US Patent Issued to OmniVision Technologies on Dec. 9 for "Image sensor and optical signal generation method" (Japanese, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,495,223, issued on Dec. 9, was assigned to OmniVision Technologies Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Image sensor and optical signal generation method" was invented by Yoshiyuki Matsunaga (Kyoto, Japan), Keiji Mabuchi (Cupertino, Calif.) and Lindsay Grant (Campbell, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An image sensor includes a plurality of pixels and includes a photodiode configured to operate in both modes of a linear mode for linearly responding to a light incident amount and a photo-voltaic mode for logarithmically responding to the light incident amount, a source follower circuit configured to output a signal voltage according to a sign...