qocsuing: A peek inside Nikon’s super-secret sensor design lab

qocsuing

A peek inside Nikon’s super-secret sensor design lab

I’ve known for some time that Nikon actually designs their own sensors, to a fairly minute level of detail. I think this is almost unknown in the photo community; most people just assume that “design” in Nikon’s case simply consists of ordering-up different combinations of specs from sensor manufacturers, picking a feature from column “A”, another from column “B” and so on, like a Chinese restaurant menu. In actuality, they have a full staff of sensor engineers who design cutting-edge sensors like those in the D5 and D850 from the ground up, optimizing their designs to work optimally with NIKKOR lenses and Nikon's EXPEED image-processor architecture. Get more news about Super fine peek Sensor Cable,you can vist our website!

Given my own background in the semiconductor industry (my Master’s Degree is in semiconductor physics, although I haven’t practiced as an engineer for many years now), I’ve always wanted to do a story about sensor design, and it seemed like telling the largely-unknown story of Nikon’s sensor design abilities would be a good backdrop for it.

A chance to peek behind the curtain?
I’ve approached other sensor makers in the past about doing a story on sensor design, but it’s such a proprietary area that I’ve always been turned down flat. In Nikon’s case, though, I thought they might be interested in having the story told, because it’s a unique ability of theirs, compared to many of their competitors. I thought it would be beneficial to them to have more people be aware of it, and it might be an angle for me to finally get sensor engineers to peel back the curtain, if only a little.

And from our reader’s side, given that the D850 won our Camera of the Year award for 2017 and its sensor recently receiving the first DxO Mark score of 100 for an SLR, I thought there’d be a lot of interest in hearing some of what went into its making.
So I pitched Nikon on the idea of doing a sponsored article about their sensor-design efforts. As with others I’d approached in the past, they had a lot of concern about the deeply proprietary information and technology involved. It took a good four or five months of discussion and back and forth, and the strong support of Nikon’s US PR and marketing team, but in the end they agreed, resulting in the story you see here.

There’s a lot to talk about, so this will be a very long article, but I hope readers will find it as interesting to read as I did to research and write it.

We obviously won’t be able to get all the way down into the details, but hopefully this overview will shed some light on what it takes to make a great-performing sensor, and show some of the surprising (to me, at least) ways in which Nikon optimizes their sensor designs.
Even though I knew that Nikon had its own sensor design operation, I was surprised to learn just how deep the process runs.

Companies designing chips of whatever sort generally rely on standard processes established by the “foundry” company that does the actual manufacturing. In these cases, the design process is “just” a matter of defining the layout of the devices on the chip. I say “just” though, because it’s far from a routine process to do this. The size and shape of transistors, photodiodes, resistors and capacitors determines their electrical characteristics, and there are loads of tradeoffs involved in balancing light-gathering efficiency, noise levels, readout speeds, on and on. A big trick is designing the pixels and readout circuitry so there’s as little “dead” (non-light-sensitive) area as possible, while maintaining readout speeds and minimizing power consumption.