# Eric Fossum

Eric R. Fossum (born October 17, 1957) is an Emmy award-winning American engineer 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 a professor at Thayer School of Engineering in Dartmouth College.

## Early years and education

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

## Academic career

During the 4th year of his PhD, Fossum became an acting instructor at Yale University. After graduating Yale, 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 1990, 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 2007 he co-sponsored the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest, aimed at increasing innovation and invention in the world of robotics.
He joined the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth in 2010, where he 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.

## Invention

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 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 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. 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.
In 1994, the 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. 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.

## Entrepreneur

In 1995, frustrated by the slow pace of the technology's adoption, Fossum and then-wife 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.
In late 2001, Micron Technology Inc. acquired Photobit Corp. and Fossum was named a Senior Micron Fellow; he 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. 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 Siimpel's total $65M in funding over its lifetime. But ultimately, a severely damaged Siimpel was acquired three years later by Tessera for only $15M.
In 1986, he co-founded the IEEE Workshop on CCDs, now known as the International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW). In 2007, with Nobukazu Teranishi and Albert Theuwissen, he co-founded and was the first President of the International Image Sensor Society (IISS) which operates the IISW.
In 2017, Fossum co-founded Gigajot Technology, Inc. with two former Dartmouth PhD students, Saleh Masoodian and Jiaju Ma, to commercialize the Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) technology developed in his lab at Dartmouth College.

## Achievements and awards

Fossum has published over 300 technical papers, and holds more than 180 U.S. patents. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Optica.
* Yale's Becton Prize in 1984
* IBM Faculty Development Award in 1984
* National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986, the JPL Lew Allen Award for Excellence in 1992
* NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 1996
* Induction into the US Space Foundation Space Technology Hall of Fame in 1999
* Photographic Society of America Progress Medal in 2003.
* Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal in 2004.
* IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award in 2009
* Inventor of the Year by the New York Intellectual Property Law Association in 2010
* Induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011.
* Elected as a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2012.
* Elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013.
* Received the Doctor of Science honoris causa from Trinity College (Connecticut) in 2014.
* Received 2017 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (shared with 3 people)
* OSA/IS&T Edwin H. Land Medal in 2020.
* National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Technology and Engineering Emmy Award in 2020
* National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2025.