Sony is making an investment of 80 billion yen to increase the production capacity for its back-illuminated stacked CMOS sensors that we’ve talked of previously. The capacity increase to 60,000 wafers per month by the end of September 2013 will be mainly used to supply smartphones. These new stacked CMOS image sensors allow for a much smaller chip size, which should result in enhanced image quality, functionality and power efficiency.
Sony said that it plans to incorporate “superior core technologies, including stacked CMOS image sensors, into a wide range of products for its digital imaging and mobile businesses, which are priorities within its electronics business.” There will be both 8MP and 13MP versions of these image sensors and we suspect the latter is going into the Xperia GX that is expected to release internationally under the LT29i ‘Hayabusa’ codename.