Geeking Out with the Guts of the Next Great Phone Cameras

BARCELONA

It's a question for every maker of a slab hoping to have the next great smartphone: How do you make it different, possibly unique?

Cameras are one thing that consumers immediately respond to in a phone, so it's a natural place to focus, if you will. I met here at the Mobile World Congress with DigitalOptics, the camera component subsidiary of Tessera Technologies (TSRA), which markets a number of devices and patented IP for electronics, including the guts of cameras.

DigitalOptics has image processing intelligence that is designed into the image processor chip included in many of the prominent handsets on the market. The fifteen-year-old outfit has sold a quarter of a billion units so far, where units is basically licenses of its technology.

Today, DigitalOptics has its patented technology included in imaging chips in not just mainstream handsets but also those from up-and-comers that want desperately to rise above the pack.

Phones such as those from OPPO, the upstart China brand, for example, may feature something called the “beauty effect,” which adjusts skin texture and tones in real time as you're taking a portrait to, say, make your subject look better. Think of it as real-time PhotoShopping. That feature has made some OPPO devices very popular with women in China, says the unit's VP of product marketing, Eric Siegler.

And DigitalOptics technology is in numerous phones to achieve the face-detection feature that lets the camera home in on a person in a shot.

The next step may be an IPO for DigitalOptics, perhaps in a couple of years, Tessera has said. But for the moment, DigitalOptics is focused on moving beyond licensing intellectual property to instead selling a new kind of hardware that manipulates camera lenses in small spaces.

The company's “MEMS Cam” is an “actuator” that is responsible for physically moving a camera lens back and forth to achieve focus. Unlike today's actuators, which are made from multiple moving parts assembled in a coil fashion, dependent upon magnetic forces, Siegler explains, MEMS Cam is fashioned like a semiconductor, from a wafer of silicon, as a single part that can tense and stress to achieve movement, a so-called microelectromechanical system, or MEMS, hence the name. It serves as an armature that grips the lens and can flex to move the lens back and forth.

There are numerous advantages to MEMS in general, and in MEMS Cam in particular, including far lower power requirements, and less bulk. That allows for camera assemblies that save battery life and save precious space inside a handset. And they can be very, very fast. DigitalOptics says its focus time of a couple hundred milliseconds is fractions of the time a conventional actuator takes in today's cameras to shift the lens.

The MEMS Cam, bottom, in its package, and bundled with an image processing chip, top.

While phones such as Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and Samsung Electronics's (005930KS) Galaxy S III, and even a less-ambitious phone such as Google's (GOOG) Nexus 4, can all take very good pictures, the advantages of MEMS Cam promise some novel features. One is multiple focus, where a single shot is taken as a series of shots in rapid succession with different foci. The MEMS Cam can switch so fast that it might, say, take six exposures in half a second, with focus on foreground in one, mid-point in another, background in a third, and points in between in each of the other exposures. The camera can stitch them together as a single image file called an “MPO.” That means that a user can take a shot and then decide afterward which object should be in focus, seeing as there are several focused exposures captured for a given moment in time.

DigitalOptics expects the MEMS Cam to show up in handsets toward the latter half of this year.

Many intriguing possibilities arise, though they are not necessarily imminent. For example, every phone camera user would love to have real optical zoom. With a MEMS actuator that can move left and right, not just back and forth, one could swap out lenses of different focal lengths to achieve a kind of zoom, says Siegler. In addition, the MEMS Cam is not just a solid-state motor, it is also a sensor, in that it detects gravitational pull. What that means is that when you point a phone upward to take a picture of the sky, or down to snap a flower, the device can sense the change in the tug of the earth. It can then adjust how much force is required to move the armature depending. That can result in more efficient use of the phone's power and faster switching times for the lens, as less effort is required in some cases to overcome gravity.

All in all, it looks like a fascinating future for one of the features with which consumers seem most enamored in their smartphones.