Re: The Truth about Nikon Sensors (finally) ... for All the Sony Fanboys ...
joefoo wrote:
Ken says Towerjazz made the D850 sensor. Ken also said he was 99% certain the D850 had a hybrid viewfinder. Ken's a special guy.
The people who actually run the fab and make the sensors have to do the lion's share of the actual engineering and design work. They have to come up with new processes and test them before they can offer them to customers. Nikon's sensor design team undoubtedly have some input, but where exactly the dividing line is between "Nikon's tech" and "FoundryCo X's tech" (not to mention licensed tech from other companies) is not something we will ever know.
Well, the dividing line is actually fairly established in the fabless semiconductor industry. Sensors, like any other IC, go through front-end design (i.e., system and architecture design, RTL design, etc.), back-end design (physical synthesis, place & route, DFT, etc.), and tape out to the foundry. It is true that process development by the foundry is critical in enabling the technology but no one would ever call an IC by a fabless semiconductor company to be Foundry X's technology! To give you examples, Qualcomm and Broadcom are two of the largest fabless IC companies. You would never call a QCOM cellular modem chip, or a BRCM's BT/WiFi chip to be, say, TSMC's technology, or UMC or SMIC's technology (TSMC, UMC, and SMIC are a few big foundries used by QCOM and BRCM). Similarly Samsung foundry is used for some of Apple's Ax processors. No one would ever call those processors to be Samsung technology even though Samsung foundry is where those processors are actually fabricated and their process technology has certainly played a critical role.
Now, I obviously don't know the details of the working relationship between Nikon and Sony on these sensors. Specifically, I don't know if Sony has just provided the process technology and the foundry services, or if Sony has also been involved in any of the front-end or back-end design. If Sony has not had any involvement in the front-end design of the sensor, it would be safe to call it Nikon technology as anyone in the industry would.
Sep 13, 2017 at 02:04 PM
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