- Compact Mira050 enables engineers to build compact wearable devices, and offer power savings at high-quantum efficiency.
- Compact Mira050 offers high sensitivity to light in the visible and NIR spectrums.
- The effective resolution of the CMOS image sensor is 576px x 768px with a maximum bit depth of 12 bits.
Compact Mira050 by ams OSRAM is a 0.5Mpixel complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor suitable for wearable and mobile devices. Compact Mira050 offers high sensitivity to light in the visible and NIR spectrum and thus requires less illumination to help extend the run-time of a battery-powered device. The Mira050 is suitable for applications such as eye tracking, gesture tracking and contextual awareness in augmented reality (AR)/ virtual reality (VR) headsets, object detection in robots and 3D depth sensing for face recognition in smart door locks.
The Mira050 image sensor employs back-side illumination (BSI) with the sensor layer on top of the digital/readout layer. This results in a compact chip measuring just 2.3mm x 2.8mm. BSI technology also gives the sensor very high sensitivity and quantum efficiency with a pixel size of 2.79μm. The effective resolution of the CMOS image sensor is 576px x 768px with a maximum bit depth of 12 bits. The sensor is supplied in a 1/7” optical format. It features a MIPI CSI-2 interface that allows for easy interfacing with a processor or FPGA.
The Mira050 also features a programmable register that enables the user to control window coordinates, timing parameters and exposure time, and mirror, flipping and cropping functions. The on-chip registers can be accessed via a camera control interface (CCI) for easy configuration of the sensor.
Jens Milnikel, Executive Vice President and General Manager BU Image Sensor Solutions at ams OSRAM, said: ‘In wearable and mobile devices, the most important parameters for an image sensor are active area utilization or footprint efficiency and power consumption. For both of these desired attributes, the Mira050 is a leader in the market, offering higher resolution, higher sensitivity and lower power consumption in a smaller footprint.’
The high sensitivity to light offered by Mira050 allows for capturing clearer and more detailed images even in low-light conditions. The CMOS sensor can enable engineers to design smaller and power-efficient smart glasses, and VR headsets, or employ it in surveillance applications in dark areas.
