Galaxycore Announces 1.12um Pixel

With the new Galaxycore announcement, it seems that most 1st, 2nd and 3rd tier mainstream image sensor makers have 1.12um pixel products in their portfolio:

"GalaxyCore Inc, (“GalaxyCore”, “We” or “our”), largest and most advanced CMOS image sensor IC fabless company in China, today announced it successfully developed Through-Silicon-Illumination (“TSI”) technology for image sensor manufacturing on 12-inch wafer based on 90nm (“nanometer”) logic process in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (“TSMC”), and will commence volume production shortly.

GalaxyCore owns wide scope of proprietary intellectual property of TSI technology, including analog design, pixel layout, and pixel-related process technology. This leading-edge technology applies to manufacturing of image sensors with pixel size of 1.75um to 1.1um, and will further extend to 0.9um pixel size node. GalaxyCore expects to launch 5-Megapixel, 8-Megapixel and 13-Megapixel image sensor products utilizing this technology in 2014 and 2015.

Our TSI technology has the following features,

High performance: TSI significantly improves sensitivity and signal-noise ratio, meanwhile it significantly reduces thermal noise, dark current, and crosstalk.
High speed and low consumption: TSI technology adopts 90um process technology in TSMC with fine-tuned process parameters. Combined with our distinctive optimal analog and digital circuit design, it realizes high speed and low power consumption at same time, which leads to high frame rate as well as low thermal noise stemmed from low consumption.
Cost efficiency: By utilizing our proprietary pixel process technology, TSI achieves excellent image performance with fewer process steps.

“We are very excited about the timely success in TSI technology development and its outstanding performance revealed so far,” said GalaxyCore CEO Zhao Lixin, “I would like to thank TSI R&D team in GalaxyCore for their excellent job and thank TSMC for their great supports. We will promptly launch 5-Megapixel, 8-Megapixel and 13-Megapixel image sensors utilizing this TSI technology with 1.1 – 1.4um pixel size in the next a few months. We dedicate to offer high performance and cost efficient world-class image sensors products for the fast-growing market of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.”

The first product appears to me 5MP 1/5-inch GC5005: