Enabling smartphones with space-saving accurate distance measurement

Competing ToF sensors struggle to accurately measure distance below dirty or smudged cover glass whereas the TMF8801 maintains high accuracy through use of its on-chip histogram processing.

“The new TMF8801 direct ToF sensor which complements the TMF8701 short range ToF sensor released in 2018, provides extended distance range sensing for smartphones,” said Dave Moon, Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Integrated Optical Sensors business line at ams. 

“The TMF8801 is ideally suited to provide support for improving world-facing mobile phone camera performance using laser detection auto-focus (LDAF), enabling mobile phone users to take pin-sharp photos and selfies.”

With an integrated VCSEL infrared emitter, multiple SPAD (single photon avalanche photo-diode) light detectors, time-to-digital converter, and on-chip microcontroller for processing histograms, the TMF8801 delivers superior ToF performance. Compared to distance averaging employed with an indirect ToF system, the direct ToF time measurement methodology used in the TMF8801 delivers higher accuracy true-distance measurements.

When used to support LDAF, high accuracy distance measurements deliver improved camera performance: sharper, in-focused images under any ambient lighting conditions, and accurate adjustment of the camera flash brightness to improve picture quality.

The small size and low power consumption of the TMF8801 is ideal for fast-ranging collision avoidance detection used in autonomous vacuum cleaners, and industrial robotics. For display-based products such as mobile computing, the TMF8801 can be used for user presence detection to automatically wake up or put the system into a low-power sleep mode based on the presence or absence of a user.

The TMF8801 is housed in a 2.2x3.6x1.0mm package and is in volume production. Unit pricing is $2.89 in order quantities of 5,000 pieces.