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It is a digit imaging world now. The image sensor is exactly the image input device in various kinds of systems. From 1960, the semiconductor industry rose, and from the end of 1960 era, two kinds of main image sensor technologies, the CCD and the CMOS image sensors, began to develop at the same time. The CCD image sensor was invented in 1969. Its superior image quality had been developed in several years. The CCD image sensor dominated the market exclusively in 1980 and 1990 era. Until the beginning of 2000, as the image quality of CMOS image sensor was improved to a considerable extent, the CCD domination era was over. After 2000, due to the rising of multimedia, network, and mobile communication, in addition to the improvement of the wide-band environment, a lot of new applications appear. The flourishing development of the image sensor applications have caused CMOS image sensor market to grow fast. Finally, CMOS image sensor market has outpaced the CCD image sensor market. In this thesis, the first part is an industry analysis. The history of the global image sensor industry was introduced. The development and the competition of two kinds of main technologies, CCD and CMOS image sensor, were analyzed in detail. The first part includes the brief introduction of the image sensor industry, the current image sensor market overview, CCD image sensor industry analysis, and CMOS image sensor industry analysis. The thesis elaborates the essentials of the image sensor technology and industry, the development history, and the competition strategies of various companies, to verify the theory of industry growing up strategies. The second part of this thesis is to select an IC design house, OmniVision, for conducting a case study. A detailed analysis to the case company was made by using the analysis framework of blue ocean strategy and technology adoption life cycle. The second part includes the brief introduction of the case company, the strategies and operation performance during the start-up period (year 1995~2000), the fast growing period (year 2001~2006), and the company transition period (year 2007~2010). We analyze the correlation between the growth performance and the OmniVision’s innovative strategies for break-through the various bottlenecks during three different periods.
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