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PASADENA, CA, Aug. 16 -- Photobit Corporation, a supplier of CMOS imaging sensors, has announced that the U.S. Army White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) has awarded the company an $8.65 million, multi-year contract to develop high-speed, high-resolution video-camera technology. Photobit says that the technology, which will be based on its proprietary CMOS active pixel sensor (APS) architecture, is suitable for applications requiring the capture of high-speed video sequences such as missile-to-missile intercepts or the tri-service (Navy, Air Force, and Army) Airborne Separation Video program, administered by the Naval Air Warfare Center. This contract is Photobit's third with WSMR. "This agreement will allow Photobit to develop high-speed video cameras for a variety of Defense Department needs," said Dr. Eric R. Fossum, the company's chief scientist and chairman. "It also has the added benefit of enabling Photobit to further refine our commercial and consumer products for high-speed motion analysis, industrial inspection, and machine vision." Photobit, founded in 1995, owns the rights to high-performance image-capture technology developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The company has designed more than 30 off-the-shelf and custom CMOS image sensors. In June 1999, under another WSMR contract partially funded by the government's SBIR program, Photobit launched the PB1024, a 1024 x 1024 CMOS APS sensor. The PB1024 is believed to be the world's fastest megapixel camera-on-a-chip, capturing megapixel images at up to 500 frames per second with on-chip, 8-b digital input. Photobit is currently developing multi-megapixel sensors with higher throughput and greater bit resolution.
Photobit's CMOS "active-pixel" technology has received several patents. According to the company, the four key benefits of this technology are:
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