Eric R. Fossum (born October 17, 1957) is an Emmy award-winning American engineer who co-developed some of the active pixel image sensor with intra-pixel charge transfer, with the help of other scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
At Columbia University, he and his students performed research on CCD focal-plane image processing and high speed III-V CCDs.
He joined the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth in 2010, where he teaches, performs research on the Quanta Image Sensor[7] with his graduate students, and coordinates the Ph.D.
One of the instrument goals was to miniaturize charge-coupled device (CCD) camera systems onboard interplanetary spacecraft.
In response, throughout the early 1990s, the JPL team, including Fossum, Sunetra Mendis and Sabrina E Kemeny, made some changes to the already invented CMOS active-pixel sensor (APS).
The same year, he co-authored an extensive paper broadly defining the active-pixel sensor (APS) and giving a historical overview of the technology.
A CMOS sensor with PPD technology was first fabricated in 1995 by a joint JPL and Kodak team that included Fossum along with P.P.K.
Despite initial skepticism by entrenched CCD manufacturers, the CMOS image sensor technology is now used in almost all cell-phone cameras, many medical applications such as capsule endoscopy and dental x-ray systems, scientific imaging, automotive safety systems, DSLR digital cameras and many other applications.
Fossum claimed to have raised over $25M in financing during his tenure as CEO, adding to Siimpel's total $65M in funding over its lifetime.
In 2007, with Nobukazu Teranishi and Albert Theuwissen, he co-founded and was the first President of the International Image Sensor Society (IISS)[19] which operates the IISW.