InVisage Technologies

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InVisage Technologies Inc.

Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Semiconductors
Founded	October 2006; 19 years ago (2006-10)
Founder	Ted Sargent
Headquarters	Menlo Park, California
Key people	Jess Lee, CEO
Parent	Apple Inc.
Website	invisage.com

InVisage Technologies Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company known for producing a technology called QuantumFilm, an image sensor technology that improves the quality of digital photographs taken with a cell phone camera. The company was based in Menlo Park, CA. It was acquired by Apple Inc. in 2017.

InVisage Technologies was founded by the company's current CTO Ted Sargent, a professor from the University of Toronto.^[1] While developing transmitters and receivers in his lab at U of T, he discovered an especially sensitive receiver, which formed the basis of InVisage's QuantumFilm technology.^[2] Sargent then secured the rights to the technology and founded InVisage in October 2006.^[3] The company applied this technology toward mobile phone cameras.^[4] In 2007, Jess Lee, a former vice president from OmniVision Technologies, joined InVisage as the company's CEO.^[5] Syrus Madavi serves as the company's chairman of the board of directors, having joined InVisage in 2012.^[6]

In February 2013, it was announced that the company had received $20 million in a Series D funding round led by GGV Capital that included Nokia Growth Partners as a new investor, with the company expecting to begin shipping devices with their sensors in the second quarter of 2014.^[7]

On November 9, 2017, Apple, Inc. acquired InVisage Technologies.^[8]

QuantumFilm Technology involves the creation of a film to coat the image sensors used in a cellphone camera, allowing it to capture more light, improving the quality of the images taken.^[9][10] A typical camera phone pixel sensor is made up of several layers, with a layer of colored plastic or glass acting as a color filter sitting on top of several layers of metal connecting silicon electronic transistors together, which is itself on top of a base layer of silicon used by the sensor's electronic transistors and photodetectors. The light coming to the sensor has to pass through the layers of metal before reaching the silicon, a weak light absorber, so the sensor detects only about 25 percent of the light that makes up the image.^[11] QuantumFilm places a layer of semiconducting crystals - called quantum dots - on top of the chip, which allows the chip to absorb more light, place more pixels in a smaller space, and create sharper images.^[12]

Using quantum dots is more efficient at capturing light than traditional silicon-based image sensor chips (capturing 90-95% of the light that hits it), giving the sensors higher sensitivity in low light as well as higher resolution.^[3][13] And while traditional image sensors read an image from top to bottom (which can create a blurred image when the subject is moving), quantum dots detect the entire image at the same moment, reducing the chance for distortion.^[14]

Invisage held patents related to the development of QuantumFilm technology, as well as its applications toward optoelectronic devices.^[15]

In 2010, InVisage's QuantumFilm technology was awarded The Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award.^[16] In 2011, the company received a gold award from the International Imaging Industry Association's (I3A) VISION 2020 Imaging Innovation for its QuantumFilm technology.^[17]

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