Sharp Microelectronics has developed a 'black box' for the Japanese automotive market that can record up to six hours of travel and allows accidents to be reconstructed. The heart of the travel recorder is a 2 MegaPixel CMOS sensor in 1/4 format, combined with a 180° lens in order to record what happens across the entire width of the road. The black box system comes in two versions, one for rear-view and the other for the front-view applications.
CCD and CMOS modules are also becoming increasingly popular in Europe as sensors for camera-supported driver assistance systems. Sharp will be offering optimised CCD and CMOS automotive camera modules within the next one to two years for this market, which is growing 42 per cent a year.
The CCD modules for passive driver assistance systems have a light sensitivity of just 1.8 lux – the equivalent of the ambient light of a moonlit road. Through improved software, the next generation of Sharp CCD modules will superimpose automatic guidelines that will mark the danger zone, such as when reversing. CCD modules are still ahead at the moment, due to their light sensitivity but, in the long term, CMOS modules will be used more and more as rear-view cameras. Once the CMOS sensors have achieved the necessary image performance in dark environments, they will also bring a whole host of further advantages with them, such as lower costs, higher resolution and, above all, a more compact design, as the image processor can be integrated directly onto the camera chip.
High frame rates and dynamics (greater than 100dB) are required, particularly for front cameras, in order to get clear images under even the most extreme light/dark contrast conditions. Equipped with roller shutters, the next generation of CMOS camera modules for active driver assistance systems achieves shutter speeds of up to 30 images a second with a dynamic range of 100 dB, which compares with the human eye at 14 images a second and a dynamic range of 105 dB.
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