FastVision CEO, Dr. Joseph Sgro, wrote the following regardign future trends in the Imaging Industry:

"The use of CMOS in cell phones and digital still cameras is driving the development of CMOS processes that are leading to high performance CMOS imagers that are clearly superior and cheaper than CCD imagers.  The newest CMOS sensors have 5-7 um pixels, noise lower than CCD sensors, and are capable of output rates in the 4-8 GigaBytes/sec. range while costing less than $1,000. Another advantage of this high speed conversion rate of CMOS is the ability to produce High Dynamic Range (HDR) methods by over-sampling.

"Also the use of back side imaging (BSI) sensors in commercial products is driving the cost of the BSI process down to the point where it is economical feasible to use in commercial CMOS sensors.  BSI consists of back side thinning (BST) which requires bonding the sensor surface to a “handle” wafer and grinding the back of the sensor to a thin layer of silicon which allows 100% exposure of the photo-diode along with a suitable antireflective coating (AR).   This allows manufacturers to produce BSI very high speed CMOS sensors that have %100 fill factor which has been a major disadvantage of CMOS until now."