Vertical Transfer Gates Proposed by Omnivision, KETRI

Aiming to improve fill factor in small pixels, both KETRI and Omnivision applied for patents on vertical transfer gate structures, US20110084322 and US20110089311 respectively. The structures look quite similar:

KETRI Gate

Omnivision's Gate

Meanwhile, applications from Apple Imaging Group continue to trickle in. A large 91-page US20110090351 talks about temporal noise filtering with motion artifact reduction. The algorithm itself is quite straightforward but assumes that one has pixels motion vectors ready:

The Apple application also talks about other ISP stages, such as shading correction, defect pixel correction, demosaicing, etc.