Since the early 1970s, Fairchild Imaging has been a pioneer in electronic imaging utilizing our proven CCD based technology. In our continuous quest to push the state-of-the-art in optical image sensors, Fairchild Imaging has invested significantly to develop high-performance CMOS image sensors (CIS) for aerospace, defense, dental, industrial, medical, and scientific imaging markets.

CIS detectors provide advantages over CCD image sensors particularly in speed and power consumption. Until recently, however, CMOS detectors have not been capable of delivering the low noise performance of their CCD counterparts. Even active pixel sensors with amplifiers intregrally embdedded in each pixel tend to have read noise that is an order of magnitude higher than a CCD. As a result, CIS technology has lagged CCD technology in many high-performance imaging applications.

Fairchild Imaging's first CIS development broke the read-noise barrier and finally offered a CMOS detector that challenged the sensitivity of high performance CCDs. At the heart of this next generation sensor, Active Reset™ technology pushed the noise floor down by more than an order of magnitude and delivered true low-light sensitivity. Active Reset enabled simultaneous high-speed low-noise optical detectors in such applications as machine vision, industrial inspection and spectroscopy. Our first CMOS camera product, the Owl 2k line scan camera, is already breaking new ground in industrial markets such as glass inspection and web inspection and is the vanguard of our thrust into the high-performance CMOS arena.

sCMOS

More recently, Fairchild Imaging developed breakthrough technology based on next-generation CIS design and fabrication techniques. This new breed of CIS, known as sCMOS (Scientific CMOS) represents an unprecedented combination of speed, sensitivity, dynamic range, resolution and field-of-view. sCMOS is poised for widespread recognition as a true scientific grade CIS, capable of out-performing most high-performance imaging devices on the market today.

Fairchild Imaging developed sCMOS technology in collaboration with international partners Andor Technology (United Kingdom) and PCO (Germany). For more information on our partnership, check out our new technology website at www.scmos.com or download the sCMOS whitepaper or click here for a high resolution version.