EE Times Under The Hood - October 8, 2007 - (Page 46) under the hood: DIGITAL HOME “bonus” carrying case joined up with a USB cable, AAA battery and photoediting software. While the product package showed an optimistic retail price of $39.99, a second sticker proclaimed, “Wow! Only $10!” Vivitar kept everything cheap. A diminutive, 1/7-inch CMOS image sensor from PixArt of Taiwan was paired with an image processor from the same company, and 8 Mbytes of SDRAM served for working memory. By limiting resolution, the sensor could be made quite small, minimizing the processor horsepower needed for basic image correction and compression. The claimed 2 Mbytes of user memory was not a standalone chip; a portion of the SDRAM was for image storage. This money-saving trick required users to download the images before removing the battery. Underscoring the design’s pennypinching nature was the chip-andwire assembly of the image processor, whose bare silicon gets wirebonded directly to the board and then “glob topped.” A small, inexpensive monochrome segment LCD provided the user interface. A rough manufacturing cost estimate of $6 to $7 (inclusive of all accessories) pointed to slim, but still positive, profits— even at the “Wow! Only $10!” price. www.eetimes.com • www.techonline.com IN BRIEF As imaging component prices fall, inexpensive variants of the digital camera are being cranked out. Four low-end cameras were opened up, each with different price points and features.All rely on low-cost manufacturing technologies, and component suppliers whose names might not be all that familiar. But the capabilities of some of them arguably meet or exceed those of high-end products of less than a decade ago. Component focus Not too far up the ladder was a $49 Disney-branded camera that added a flash lamp, LCD and nonvolatile (NV) storage. Resolution was bumped to VGA (640 x 480) with a larger, 1/4inch Omnivision CMOS sensor and 16 Mbytes of Hynix NAND for permanent image retention. A 1.1-inch color STN LCD for image review, from China’s Shenzhen Tongxingda, added about $3 to the parts bill. A globtopped chip, joined to 2 Mbytes of Hynix SDRAM for working memory, provided image processing. A small flash from EON held system code. A xenon flash, NV memory, more-complex supporting passive component set and fancier casings pushed the production cost to $20. The next resolution bump in the How much component opportunity outside the silicon world can there really be in products ranging from $10 to $100? With the definition of opportunity being part count (but not necessarily fat profits), quite a bit, it turns out. NonIC components abound, with about 75 passive and active discrete components joining the three chips in the least expensive Vivitar digital camera.The Disney camera has about 150 discrete components and five primary ICs.At the high end, almost 200 passives or small actives (diodes, transistors, LEDs) can be found in the 3.2-megapixel Hello Kitty and 4.1-Mpixel Digital Concepts designs. Notable is the percentage of components dedicated not to subpenny resistors but rather inductors (for switching regulation) and tantalum capacitors (presumably for keeping electrical noise out of images). Lastly, the xenon flash in three of the designs means a high-voltage electrolytic capacitor with a high farad rating, perhaps the most expensive of the passive components seen. camera horde was to 3.2 Mpixels, with the Hello Kitty camera. Several other enhancements supported its $99 retail price point. The thin design was partly enabled by use of a flat Li-ion cell. A stamped-metal shell kept the case stiff despite its slender profile. Accessories were about the same as for the other models, but the LCD choice here was a 2-inchdiagonal TFT display from AUO— likely a $6 to $7 selection, about double the cost of Disney’s display. The extra camera resolution required bigger pixels and a more expensive sensor. A 1/2-inch-format CMOS imager from Omnivision was combined with a three-element lens to provide better pictures for the money. The CPU/NAND/SDRAM topology of the Disney camera was repeated in the Kitty, with vendors Syntek, Hynix and Spectek used for each respective socket. A $30 parts cost was reasonable for the Kitty, given the total implementation, leaving room for the $99 price to be reduced. A Digital Concepts 4.1-Mpixel camera was the resolution king of the group, arriving with the basic accessories of cable and software. So how could it offer more megapixels than the Hello Kitty, yet retail for $40 less? For starters, up-interpolation gave a little boost to the numbers. A Sunplus Tcatch device raised apparent resolution from the 3.2-Mpixel Omnivision sensor—the same as in the Kitty—to the final 4.1-Mpixel figure. To save a few dollars, Digital Concepts ditched the Li prismatic cell and downsized the LCD to a 1.5-inch-diagonal panel. The megapixels/dollar ratio was improved by pushing nonvolatile storage costs back to the user. I did get around to buying that DSLR for analysis: Nikon’s D40. It’s a fantastic camera, but its $600 tag places it out of the reach of most casual buyers. For those folks, inexpensive CMOS imagers and companion electronics have made sub-$100 cameras possible—at a profit. ■ 46 Electronic Engineering Times, TechOnline | October 8, 2007 http://www.eetimes.com http://www.techonline.com
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