First Mike Rayfield left to become VP of Wireless solutions at Micron and earlier in May Philip Carmack Sr. VP Mobile business unit at Nvidia also announced his departure. Deepu Talla is the new boss of Tegra replacing Mayfield while Gary Hicok replaces Carmack at his previous job of Sr. VP Mobile business unit. Luckily for Carmack, his new position seems pretty nice, as he is the new CEO of Aptina.
Phil spent 12.5 years at Nvidia coming from 3DFX and Gigapixel in the early 2000s and as of today he got upgraded to CEO of Aptina, a leading provider of CMOS sensors that found its way to some key cameras such as the Nikon V1. Thanks to the Aptina sensor Nikon V1 can shoot 4K video at 60 FPS even in RAW.
Aptina new products include the AR1411HS image sensor has the capability of providing full 4K video at 60fps, in either Quad HD (3840H x 2160V) or the wider Digital Cinema 4K format (4096H x 2160V), and a blazingly fast 120fps 1080p video mode. The new development goes on for some even more exciting products.
Since everyone knows that we are slowly but surely moving toward 4K video, Aptina has some right products and according to some analysts, Aptina has the biggest chunk of the CMOS sensor market.
Aptina also has an interesting leadership past, as between August 2009 and September 2012 the CEO of the company was Dave Orton, once the fearless leader and CEO of ATI Technology. Carmack succeeds Nicholas Brathwaite, an interim CEO who was leading the company in this transition period.
Carmack definitely understands where the industry is going and even the point and shoot cameras nowadays are expected to have a ridiculously high number or pixels, great video capabilities including support for 4K video in the near future, something that only a hand full of super expensive 4K TVs can reproduce at the moment.