As for better sensors, that would require someone to have product meetings with Sony followed by making some kind of deal. Sony (or any one else) has no reason to produce sensors if there no market for them.
Olympus has own sensor design and development capabilities and prototyping laboratories, but they do not have a factory for full sensor series production.
And why they should? When you get cheaper by simply buying someone else to do it for you, question is just about the batches size, batch periods and total production run and that gives you the underline how much it costs to do.
At the moment, Olympus designs (and possibly has manufactured) small specialist sensors for very high cost medical equipment. They have also prototyped some larger sensors. That is, however, a completely different matter from designing a competitive large sensor for mass production.
And yet E-M1 II sensor is their designed, as they have other 4/3" sensors designed and developed with even prototypes.
No sensor used in any production Ft or mFT camera was ever 'Olympus designed'.
They would have to acquire access to leading edge IP, like competitive column ADCs, they would have to find a foundry that can do wafer thinning and packaging for large chips to allow BSI, etc, etc.
Check Olympus finance papers about decade ago, they purchased the equipment to do all required.
BS. For a start, it wouldn't be Olympus that needed and purchased the equipment, it would be the foundry they used. Second, your time scale is up the shoot.
Here is a paper from TSMC, one of the major image sensor foundries, detailing their wafer thinning process as a leading edge research topic in 2013.
Unlike Olympus, Nikon actually has a design team that has designed. now, six large high-volume sensors, and they cannot really produce a completely competitive sensor. Their last effort, the D5 sensor, had to give away a whole load of bright light DR to compete on low light performance.
Unlike you, Olympus has already done that kind things.
BS. Olympus has not designed any large, high-volume sensors. (And I never claimed that I had). If you wish to dispute that, please identify just one large mass-market sensor that they have designed, and what is the evidence that they designed it.
Because sensor is stacked with manufacturer brand, doesn't make it the manufacturer designed or made. Even Sony stamps all kind chips, processors and sensors with their own codes (IMX etc) while the designs are totally someones else. That is the common thing in the industry.
It's also nonsense. Sony doesn't do foundry sensor work and every chip labelled 'IMX' was designed (as in process, circuitry and layout) by Sony engineers. If you want foundries to make your sensors to your own design, you go to TowerJazz, or TSMC or Dongbu, not Sony.
LOL. So you really claim that because there is "SONY" on the chip, it is Sony designed?
Absolutely. Sony doesn't do foundry services for image sensors (it does for MEMS, but that's a completely different situation). An if you use a foundry service, and send the tape-outs to a foundry, your VLSI design engineers write
you name on the chip, not the foundry's (why would they write the foundry's name?).
The sole exception in the case of Sony is the D5 sensor, which was a Nikon co-designed with Toshiba and was being fabricated on Toshiba's line when Sony bought the business, so there is an existing contractual arrangement. And that sensor doesn't have 'Sony' written on the chip.
In any case, why would any company want to use Sony as a foundry, when they'd always take second place to Sony's own work and risk their own IP being co-opted by Sony when there are plenty of independent image sensor foundries available? The only reason that Sony sensors perform better that the competition is their design, particularly the column ADC and digital CDS. You wouldn't get those if you designed you designed your own sensor, so there's be no reason going with Sony.
You can't tell anything who designed the silicone by looking at its texts or serial numbers.
By and large silicone is not used in image sensors, sometimes it is used to enhance the subjects those sensors get pointed at.
Even a very slight series change can mean that the chip is designed totally differently by someone else.
Please do explain what you mean by that, and give an actual example of such a case.
Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4 etc.
What on earth are you talking about? Playstations are games consoles, not chips. The transdition from PS, PS2, PS3 and PS4 is not a 'very slight series change', they were each ground-up new products. Only the name carried forward.
The original PS and PS2 used a MIPS processor core, Sony designed GPU fabricated by Sony SS. PS3 used the IBM Cell PowerPC architecture plus and nVidea GPU, fabricated on the Sony/Toshiba/IBM 'fab club' (three companies keeping their lines compatible so that they could all process the same chip designs). Playstation 4 used a custom design by AMD based around its Jaguar x86 microarchitecture and fabricated by TSMC. I guess the move to TSMC was due to Sony deciding that dedicating their fabs to image sensor production was a better option than trying to keep up with the competitive processor market.
In any, case, this has zero connection to the question of an image sensor which has the same specification and same performance.
Just like they have as well imaging sensors designed by others and produced only by Sony, stamped with Sony production codes and brands in the same way.
Complete nonsense for which you have zero supporting evidence, and which goes agains common practice in the semiconductor industry.
What's amusing is to work out what is your motivation for making up all this nonsense. To argue that Olympus might have designed their own sensor for this camera, and made it work no better than the sensor they were already buying from Sony. If true, all it would mean would be that their management was incredibly stupid, that they would spend good money designing a complete new sensor that only did what the old sensor would do. Why would they do that?
