 So here the SID display week and who are you? I'm Avis Turum. I'm a senior VPE and general manager of the Sensors BU at TowerJazz. So TowerJazz, what is TowerJazz? TowerJazz is a foundry making silicon for customers. So it's not our products. We develop technologies but we are a specialty foundry focused on analog devices and we have sensors devices, we have RF devices, power management, etc. And so in the sensor, I read somewhere on the internet that there was camera sensors that were coming with your technology, right? Correct. So are you making camera sensors? So we're making camera sensors in different types of applications. We are not making camera sensors for cell phones. We do make camera sensors for high-end photography, for cinematography cameras and also for medical applications and industrial applications. And that's already in the market for a long time or recently? Already in the market for a very long time. For example the medical x-ray sensors we sell since 97. 97. So people can make especially custom advanced camera sensors with you? Correct. And they can try to reach new levels of performance and everything? Yes, and that is done by them designing the product and us designing the special pixel per their needs. How does that work? So where are you based? We are based in Israel. The fab is there? No, we have fabs all over the world. We have two fabs in Israel, two fabs in the US and three fabs in a joint venture with Panasonic. So how does it compare with like TSMC for example? So TSMC are more focused on digital. So although they do do some analog but they are more focused on digital. Most of their sales are very deep technology nodes for digital applications. We are we stay completely away from digital. We are focused on analog. Completely away? Completely away. But like high-end cameras they want to have digital stuff going on. Yeah what you call digital this is what we call analog. What you call analog you call film analog, right? Yeah. But analog we talk about analog electronics. So when we focus on analog electronics meaning the sensor. The sensor itself is an analog sensor because it collects photons and translates it into voltage not into one and zeros. The translation later into one and zeros and all the data processing this is digital. That's a CPU somewhere else. Exactly. So in your camera for example you have a sensor which is an analog device and you have also an image processor that is a digital device and the image processor would do all the color perfection, white balance and things like that. So for many years I've been writing on the internet have I been correct or wrong when I say it's a sad state of affairs that people are using smartphones to take baby pictures and wedding photography and all this and what is special about a real camera sensor? Oh this is a very good question and many people are satisfied with their cellphone camera and well in broad daylight perfect conditions they might be right they get decent pictures but really if you want a good picture in different conditions color reproducing a high dynamic range think like that there is never an impossible just because of the pixel size and the lens size the smartphone too small right it's tiny yeah it's just that the amount of light that a pixel can collect is much smaller never even for 10 years in the future no way even 10 years in the future so you need a little bit of size and you need to do the effort when you have friends or family carry something not too small maybe you can make the phones bigger also right or having a very big phone yeah so there are some trends in in the market one trend obviously is the mirrorless camera so it's a it's a DSLR level camera but without the hassle of the DSLR so it's a smaller camera the problem is that usually people who buy those kind of cameras would not satisfy with a with a simple lens so eventually they buy a very big lens and the size of the camera is dictated by the lens not necessarily by the camera but this is one way to do it the other way still not in the market but I hear people talking about it is to have an add-on module on your cellphone so your cellphone becoming the control of your camera so you don't use the cellphone camera you use a separate camera but this separate camera cannot control itself the cellphone will control the camera I saw something from Yongnuo or something like that where it's like a micro four-thirds add on to your phone or something like the micro four-thirds sensor for a phone would be great yeah but it's not happening so far it's not happening so far and and I think it depends on on market demand so right now I'm filming this video with the micro four-thirds Panasonic camera what is making this special can you say something more about what if I did a video with the phone it would be flat it would be you wouldn't get the realism yeah yeah absolutely especially in the in this area that we are in it's very difficult to get decent colors with a cellphone camera because of the different light can lighting conditions that we have here you have for example your own light source just for this and with with cellphone it would be it would be very very difficult to reproduce the real colors in in this environment so what are the rumors and stuff there's all these camera rumors websites they talk they put the word panasonic and tower jazz and the same rumor yeah is it official something or yeah so so what's official is that we signed a deal with Panasonic in 2000 april 2014 for a joint venture actually Panasonic spun off of all their all of their silicon production facilities and we are just having a joint venture of three production facilities with Panasonic where we hold the majority shares so we continue the development and obviously our a major customer of us is Panasonic now because now it's part of the jv and we supply Panasonic the silicon that they used to produce by themselves so they already have your sensors made in your fab they have sensors that are in their cameras yes but it's for the high-end one for the very camera I cannot tell you which ones they're using for each camera so potentially it might be a lot of things happening for the future also but you can't say I cannot say of course I'm sorry I'm not trying to get any yeah but isn't my understanding is that sony is huge with camera sensors right yes you have all the way from smartphone to many different camera makers and I'm guessing also all these camera brands like Nikon and Panasonic and lots of other digits by the sensors from Sony this is correct so they're very good with that yeah this is correct the problem is that sony is also a camera maker so they also compete with their customers so it's not a an easy situation especially if the market grows and there is not enough capacity so there is a competition on on supply and if sony is also a customer of their own facilities of their own production they may give themselves the the benefit of getting advantage yeah is it possible that some things like what I'm missing in the panasonic camera I don't want to get any secrets right but what I'm missing is something like face detect autofocus and maybe sony says you can't have it we keep it for our cameras only you can get the sensor but you do your own autofocus or something like that maybe so the face detection autofocus is composed from hardware stuff on the sensor itself so the hardware stuff is basically special pixels as part of the total number of pixels that you have on the sensor you have special pdf pixels that are being used for this and the rest is done by very sophisticated algorithms so it could be for two different camera vendors that have exactly the same sensor exactly the same hardware one would have faster autofocus and the other one not just because they have a better algorithm of it's just an algorithm question maybe it's not just but but it could be do you work with the face detect stuff no no not yet no you could it's it's not our expertise especially not the software to do that is the face detect pixels are visible or they're just invisible it doesn't affect the image quality does it or it doesn't affect the image quality and then what I'm looking forward to is a k it sounds interesting and I saw sharp recently they did an 8k micro four thirds so it definitely is possible to have a 8k in this kind of sensor size all the way down well it is possible the the only thing is that you pay by pixel area so going from 4k to 8k by definition it would reduce your pixel size or your pixel area by a factor of 4 that means less photons that you can collect less sensitivity etc so so what's the challenge what's the what how do you get to make it usable you need to make a more light sensitive sensor four times more light sensitive to add four times more pixels or or or you settle with what you have so for example you you know just as an example if you look at the Sony alpha 7 series you have the r and you have the s right different resolution each one has its advantages and disadvantages the r would give you very high resolution the s would give you much higher sensitivity because of the larger pixels is it correct that the sensor technology is like what you're doing is way more advanced than the chipsets so sometimes you do just too much and the chip cannot keep up so they have to use FPGAs and all this stuff to try to keep up or it's not true each each area has its own difficulties and its own expertise but the one thing I can tell you for sure that in order to get very very good pictures no a data processor no no image processor as good as it will be would cover up for lousy sensor they do all this psych they do this what you call it processing of images and stuff which is impressive a little bit but it's fake right yeah it's nothing as good as real optics that's that's that's correct and and that's exactly what when you start with a good image then obviously when you do some corrections and and you know photographers use a photoshop on on their pictures it's not something that you is unheard of but you must start with a good image so you're looking forward to the future there's amazing things happening like in your industry it's just going to for example 8k and all this stuff is a lot of what else is cool so so what is cool is 8k for sure a higher frame rate for sure but I think the most important part is the high dynamic range which is still a problem that even with the high-end DSLR cameras you still look at pictures you take pictures and you still suffer from low dynamic range or lower dynamic range that you would expect I saw some displays at the trade show there's 10 000 nits but there was also 1000 nits or something like that and you need a better dynamic range camera to capture realistic HDR right absolutely this is a big challenge for you or this is part of what you do yeah and you provide these tools so the so the designers can use your tools is like you know the whole what do you call it the it's basically software and stuff right to use your fab to the max yeah but the the use we call it pdk it's the process design kit for the designer to design using our best-in-class process parameters but in addition we do changes to the process for the customer needs in order to perfect the performance of the pixels cool all right thanks a lot so i'm looking forward to those 8k cameras for my next camera okay thank you