It’s no news that Sony has been dominating the image sensor business for the last couple years but with new reports coming out of Korea, Samsung is serious about increasing its share of the image sensor market and taking some business away from Sony so much that they’re about to spend over $800 million to ramp up image sensor production yet again.
According to an article in Business Korea, Samsung is planning to convert another of its DRAM production lines in South Korea into a CMOS sensor production line. The company did the same thing with a different DRAM production line in 2018. While it’s more cost effective to convert a DRAM line than to build out a new sensor line from scratch, according to Business Korea; the conversion will still cost Samsung an estimated $817M USD.
If all goes according to plan, the production line should be up and operational as soon as this year, increasing Samsung’s production capacity for sensors like the 108MP ISOCELL Bright HMX, the recently announced 50MP ISOCELL GN1 with “DSLR-like” autofocus, and the rumored 150MP “almost 1-inch” sensor Samsung is allegedly working on.
Original Article on PetaPixel
