Fig. 1
Sketch of Wafer &
Component Structure
Click to enlarge

Fig. 2

Cross-section of Doublet
Lens Module
Click to enlarge

CMOS Imaging Solutions

Camera lens technology holds an important key to development in the mobile phone industry. Phones continue to get smaller and thinner every year, and cameras are wanted in cheaper and cheaper phones. More and more phones are equipped with two cameras: one for still pictures and video recording and one for video conferencing. Manufacturers are pressured to continue equipping mobile phones with ever higher-performance and smaller and thinner cameras at ever lower costs. Only a revolution in lens manufacturing technology can enable phone manufacturers to meet these growing demands, and Heptagon's unique CMOS imaging lens technology is leading that revolution.

Traditional plastic lenses cannot support these advances as they cannot survive the standard high-temperature SMT "lead-free reflow" process used in assembling the printed circuit boards for mobile phones. This means the cameras must be mounted separately in an extra assembly step onto dedicated sockets. All this adds to the height, footprint and cost of the overall camera solution.

Heptagon's unique wafer-scale (REEMO®) CMOS imaging lens technology, on the other hand, cuts through these problems by allowing high-performance lenses to be integrated directly through the standard SMT lead-free reflow process with no additional holders. Our wafer-scale production technology also allows us to add features such as lens apertures and IR cut-off filters directly onto the lens wafers simply by adding wafer processing steps. This eliminates the need for separate apertures and IR cut-off filters and brings further cost and size savings. Also, because our lens wafers are in the same 8" and 12" format as CMOS sensor wafers, we enable the assembly of lens-and-sensor modules directly at wafer scale, producing thousands of complete camera modules in one wafer-scale assembly step.