| InVisage Technologies | |
| Type: | Subsidiary |
| Industry: | Semiconductors |
| Key People: | Jess Lee, CEO |
| Founder: | Ted Sargent |
| Location: | Menlo Park, California |
| Parent: | Apple Inc. |
InVisage Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company known for producing a technology called QuantumFilm, an image sensor technology that improves the quality of digital photographs taken with a cell phone camera. The company is based in Menlo Park, CA.
InVisage Technologies was founded by the company's current CTO Ted Sargent, a professor from the University of Toronto.[1] While developing transmitters and receivers in his lab at U of T, he discovered an especially sensitive receiver, which formed the basis of InVisage's QuantumFilm technology.[2] Sargent then secured the rights to the technology and founded InVisage in October 2006.[3] The company applied this technology toward mobile phone cameras.[4] In 2007, Jess Lee, a former vice president from OmniVision Technologies, joined InVisage as the company's CEO.[5] Syrus Madavi serves as the company's chairman of the board of directors, having joined InVisage in 2012.[6]
In February 2013, it was announced that the company had received $20 million in a Series D funding round led by GGV Capital that included Nokia Growth Partners as a new investor, with the company expecting to begin shipping devices with their sensors in the second quarter of 2014.[7]
On November 9, 2017, it was reported that Apple, Inc. acquired InVisage Technologies.[8]
QuantumFilm Technology involves the creation of a film to coat the image sensors used in a cellphone camera, allowing it to capture more light, improving the quality of the images taken.[9] [10] A typical camera phone pixel sensor is made up of several layers, with a layer of colored plastic or glass acting as a color filter sitting on top of several layers of metal connecting silicon electronic transistors together, which is itself on top of a base layer of silicon used by the sensor's electronic transistors and photodetectors. The light coming to the sensor has to pass through the layers of metal before reaching the silicon, a weak light absorber, so the sensor detects only about 25 percent of the light that makes up the image.[11] QuantumFilm places a layer of semiconducting crystals - called quantum dots - on top of the chip, which allows the chip to absorb more light, place more pixels in a smaller space, and create sharper images.[12]
Using quantum dots is more efficient at capturing light than traditional silicon-based image sensor chips (capturing 90-95% of the light that hits it), giving the sensors higher sensitivity in low light as well as higher resolution.[13] And while traditional image sensors read an image from top to bottom (which can create a blurred image when the subject is moving), quantum dots detect the entire image at the same moment, reducing the chance for distortion.[14]
Invisage holds patents related to the development of QuantumFilm technology, as well as its applications toward optoelectronic devices.[15]
In 2010, InVisage's QuantumFilm technology was awarded The Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award.[16] In 2011, the company received a gold award from the International Imaging Industry Association's (I3A) VISION 2020 Imaging Innovation for its QuantumFilm technology.[17]