It was a surprise to me. It's not my job to look out for these things and I didn't mean to imply that you unobservant.
I'm betting that the current product is intended for the Pro/SLR market given its area. Doubling the are of the chip would push the price into the stratosphere, if it could even be produced at all.
Sony has went from producing under 10 mill CCDs in '97 to over 20 mill in '00. So there is a study production increase. I think whatever cost savings derived from the earlier generations will get carried over to the new one as well.
Those are some awsome pictures!
Technology does improve, but the gains are relatively small. There is a fundamental limit to the CCD pixel SNR that is set by the combination of temperature and photodiode size (assuming some illumination level). Modern CCD chips are not far from this fundamental limit. If you really want low noise, you need either large and expensive photodiodes, or you must cool the CCD chip. Unfortunately cooling the sensor isn't feasable with a battery powered camera.
CCD's are expensiveto produce, but the X3 is Cmos so we may see some large sensors in consumer cameras.
It's more affordable because of competition with AMD, secifically the Athlon. Did you know the P4 was/is much larger than the PIII (on the 18u process -- I'm not sure if Intel is currently down to 13u, but I believe it needs to be to be equivelent to the size of an 18u PIII)?
Have there been significant drops in cost per unit over this time?
Wow! Sonys new APS size CCD ICX413AQ !!!
Optical Format 1.8 inch, 28,4mm (APS size)
Aspect ratio: 3:2
Colour filters: RGB primary
Active pixels 3000x2000 (total 6 Million square pixels)
Chip size: 25.2x17.64
Unit cell size: 7.8 x 7.8 um
Test sample TS: End May 2001
Evaluation sample ES: End December 2001
Mass Production MP: End June 2002
(from my Kumamoto 2nd Techno-Park source!
Niklas
I meant to say the new sensor figures to cost 5 times what the F707's sensor costs.
Large CMOS chips are expensive to produce too. The 3.5MP Foveon chip in on par with the Largest Pentiums ever produced.
Competition cuts into their profits and pushes them to make chips less expensively. This has been achieved mostly by making the chips smaller. Progress in reducing defect density on wafer, which would enable them to make larger chips more economically, has been very slow.
Every new generation is physically larger than the previous on the same process technology. Each new generation starts out very expensive too. The price then comes down from competition, economies of scale, the learning curve at the fab, and also because they move to new process technologies that make the chips smaller.
Intel is down to 0.13micron for the newest P4, which makes it still a big larger than the 0.18micron P3. 0.18micron P3: 106mm^2, 0.13micron P4: 146mm^2. (Intel doubled the cache size to 512KB when they moved from 0.18 to 0.13 micron with the P4, which added an extra 13 million transistors for a 30% increase If they had kept the cache size the same, the 0.13micron P4 would be about the same size as a 0.18micron P3.)
Unfortunately, the scaling is worse than this. Yield drops off very rapidly as you increase size.
-- Ulysses
Interesting.
It's still there. They've just moved things around a bit:
Yes, that would seem to be correct.
Your questions would seem to mirror my own as I look more closely at this.
What are you thinking that this implies?-- Ulysses
The circuitry for an electronic shutter takes up extra space on the CCD. If you don't want an electronic shutter and don't need the ability to pull video off the chip, then you can skip this circuity and use the space for larger receptive areas. All digital SLRs do this.
900mm^2 will probably be beyond the realm of what can manufactured cost effectively for anything other than special purpose applications for quite some time. I think they used the aspect ratio to match the aspect ratio of film (as done in other digital SLRs). I doubt it has anything to do with plans to make a 35mm size CCD in the near future.
