Funding
Cmosis NV has concluded its second round of financing, raising €1.11 million from present shareholders, new personnel and management, for the further development of new CMOS image sensor technologies and for business expansion. At the same time the company announced the appointment of Luc De Mey as CEO and President. Guy Meynants will become vice president of R&D.
“Cmosis’s first 18 months of operation have confirmed to all of us that there are tremendous, still untapped, business opportunities for CMOS image sensors,” De Mey said.
De Mey's believes recent progress of CMOS image sensor technology will cause conventional technology to lose application areas and market share. “Cmosis’s focus will be on machine vision, medical, scientific and space applications,” he said.
De Mey joins the company from FillFactory where he served from 1999 until 2004 as CEO and President. After the acquisition of FillFactory by Cypress Semiconductor in August 2004, he oversaw the integration of the Mechelen operation, until leaving in October 2005.
Cmosis received initial financing from its founders and Capital-E, an early-stage venture fund focused on microelectronics start-ups in Europe. The company’s technology portfolio is based upon IP related to various advanced aspects of image sensors, including high pixel counts at a high fill factor, high-speed functionality, high dynamic range, time-delay and integration implementation in CMOS, very low noise pixels and readout circuits.
In June 2009 Cmosis will move to a new facility in Antwerp, Belgium, where it operates development labs, device qualification and a clean room for wafer and device production testing. The move will underpin the launch of a suite of standard machine-vision CMOS imagers and the manufacture of the company’s first custom image sensor products.
In March 2009 the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT) granted Cmosis a substantial subsidy for its R&D activities, leading to the development of the new suite of standard image sensor products.
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