Guy Meynants

Prof. Meynants started working on CMOS active pixel image sensors in 1994 at IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) during his Ph.D. research. He developed several image sensors at Imec, mostly for space applications as CMOS image sensors were more tolerant to ionizing radiation than CCDs. For example, he co-designed the image sensor for the VMC visual monitoring camera on board of Mars Express, known as the “Mars webcam”, which is still in use today (tweeting daily images) and the radiation-tolerant STAR-1000 image sensor.  He was one of the co-founders of Imec spin-off company FillFactory NV in 2000, where he developed various CMOS image sensors for industrial, digital photography and space applications, and worked on technology development for low-noise high dynamic range pixels. From February 2006 up to October 2007 he worked at IMEC-NL (Eindhoven, Netherlands) on ultra-low power analog sensor interface circuits. In 2007, he co-founded CMOSIS (Antwerp, Belgium) to develop advanced image sensors for professional applications. He led the company through its incubation phase as CEO and became VP R&D & CTO of CMOSIS in june 2009. Guy was responsible for the technical direction of the company and managed the development team.  CMOSIS developed image sensors for machine vision, for aerospace (e.g. the extreme-UV imagers for ESA’s Solar Orbiter or the engineering camera’s and supercam imager on board of Nasa’s Mars Perseverance rover), for broadcast and cinema cameras, and for high-end digital photography. In December 2015, AMS acquired CMOSIS and Guy became an AMS engineering fellow, in charge of CMOS image sensor technology for AMS.  He left AMS early 2019. He is a managing director of Bulgarian startup in industrial image sensors Photolitics since April 2019, and joined KU Leuven later that year, first as a research assistant and since October 2021 as professor. He teaches classes on mathematics, control systems design, entrepreneurship and - of course - image sensors.

Guy Meynants received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electronics engineering from the KU Leuven, Belgium in 1994 and 1998 respectively. He invented 33 patents and patent applications in the field of image sensors and analog circuit design, and co-authored 60+ scientific publications. Guy is also a board member and the secretary of the International Image Sensor Society, a non-profit organization that promotes Image sensor research and knowledge and organizes the bi-annual International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW), the premier conference on the field of image sensor research (see www.imagesensors.org). He was the Technnical Program Chair of IISW 2021 and is the General Co-Chair of IISW 2023.