ST makes giant image sensor for Las Vegas attraction

STMicroelectronics has made a custom 316Mpixel 18K image sensor for a company with a super-high resolution cinema in Las Vegas.

The die measures 99 x 83mm (82.4cm²) – four fit onto a 300mm wafer (right).

It can capture images at 120frame/s and transfer data at 60Gbyte/s.

“Building a custom sensor of this size, resolution and speed, with low noise, high dynamic range and seemingly impossible yield requirements, presented a truly novel challenge for ST – one that we met from the first wafer out of our 300mm fab in Crolles,” said ST’s general manger of imaging Alexandre Balmefrezol.

Sphere Entertainment is the customer, which is building the sensor into a camera of its own design – for which it has 10 patents – to record material for its cinema.

Called ‘Big Sky’, the camera has “the world’s largest cinema camera sensor in commercial use, working with the world’s sharpest cinematic lenses”, said Sphere. It “allows filmmakers to capture large-format images from a single camera without having to stitch content together from multiple cameras, avoiding near distance limitations and seams between images”.

The cinema, also called Sphere, has what the company claims is the world’s largest, high-resolution LED screen – at ~15,000m² and 16K x 16K resolution – “which wraps up, over, and around the audience to create a fully immersive visual environment”, it said.