Eric Fossum

Eric R. Fossum (born October 17, 1957) is an Emmy award-winning American engineer and professor, who co-developed some of the active pixel image sensor with intra-pixel charge transfer, with the help of other scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He is currently a professor at Thayer School of Engineering in Dartmouth College.

Fossum was born at Hartford Hospital and raised in Simsbury, Connecticut and attended public school there.

He graduated from Simsbury High School.

He also spent Saturdays at the Talcott Mountain Science Center in Avon, CT, which he credits for his lifelong interest in science, engineering, and mentoring students.

He received his B.S. in engineering from Trinity College in 1979, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Yale University in 1984.

The invention of APS technology was done by the Japanese companies Olympus and Toshiba during the mid-to-late 1980s, noting the former developed the vertical APS structure with NMOS transistors and the latter developed the lateral APS structure with PMOS transistors.

The JPL team was the first to fabricate a practical APS outside of Japan, while making several key improvements to APS technology.

The JPL sensor used a lateral APS structure similar to the Toshiba sensor, but was fabricated with CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) transistors rather than PMOS transistors.

This made JPL's APS device the first CMOS sensor with intra-pixel charge transfer.

After graduating Yale, the now Dr. Fossum became a member of the Electrical Engineering faculty at Columbia University from 1984 to 1990.

At Columbia University, he and his students performed research on CCD focal-plane image processing and high speed III-V CCDs.

In 1986, he co-founded the IEEE Workshop on CCDs, now known as the International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW).

Since 1987, Eric has supervised 23 doctoral dissertations throughout his faculty positions at Columbia and Dartmouth.

While Fossum was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin invoked a plan of "Faster, Better, Cheaper" for NASA Space Science missions.

One of the instrument goals was to miniaturize charge-coupled device (CCD) camera systems onboard interplanetary spacecraft.

In 1990, Dr. Fossum left his university professorship and joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology to manage JPL's image sensor and focal-plane technology research and advanced development.

In response, throughout the early 1990s, the JPL team including Fossum, Sunetra Mendis and Sabrina E Kemeny, made some changes to the already invented CMOS active-pixel sensor (APS).

They implemented Dr. Nobukazu Teranishi's pinned photo diode invention in on chip as camera-on-a-chip technology.

They also included other invented technologies by other people, such as a sample and hold in the sensor chip.

Based on these changes and additions, the JPL team made their first image sensor.

The same year, he co-authored an extensive paper broadly defining the active-pixel sensor (APS) and giving a historical overview of the technology.

In 1994, JPL image sensor team proposed an improvement to the CMOS sensor: the integration of the pinned photodiode (PPD).

A CMOS sensor with PPD technology was first fabricated in 1995 by a joint JPL and Kodak team that included Fossum along with P.P.K. Lee, R.C. Gee, R.M. Guidash and T.H. Lee.

In 1995, frustrated by the slow pace of the technology's adoption, Fossum and then-wife Dr. Sabrina Kemeny co-founded Photobit Corporation with 3 other co-founders to commercialize the technology.

Fossum left JPL to join Photobit full-time in 1996.

Further refinements to the CMOS sensor with PPD technology between 1997 and 2003 led to CMOS sensors achieve imaging performance on par with CCD sensors, and later exceeding CCD sensors.

As part of Goldin's directive to transfer space technology to the public sector whenever possible, JPL led the CMOS APS development and subsequent transfer of the technology to US industry, including Eastman Kodak, AT&T Bell Labs, National Semiconductor and others.

Despite initial skepticism by entrenched CCD manufacturers, the CMOS image sensor technology is now used in almost all cell-phone cameras, many medical applications such as capsule endoscopy and dental x-ray systems, scientific imaging, automotive safety systems, DSLR digital cameras and many other applications.

About 8 billion cameras are manufactured each year using CMOS technology.

In late 2001, Micron Technology Inc. acquired Photobit Corp. and Dr. Fossum was named a Senior Micron Fellow and remained with Micron for about a year before his first retirement.

In 2005, he joined SiWave Inc., a developer of MEMS technology for mobile phone handsets, as CEO.

In 2007 he co-sponsored the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest, aimed at increasing innovation and invention in the world of robotics.

SiWave was renamed Siimpel and grew substantially before his departure in 2007.

Fossum claimed to have raised over $25M in financing during his tenure as CEO, adding to Siimple's total $65M in funding over its lifetime.

But ultimately, a severely damaged Siimpel was acquired three years later by Tessera for only $15M.

He joined the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth in 2010, where he currently teaches, performs research on the Quanta Image Sensor with his graduate students, and coordinates the Ph.D. Innovation Program.

He also serves as Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer.

In 2014, he received an honorary doctor of science degree from his undergraduate school, Trinity College.

During the 4th year of his PhD, Eric R. Fossum became an acting instructor at Yale University.