We had the exciting opportunity to converse with Radhika Arora, Director, Product Marketing, Automotive Solutions Division at onsemi recently. onsemi were proud Signature Sponsors of AutoSens Detroit in 2022.
Radhika Arora is a proven leader in business development and strategy with an impressive track record of increasing profits and expanding market share. She has had tremendous success in establishing a lasting presence in varied market segments, identifying growth opportunities in new emerging applications and initiating strong business alliances. She is equally skilled at directing cross-functional teams to manage full product life cycle. Radhika currently works at onsemi as Director – Autonomous Driving. She drives the strategy for self-driving cars with a focus on image sensors. Her efforts have led to onsemi having far-reaching impacts with key design wins. Prior to that, Radhika served as Product Line Manager – Image Sensor Group (ISG). She managed the Internet of Things/Scanning product line growing it into a critical and highly profitable segment for the company. Radhika also founded a Non-Profit Organization – Suncharged. The organization focuses on enriching lives and improving productivity in rural India through means of alternative and sustainable energy solutions.
Q: What excites you most when looking to the future of HDR image sensors?
The most exciting part of the future for HDR sensors is the role they will play in the path towards “vision zero” – the strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all. As we move forward towards the rollout of autonomous vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are becoming more sophisticated, and these require reliable components to help ensure the safety of both vehicle occupants and road users. In current automobiles, a single pair of human eyes is expected to monitor the road and the surrounding environment – in autonomous vehicles human eyes will be replaced by multiple cameras. It will be critical for the optical and imaging sensors in these cameras to perform to the same standard, if not better, than the human eye.
It may be some time before fully autonomous vehicles appear on our roads, but in the meantime image sensors have a major part to play in ensuring the safety of drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists, especially in challenging, low-light conditions. Safety standards such as Euro NCAP have introduced regulations to mitigate the severity of rear-end collisions and to expand road coverage for vulnerable road users in challenging lighting conditions. The unique image sensor technology from onsemi® enables automotive OEMs to comply with these regulations.
The performance of ADAS systems such as park assist, pedestrian detection, lane departure warning, or traffic sign recognition can be adversely affected by wide variations in ambient lighting conditions (caused for example, by bright sunlight incident at a low angle of elevation or reflecting from a wet road surface) and other light sources such as the headlights of oncoming vehicles. Another challenging, and potentially dangerous situation can arise if the headlight of one’s own vehicle reflect from a road sign making if difficult (and potentially impossible) for an image sensor to capture the speed limit or other warning information on the sign. These conditions also present difficulties for authorities monitoring and controlling the flow of road traffic in real time – vehicle lights shining directly on a monitoring camera make scene detection very difficult. Similarly, cameras monitoring the entrances and exits of tunnels must contend with the contrast between the bright light of the sun outside the tunnel and the artificial light illuminating the dark interior. If the camera’s field of view includes both environments, parts of the image can be rendered useless because it becomes completely saturated by the bright light or is too dark for any useful information to be discerned.
At onsemi, we are excited by the fact that our image sensors are designed to operate in even the most challenging conditions and that they will make roads much safer for all users.
Q: Can you tell us a little more about what you and the team at onsemi is doing in this field?
These are, without doubt, exhilarating times for vendors to the automotive industry and onsemi is now in the situation of providing over 75% of components for the ADAS market and over 50% of components to the automotive market overall. This puts us in the privileged position of having a deep understanding of customers’ system level challenges and enables us to work with them in building joint solutions which are becoming part of our shared journey towards ‘vision zero’. As the number of image sensors in a typical vehicle increases to more than 10, the ability to choose sensors from a range of resolutions (for different applications like SVS, ADAS etc.) which all use the same hardware technology and have a common software architecture, makes our customers’ development process more efficient thus reducing the time to market for new products.
Occupant monitoring is also as a fast-growing market segment. onsemi has worked in partnership with software developers to build a joint driver and occupant monitoring system (DOMS) solution. This unique and innovative design can monitor both the driver and passenger using a single camera, thereby enabling multiple safety functionalities and it can also be used to create next-generation cabin user experiences. Using our DOMS solution, automotive OEMs can deploy high performance, low cost in-cabin imaging solutions that make driving safer and more enjoyable. DOMS can be used to replace the single-task driver monitoring system (DMS) (which requires a dedicated Mono/IR camera) while also enabling multiple applications that can enhance safety and convenience, using a single colour/IR camera.
Q: You recently launched an 8MP Rolling Shutter CMOS Digital Image Sensor. What can you tell us about this sensor? What is coming next?
Our award-winning AR0820AT 8.3MP CMOS digital image sensor is optimized for challenging lighting situations including low light levels and high dynamic range (HDR) – conditions which occur frequently on the road for automotive applications. The 2.1 μm DR-Pix Back Side Illuminated (BSI) pixels ensure that a high-quality and detailed image is captured in even the most difficult lighting conditions. This is coupled with advanced on-sensor HDR (140 dB) reconstruct technology that incorporates flexible exposure ratio control to deliver quality images in all conditions. A frame rate of 40 fps along with a pixel size of 2.1 um and an electronic rolling shutter ensures a high-quality output – essential for safety-critical applications.
At AutoSens in Detroit, we will be bringing our latest product offering – an 8.3MP image sensor based on a 2.1um pixel size. This is a further evolution from the aforementioned AR0820AT. Our 8MP pixel specifications and sensor features make it ideal for automotive applications with single exposure dynamic range, superior low light performance, smart binning excellent performance at high temperatures. So stay tune and come visit us at the show.
Q: Moving into the specifics, how can 3 um and 2.1 um pixel architectures be expected to handle flickering and motion from fast moving objects?
onsemi pioneered the automotive HDR image sensors with multi-exposure architectures that propelled cameras to the forefront of ADAS development. While they provided excellent performance, these cameras still suffered from motion artefacts and the unavoidable flicker effects associated with using widely available LED lights. To overcome these issues, onsemi invented the split-diode and super-exposure pixel architectures which are being used in the latest 3 µm and 2.1 µm sensors. After careful consideration, we decided to focus on super-exposure pixels for our latest HDR image sensors because their ‘whole-pixel’ design provides unmatched performance and helps to mitigate LED flicker and motion artefacts. These new sensors enable higher levels of automobile safety and provide for a more visually appealing user experience in viewing applications such as surround view, augmented reality, and digital video recording.
Q: What is onsemi’s response to the semiconductor crisis we find ourselves in specific to imagers?
Even as the coronavirus pandemic begins to abate, markets continue to be tight and the problem is being further exacerbated by an acceleration in the adoption of image sensors across multiple segments – automotive, IoT and security/surveillance. This is being driven by the demand for higher resolution sensors with increased BSI transition (back side illuminated sensors driving silicon layer count). The demand for image sensors is at an all-time high and this is contributing to a significant imbalance between supply and demand. To address this deficit, onsemi has significantly increased investment (over $700M) in both frontend and backend capacity. This powerful response to increased product demand reflects our strong commitment to serving customers’ needs and to supporting their long-term growth. The expanded capacity has enabled us to take ownership of our complete image sensor development value-chain – fabrication (CFA & microlens), probe, assembly, and final test. Apart from helping us to meet the supply needs of our valued customers, it has also benefited our technical proficiency.
