Biography (Extended)

Dr. Eric R. Fossum is a solid-state image sensor device physicist and engineer and Professor of Engineering in the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth. He is the primary inventor of the modern CMOS active pixel image sensor used in nearly all camera phones and web cameras, many DSLRs, high speed motion capture cameras, automotive cameras, dental x-ray cameras and swallowable pill cameras, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is also a successful entrepreneur and served as Chief Executive Officer of several companies.

Born and raised in Connecticut, he attended public school in Simsbury and spent Saturdays at the Talcott Mountain Science Center in Avon. He received his B.S. in Physics (with Honors) and Engineering from Trinity College in Hartford. in 1979 while writing business and academic enterprise software. He then attended Yale University’s Department of Engineering and Applied Science in New Haven working on ultra-thin tunnel-oxide MOS structures, and charge-coupled devices (CCDs). He held an IBM Fellowship and then the Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellowship and spent summers working at the Hughes Aircraft Company Missile Systems Group on infrared focal plane arrays in Canoga Park, CA. He received the Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984 and Yale’s Becton Prize.

In New York City, as a member of Columbia University’s Electrical Engineering faculty from 1984-1990, he taught undergraduate and graduate classes in semiconductor devices and device microfabrication and performed research on CCD focal-plane image processing, high speed III-V CCDs, ion beam oxidation of silicon and optical interconnects. In 1990, Dr. Fossum joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and managed JPL’s image sensor and infrared focal-plane technology research and advanced development. He served as Asst. Section Manager for both the visible and infrared imaging Sections, each with about 100 engineers. In 1994, he was concurrently appointed as a Senior Research Scientist, the highest level on the technical ladder at JPL. At JPL he invented the CMOS active pixel sensor (APS) camera-on-a-chip technology and led its development and subsequent transfer of the technology to US industry. The IP portfolio has yielded one of the all-time top producing licensing-revenue streams at Caltech. In 1995 he co-founded Photobit Corporation to commercialize the technology and joined as Chief Scientist in 1996. He became CEO of Photobit Technology Corporation in 2000. In late 2001, with over 100 employees and revenue exceeding $20M per year, Photobit was acquired by Micron Technology Inc. He left Micron in 2003 and spent two years semi-retired as a consultant. From 2005 to 2007 he accepted a new assignment to lead Siimpel Corporation as Chairman and CEO, a venture-backed start up developing MEMS-based camera modules with autofocus and shutter functions for cell phones. During this period he transformed the company from a 20-person R&D organization to 100+ person product-focused company, raising over $25M in venture funding and creating strategic ties to tier1 handset makers and their manufacturing partners. After returning the helm of Siimpel to its founders, he joined the Samsung Electronics Semiconductor R&D Center, South Korea as a consultant, working on 3D and sub-micron pixel size image sensors. In 2010 he joined the faculty of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth as Research Professor to teach and to perform research on advanced imaging devices.

Dr. Fossum has published over 250 technical papers, holds over 135 U.S. patents, and is a Fellow member of the IEEE. He has been primary thesis adviser to 13 graduated Ph.D.s. He received the IBM Faculty Development Award in 1984, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1986, and the JPL Lew Allen Award for Excellence in 1992. He has received many honors for the invention of the CMOS active pixel image sensor “camera on a chip” including the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal in 1996, induction into the US Space Foundation Technology Hall of Fame in 1999, the Photographic Society of America's Progress Medal in 2003, the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal in 2004, the IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award in 2009, and named the 2010 “Inventor of the Year” by the New York Intellectual Property Law Association. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2011.

In 1986 he founded the biannual IEEE Workshops on CCDs and Advanced Image Sensors (now the International Image Sensor Workshop, IISW) which will celebrate its 25th year in 2011. IISW is now operated by the International Image Sensor Society co-founded by Dr. Fossum in 2007, and where he serves as President. He has chaired or served on conference committees for the IEEE (IEDM, ISSC) and the SPIE (Infrared Readout Electronics). He was Guest Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans. on Electron Devices Special Issues on Solid-State Image Sensors published in October 1997, January 2003 and November 2009 and has served as associate editor for IEEE Trans. on VLSI, and guest editor for IEEE JSSC. He has held appointments at both UCLA and the University of Southern California (USC) as Adjunct Professor where he taught courses in semiconductor devices, quantum mechanics and electromagnetics and guided the Ph.D. dissertation research of four students. He served on Trinity College’s Board of Fellows from 2002-2004. He has been on Trinity College’s Engineering Advisory Council since 1998, and in 2010 also joined the Industry Advisory Board of the University of New Hampshire’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

He is married to Susan Briggs Fossum, a former public school science and math teacher, and has three daughters, and two stepchildren. With residences in California and New Hampshire, they enjoy living on Lake Winnipesaukee and restoring their rural NH farm property.

Updated 19 June 2011