Sony’s Inseparable Bond with the Semiconductor Industry

Recently, Sony showcased the Vision S SUV concept electric vehicle at CES 2022 and said that Sony plans to establish a subsidiary "Sony Mobility Inc." to enter the electric vehicle market.

Electric vehicles have become an extremely hot field. In addition to traditional car manufacturers, manufacturing or ICT companies such as Hon Hai, Baidu, Huawei, and OPPO have also crossed over, and it is not surprising that Sony, a veteran technology company, has joined the game. Looking back at Sony's entire development history, from manufacturing and exporting radios/televisions to becoming the global CIS leader and now making cars, Sony's "life" has been "inseparable" from the semiconductor industry.

Transistor technology plus "BUFF"

After World War II, Japan was in ruins. Ibuka, who had already become famous in his youth, founded the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute in October 1945, the predecessor of Sony. The following year, 25-year-old Akio Morita joined the joint operation at the invitation of Ibuka, and renamed the institute Tokyo Telecommunications Industry Co., Ltd. (abbreviated as Totsuko). Its main business was the manufacture and sale of tape recorders. Ibuka was responsible for technology and product development, while Akio Morita was responsible for sales and corporate management.

In the early days of its establishment, Totsuko's development was not satisfactory due to its single business source and unstable economic situation. It was not until 1948 when Bell Labs developed the transistor that Totsuko began to focus on this technology three years later. In 1953, Akio Morita introduced transistor technology from Westinghouse Electric in the United States and thought about how to replace the large and power-hungry vacuum tubes.

In 1955, Totsuko launched the first transistor radio in Japan, the TR-55. Its compactness and portability made it a big hit, and the company's operations gradually improved. In 1958, the TR-610 opened up overseas markets for it, and Totsuko changed its name to Sony in the same year. The name is a combination of the Latin word "Souns" and the old English word "Sonny-boy", meaning "a cute and naughty child who started with sound", and it is still used today.

While selling radios, Sony also started a black-and-white television business and launched the world's first transistor television, the TV8-301, in 1960, which contained 23 transistors, 15 diodes and 2 high-voltage diodes.

In 1968, Sony launched the KV-1310 TV based on the "Trinitron" display technology. This technology was personally developed by Ibuka Masaru, which made a qualitative leap in the brightness, color and color purity of CRT TVs. As a result, it became popular all over the world. Sony paid off the huge development debt to the bank in just three years, and became the king of the CRT TV era. Later, the emergence of LCD and plasma technology impacted the CRT TV market, and Sony established the "BRAVIA" LCD TV brand in 2005.

In fact, Sony is not only successful in the radio and television businesses, but its Walkman, portable DV and CD records, and PlayStation game consoles have also become synonymous with the company.

"Dominating" the global CIS market

In addition to the above businesses, CMOS image sensor (CIS) is an important representative of Sony's semiconductor business. For many years, Sony has been the number one player in the global CIS market and has captured nearly half of the market share.

CIS is widely used in mobile phones, security, automobiles and other scenarios due to its advantages such as small size and low cost. Sony was the first to enter the market in 2000 and achieved mass production six years later.

It is worth mentioning that Sony's back-illuminated CIS and stacked CIS have led two changes in CIS technology. Before launching the back-illuminated CIS, Sony developed a chip called "Exmor" for on-chip analog-to-digital signal conversion, which upgraded the traditional external ADC to a built-in ADC, which can operate at a low frequency and can effectively reduce noise and achieve high-speed extraction. In addition, Exmor emits a digital signal with better anti-interference performance. IMX035 is the first product launched in this series and is used in the security field. Subsequently, Exmor technology was quickly promoted by Sony to electronic fields such as cameras.

After implementing a built-in ADC, Sony launched the Exmor R sensor using back-illuminated technology in 2008. The release of Apple's iPhone 4s made the Exmor R sensor famous.

In 2012, Sony released its first double-stacked CIS, named "EXMOR RS", which made the image sensor unit and logic control unit on two wafers respectively, and interconnected the sensor unit and the logic control unit through TSV (through silicon via) packaging technology; in 2017, Sony's first three-layer stacked CIS was unveiled at the ISSCC conference, which includes an image sensor unit, a logic control unit (ISP chip), and a DRAM chip. It has once again achieved innovation in performance, capable of shooting high frame rate images at 120fps, and can provide 960fps FHD super slow motion playback.

On December 16, 2021, Sony launched the world's first double-layer transistor pixel stacked CIS technology. The new technology not only makes it possible to independently optimize the photodiode and pixel transistor architecture, thereby increasing the saturated signal amount by about twice compared to traditional image sensors, but also increases the size of the amplification transistor, thereby significantly reducing noise problems in dim scenes.

In addition to taking the lead in technology, Sony has also made great efforts in production capacity. In 2015, Sony announced that it would acquire Toshiba's image sensor business for 19 billion yen (about 155 million U.S. dollars), including Toshiba's 300mm wafer production line manufacturing facilities, equipment and related assets; in November 2021, Sony said it would invest 500 million U.S. dollars to cooperate with TSMC to build a wafer foundry in Kumamoto, Japan, which is scheduled to break ground in 2022.

Cross-border "playing" car manufacturing

Nowadays, cross-border car manufacturing seems to have become a trend, and Sony is also scrambling to join in. Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida recently demonstrated the Vision S SUV concept electric car at CES 2022, and said that Sony plans to establish a subsidiary "Sony Mobility Inc." to commercialize electric vehicles.

Kenichiro Yoshida said that the Vision-S SUV prototype was developed based on safety, adaptability and entertainment. A total of 40 sensors are installed inside and outside the vehicle to ensure safety, and the cockpit can be customized for each user. In addition, with the 5G network, Vision-S can achieve high-speed, high-capacity and low-latency connections between the in-car system and the cloud, turning travel into an entertainment space, including gaming experience and audio.

In fact, Sony has long been planning to build cars. As early as 2017, Sony released the electric concept car SC-1, but it was submerged in the information of many new car-making forces and did not cause much waves; in 2020, Sony's electric sedan Vision-S 01 began road testing in Austria to verify the safety of image and sensor technologies installed inside and outside the car and the user experience of the human-machine interface (HMI) system; then it started 5G environment driving tests in April 2021.

At the same time, Sony has also continued to develop automotive sensors. On November 29 last year, Sony launched its first high-performance automotive sensor "LiDAR", which is expected to be available in March this year. The product model is "IMX459", which has about 100,000 10-square-micron pixels on a chip with a diagonal of 6.25 mm. It supports applications in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD) systems, and can achieve high-precision and high-speed measurements with a distance resolution of 15 cm, and can measure up to 300 meters.

It is worth noting that in 2016, Sony spent $212 million to acquire Altair, an Israeli semiconductor chip company specializing in RF antennas and LTE basebands, and renamed it "Sony Semiconductor Israel". In August 2020, Sony released a high-precision global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver chip. In addition to being used in the fields of the Internet of Things and wearable devices, this type of chip may provide precise positioning and stable communication functions for areas such as automotive services.

Conclusion: Sony's development shows the importance of technology research and development and market foresight, but its road has not been smooth sailing. It has also experienced dark moments such as the 2008 global economic crisis, the sale of its headquarters building due to consecutive years of losses, and the suspension of supply to Huawei in 2019. Fortunately, Sony, which dares to innovate and break through, can always adjust its operating strategy in time and is actively moving towards a path of revival.