South Korean technology giant Samsung has announced it is working on an image sensor with a global shutter level that can accurately and sharply capture very fast-moving objects. It is stated that this advanced camera technology may also be included in future iPhone models.
Samsung is coming with global shutter technology
Most smartphone cameras today use the “rolling shutter” method when taking photos and videos. In this method, the image is captured by scanning it line by line, which leads to distortions, skewing, or shifts in the image when a fast-moving object is photographed.
In global shutter technology, the situation is different; all pixel rows are exposed to light simultaneously, and the data reading process is performed synchronously. This allows the entire frame to be captured at once, and very fast-moving objects can be viewed with perfect accuracy.
Adapting the global shutter architecture to smartphones has been a challenging process until now because this architecture required increasing pixel sizes, which resulted in a decrease in resolution. However, Samsung managed to adapt global shutter capability to the smartphone form factor by adding a new pixel structure to a standard rolling shutter sensor with a 1.5 micrometer pixel pitch.
The company developed a pixel-level ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter) architecture by integrating the ADC, which normally converts analog signals from pixels to digital, into each pixel. While existing global shutter pixels are around 3 micrometers, Samsung solved this problem by combining 1.5 micrometer pixels into a 2×2 package, creating a base unit of 3 micrometers.
These four pixels share an ADC. In this case, the 2×2 portion operates sequentially like a rolling shutter, but the remaining portions can perform the global shutter function. Because a slight degradation occurs due to this partial rolling shutter operation, it does not function as a full global shutter.
Samsung states that it added an algorithm that provides motion compensation by extracting optical flow information (the change in brightness in the pixels when the object or camera moves). They explain that with this method, they have achieved a high-resolution sensor with global shutter capabilities, even at very small pixel sizes.
The company plans to present this work at the ISSCC 2026 conference, known as the “Olympics of semiconductor circuits.” Earlier this year, Samsung also introduced a hybrid shutter concept combining rolling shutter and global shutter technologies.
On the other hand, it is known that Apple is also showing serious interest in this technology and has obtained patents for integrating global shutter sensors into iPhones. There are also reports that Apple and Samsung are collaborating on next-generation CMOS image sensors.
