SK Hynix reorganizes CIS team to challenge Sony and Samsung
Latest update time：2023-02-04
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Source: This article is compiled from thelec by Semiconductor Industry Observer (ID : icbank ) .
SK Hynix has reorganized its CMOS image sensor (CIS) team to shift its focus from expanding market share to developing high-end products, TheElec has learned.
Its CIS team was a single organization before the change, but the company has now created sub-teams focused on specific functions and features of the image sensor. Overall, the team is now more of an R&D team than a sales and marketing team.
CIS is widely used in smartphones and IT products for its camera capabilities. Sony is the world's largest component producer, followed by Samsung. The two companies focus on high resolution and multi-function, and together control 70% to 80% of the market share, with Sony being the overwhelming leader with about 50% of the market share.
SK Hynix is smaller in this field and has focused on low-end CIS with resolutions of 20MP or less in the past.
However, the company has started supplying its CIS to Samsung in 2021. It provided the 13MP CIS for Samsung's foldable phones and the 50MP sensor for the Galaxy A series last year.
Nonetheless, overall demand for CIS has declined in recent years as smartphones that primarily use CIS are suffering from slowing demand. This is especially painful for mid-range phones, as their unit prices have fallen due to sluggish consumer demand. In view of this, SK Hynix has been reducing its CIS production and also reducing inventory, sources said.
Chinese companies occupy three of the top 10 CMOS image sensor lists
In 2021, the CIS market bottomed out, growing 2.8% year-on-year to reach US$21.3 billion, starting a new growth cycle. This was the slowest year-over-year growth in a decade, following 24.8% in 2019 and 7.3% in 2020. The market has now stabilized after US sanctions on major Chinese companies caused a bubble in CIS stocks. Full-year 2021 revenue reached $21.3 billion, as the fourth quarter was the best quarter ever for CIS production.
A new growth cycle for CIS is now expected, supported by opportunities in mobile and other markets such as automotive and security imaging. Yole Intelligence, a subsidiary of Yole Group, predicts that the growth of the CIS industry in the next few years will at least match the growth rate of general semiconductors, reaching US$31.4 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.7%.
Chinese players perform well, Sony is ambitious
The CIS ecosystem is still dominated by historical leaders. Sony, Samsung, Omnivision and STMicroelectronics are all strong players in the mobile and consumer markets.
Sony's market share faltered in 2021 due to COVID-19 and the U.S. ban on Huawei. This allows its competitors to increase their share and catch up technologically. However, in June 2022, Sony confirmed its ambition to regain market share, aiming to reach 60% by 2025. This announcement will strengthen production capacity and R&D capital expenditures in the coming years.
Chinese CIS leaders—OmniVision, GalaxyCore and SmartSens—also performed well in the competition. They are growing strongly, especially in the mobile market, as a direct consequence of U.S.-China trade tensions. GalaxyCore is consolidating its fifth position with revenue approaching $1 billion.
Technology development will be key to supporting the growth of the CIS market and its capacity investment
In addition to imaging quality, technology continues to evolve for better light sensitivity and data monitoring, lower power consumption, and greater compactness. There is a trend to extend silicon into shortwave infrared (SWIR) imaging. Event-based imaging is about to usher in a new paradigm with unprecedented low latency. Quanta CIS and single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) are being developed to go further in low-light imaging. Metasurfaces are the ultimate development in planar optics, reducing the cost, size and enabling new functionality of camera modules.
In addition to the competition for small pixels, a new trend is emerging in the form of larger pixels and sensors, benefiting image quality and advanced features. Both require the development of further logic technology nodes toward 28 and 22 nanometers.
One of the most requested manufacturing capabilities is in-pixel hybrid stacking, currently used primarily for mobile applications. There is a trend towards stacking more intelligence into sensors, aiming to bring memory, processing and computation as close as possible to the sensing part. The next technological challenge should be integrating artificial intelligence (AI) near or within sensors.
Sony and Samsung compete for image sensor supremacy , Haowei ranks third
Competition in the image sensor market is fierce, with Sony struggling to maintain its lead, Samsung looking to extend its recent gains, Omnivision establishing itself as the third-strongest player, and Canon unveiling impressive new technology.
While U.S. high-tech nationalists worry about Asia's overwhelming presence in the market, consumers should benefit.
Sony, which has dominated the image sensor market for years, has lost 10 percentage points of market share, from 53% to 43% in the past two years, according to its own calculations.
To reverse the decline, Sony has launched an aggressive campaign to expand production capacity, upgrade technology and diversify away from smartphones into cars, virtual reality and other applications.
According to estimates released by various market research institutions, Samsung's market share has risen from 18% to at least 22%, driven by its own mobile phone business, capacity expansion and new customers. Its share of the smartphone market could be as high as 26%. Like Sony, it sees a bright future in assisted driving.
Due to the development of new products and opportunities in China, the market share of OmniVision Technology, which was acquired by Weill, increased from less than 10% to 14%. An American company with operations in Europe and Asia, it is now owned by China's Will Semiconductor.
Several other image sensor manufacturers have single-digit market shares, including ST Micro (France), OnSemi (US), SK hynix (South Korea), GalaxyCore and Smartsens (China), as well as Panasonic and Canon (Japan).
Sony expects the image sensor market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 9% by 2030, driven by high-end smartphones, advanced driver assistance systems, industrial applications and security.
Applying this growth rate to the current market capitalization of $20 billion suggests there's a lot of business to fight for.
On June 17, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) announced plans to provide subsidies of up to 476 billion yen ($3.5 billion) to Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM), a joint venture between TSMC, Sony and Toyota Group Denso. to support its semiconductor manufacturing projects on Kyushu Island.
Construction of the factory, located near Sony's own image sensor production facilities, began in April. The Japanese government will bear about 40% of the total cost of the project, estimated at 1.16 trillion yen ($8.6 billion).
Products may include image sensor data signal processors, automotive ICs and other logic devices, with priority being supplied to Sony and other Japanese customers. Operations are scheduled to begin in December 2024.
According to the two companies, Sony will own less than 20% of JASM's shares; Denso will own no more than 10%. This would give TSMC more than two-thirds ownership in what is essentially a specialty foundry.
Meanwhile, Sony itself plans to spend 900 billion yen ($6.7 billion) on image sensor-related capital expenditures in the three years to March 2024, a 55% increase from the previous three years. This includes the expansion of Fab 5 in Nagasaki, which began operations more than a year ago.
The resulting production increase is expected to help Sony's Imaging and Sensing Solutions business sales grow 37% this fiscal year. That should boost its share of the image sensor market to 49%, a first step toward management's goal of reaching 60% in the year to March 2026.
To achieve this, Sony is developing imaging technologies for more sophisticated smartphone cameras, interchangeable lens cameras, advanced driver assistance systems and eventually autonomous driving, industrial applications, augmented reality and virtual reality.
Evolving high-end smartphone cameras will require higher resolutions, higher speeds to support video and higher magnifications.
Advanced driver assistance systems include six to eight forward, surround and rear-view cameras per vehicle. Autonomous service vehicles will require 16 to 20 cameras, each with higher resolution and synchronized with light detection and ranging.
Industrial applications include production line monitoring, product inspection, logistics base sorting, recycling material sorting and predictive maintenance.
Augmented reality and virtual reality applications include head-mounted displays, AR glasses, iris recognition, gaze detection, hand tracking, person/space recognition, and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping).
R&D work, including image sensing and artificial intelligence integration, will be conducted in Japan, China, the United States and Germany.
Japanese media reported that managers in Sony's image sensor business feel they are under siege - and as they should, given what Samsung and other rivals are doing.
Samsung's market share growth can be attributed to lower prices, higher sales, improved technology and a shift in low-end to high-end product ranges from Chinese smartphone makers Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi.
In contrast, Sony has suffered losses in its smartphone business from Huawei, which has been its main customer.
Samsung has been rapidly upgrading its image sensors, and after launching the world's first 100MP (megapixel) smartphone camera in 2019, they launched their first 200MP model in 2021. The 200MP model stands out for its low-light performance.
Miniaturization is another strong point of Samsung. Its latest 200MP image sensor, released last month, is 20% smaller than its predecessor.
On top of that, Samsung is reportedly developing a 500MP+ image sensor that can match the resolution of the human eye.
In the automotive market, Samsung offers high-definition rear-view and surround-view displays.
OmniVision Technologies has a broader automotive imaging product line, including surround-view and rear-view displays and electronic rearview mirrors, as well as driver monitoring and other in-vehicle monitoring systems. Exterior features include lane recognition, vehicle and pedestrian detection, and blind spot coverage.
OmniVision also designs image sensors and related ICs for mobile phones, virtual and artificial reality, portable computers, surveillance, industrial and medical applications. Its product lines complement those of its parent company, Will Semiconductor.
Discrete semiconductor devices, power management and other integrated circuits, as well as capacitors and other passive components will be designed for use in mobile communications, automotive electronics, security and other applications.
The product mentioned above is a CMOS image sensor, which is the most common type of image sensor produced today. CMOS stands for Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, which is the technology used to make microprocessors, memory chips, and most other ICs.
As the Tokyo Electron Online Museum of Nanotechnology explains, each pixel of a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor has a photodiode and a CMOS transistor switch that individually amplifies the pixel signal.
Pixels (picture elements) are small light-sensitive components made (usually) of silicon. The grid of pixels provides data to the image sensor via the photoelectric effect, in which light energy causes the silicon to emit electrons.
But there are alternative technologies.
In December, Japanese camera maker Canon announced the development of a new single-photon avalanche diode-type image sensor that can "see in the dark" - allowing for high-resolution shooting in the darkest nights or other low-light environments Color photos where the CMOS image sensor also does not work properly.
As Canon explains:
The SPAD sensor is a uniquely designed image sensor in which each pixel has an electronic component. When a light particle, called a photon, reaches a pixel, it is multiplied - like an "avalanche" - creating a large electrical pulse. For CMOS sensors, the reading of accumulated charge contains electronic noise, which degrades image quality due to the process of measuring accumulated light.
According to the press release, the new sensor combines a tiny SPAD sensor with a proprietary pixel architecture to "capture the world's highest resolution 3.2-megapixel images - higher resolution than Full HD." It "captures the same images as traditional CMOS sensors while requiring only one-tenth the imaging area."
Canon's new SPAD sensors are particularly suitable for use in security cameras, autonomous vehicles, medical and scientific instrumentation, low-light industrial applications and augmented reality. Production is scheduled to begin by the end of this calendar year.
Canon has been competing with Sony in the digital camera market since the 1990s. Now, it may compete with it in a wide range of image sensor applications.
Aware of this threat, Sony is also researching SPAD technology. The Koreans and Chinese should not think they are destined to inherit the market.
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