The slides depict the inner workings of Mead’s baby: the X3, a chip design that promises to supercharge, and eventually revolutionize, digital photography. The current standard is the “mosaic” method, which takes multiple adjacent pixels to generate a single dot of color, requiring a round of computation to reconstruct the image. Mead hates it: “Information is lost!” he wails, pointing to unwelcome results like the muddy moire patterns on your digital photos. Foveon’s newly announced X3 chips have three layers of color sensors, stacked on top of each other like flapjacks, so that each pixel generates full color. The setup also allows X3 chips to grab more light. So detailed and efficient is this scheme, Mead says, that it makes your current digital camera obsolete–and starts the doomsday clock for traditional emulsion film as well. One look at the conference-room wall and the future is clear.
Hype? Consider the source. Carver Mead is a silicon legend, pioneering chip technology way before it was cool. He’s part academic superstar (as physics professor, he’s a Caltech family jewel), part entreprenuer (Intel employee No. 5) and part sage (straightest talker in the Valley). His new company emerged as a result of those ideas and his connections. A business relationship with National Semiconductor led not only to a strategic investment, but an OK to start Foveon in 1997 with a brilliant National scientist, Dick Merrill. (The name comes from fovea centralis, the place on the retina where sight is sharpest.) Joining them was another wizard, Richard Lyon from Xerox PARC. The company’s first effort was the Foveon Studio Camera, a $25,000 professional portrait model, but when Merrill came up with the X3 idea two years ago, “we bet the company on this,” Mead says. The first X3 product will be a high-end camera, but you can expect consumer models by next year. If all goes well, within two or three years, you won’t consider buying a digital camera without a sticker affirming that an X3 chip is inside.
After that, the real fun begins. With high-quality, increasingly cheap image-capture chips, the stage is set for nothing less than a redefinition of photography itself. Mead talks about professional-quality hybrid camera-camcorders, but it’s also possible to envision out-of-camera experiences that are breathtaking and scary. Imagine shutterless slabs of X3 chips continually grabbing images and shipping them to supercomputers for pattern data-mining. (Walls with eyes!)
What’s equally impressive, however, is how Mead pursued his technological vision while sitting in the calm eye of the dot-com hurricane. “I’ve been through bubbles, and they’re terrible,” says Mead. “People lose touch with reality.” Not Foveon, which resisted a quick IPO before nailing down a path to profits. It wasn’t easy. “You couldn’t get suppliers. You couldn’t get space to let. You couldn’t get people to work at normal salaries.” That was then, and this is… wow. The ones who took billion-dollar bites from the apple are suffering postlapsarian blues. But Foveon is only beginning its ride. “Now,” Mead says proudly, “we have lasting value.”
