Sony Semiconductor Solutions

Sony Semiconductor Solutions
Information
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Semiconductors, image sensors, microdisplays
Founded	November 9, 2015 (operations began April 1, 2016)
Headquarters	Atsugi, Kanagawa, Japan
Notable Personnel	Shinji Sashida (Representative Director, President and CEO)
Products	CMOS image sensors, OLED microdisplays, time-of-flight and SPAD depth sensors, event-based vision sensors
Parent	Sony (Sony Group Corporation)
Website	https://www.sony-semicon.com/en/

Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation (SSS) is the Sony group company that develops, manufactures and sells Sony's semiconductors, including its CMOS image sensors and OLED microdisplays. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation with its headquarters in Atsugi, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. The company was founded on November 9, 2015 and began operating on April 1, 2016, when Sony split its semiconductor business off into a separate company. The company describes its business as device solutions "centered on image sensors", with micro-displays, LSIs and semiconductor lasers alongside them.

For virtual and augmented reality, SSS matters mainly as a display supplier. Its OLED microdisplays, first developed for the electronic viewfinders of Sony cameras, are now also sold for VR and AR head-mounted displays and AR glasses. Press reporting and a teardown analysis have named Sony as the likely maker of the micro-OLED panels in the Apple Vision Pro, and several AR glasses makers have announced products built on Sony microdisplays.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Checked company profile, history, management changes, TSMC joint venture, OLED microdisplay specs and the Vision Pro, AR glasses and SRH-S1 display attributions against the cited official releases and press reports. About review dates.

History

Background

Sony's semiconductor business began long before SSS existed; the company dates it to 1954. Sony began research on charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors in 1970 and commercialized the ICX008 CCD in 1979. Development of CMOS image sensors started in 1996, and its first CMOS sensor, the IMX001, was commercialized in 2000. In 2004 Sony decided to stop investing in increased CCD production and to focus its investment on CMOS image sensors. It commercialized a back-illuminated CMOS image sensor in 2009 and a stacked CMOS image sensor in 2012.

In October 2015 Sony Corporation completed the purchase of Softkinetic Systems, a Belgian company that developed 3D time-of-flight (ToF) range image sensors, cameras and related software under the DepthSense name. Sony said it planned to combine that expertise with its own technology to build next-generation range image sensors. In December 2017 the business became Sony Depthsensing Solutions.

Spin-off and later years

Sony announced on October 6, 2015 that it would move all of its semiconductor research and development, business operations and sales out of Sony Corporation and into a new company, Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corp., starting April 1, 2016. Image sensors were to be the new company's main focus. Sony gave the reasons as clearer accountability and responsibility from a shareholder perspective, an emphasis on sustainable profit, and faster decision-making. The manufacturing company Sony Semiconductor Corp. and the design company Sony LSI Design Inc. were to become subsidiaries of the new company, and Terushi Shimizu, then deputy president of Sony's Device Solutions business group, was expected to be named its president. The manufacturing subsidiary was renamed Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing in 2016, and Sony LSI Design was merged into SSS in April 2022.

Insightness AG, a Zurich developer of event-based vision sensors founded in 2014 as a spin-off from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, became part of the group. EE News Europe reported the acquisition in January 2020, noting that Sony listed Insightness as a subsidiary of Sony Semiconductor Solutions. In January 2022 the company adopted the corporate slogan "Sense the Wonder".

In January 2025 Sony announced that Shinji Sashida, then a director and executive deputy president of SSS, would become Representative Director, President and CEO on April 1, 2025, while Terushi Shimizu moved from President and CEO to Director and Chairman. Shimizu retired from the board on March 31, 2026. On August 11, 2026, SSS and TSMC announced a definitive agreement to set up Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, a joint venture in Koshi, Kumamoto Prefecture, to produce smartphone image sensors. SSS is to be the sole controlling shareholder, and volume production is expected to start in 2029.

Current organization

The company's corporate profile lists about 8,200 employees as of April 1, 2026, sales of 2,151.5 billion yen for fiscal year 2025, and capital of 400 million yen. Its manufacturing subsidiary, Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation in Kikuyo, Kumamoto, lists about 13,000 employees. Other group companies include Sony Depthsensing Solutions in Belgium (ToF image sensors), Sony Advanced Visual Sensing in Switzerland (event-based vision sensors), ISDC in Israel (image sensors) and Sony Device Technology (Thailand), which handles image sensor assembly.

OLED microdisplays

SSS builds its OLED microdisplays on silicon backplanes rather than the glass backplanes used in PC and smartphone displays. This allows very small pixels in a panel small enough to sit inside a viewfinder or headset. The displays were first developed for the electronic viewfinders (EVFs) of Sony's interchangeable-lens mirrorless cameras. In January 2022 the company wrote that 10 years had passed since its first shipment of OLED microdisplays, and that the panels were used in camera EVFs and head-mounted displays. In the same article its engineers described cutting the pixel pitch from 7.8 µm to 6.3 µm and adding on-chip color filters. The corporate timeline lists a 0.5-type OLED microdisplay with UXGA resolution commercialized in 2018.

The current product page divides the range into camera EVF models (0.39-type to 0.64-type) and models "mainly for AR and VR headsets".

Model	Size	Resolution	Maximum luminance (duty ratio)	Notes
ECX350F	0.44-type (11.235 mm diagonal)	1,920 x 1,080	10,000 cd/m2 (100%)	Announced September 24, 2024 for AR glasses; 5.1 µm pixels; samples planned for October 2024 at 40,000 yen
ECX348E	0.55-type	1,920 x 1,080	5,000 cd/m2 (90%)	In the lineup for AR and VR headsets; the "conventional model" against which the ECX350F was compared
ECX343FN / ECX343FNA	0.68-type	1,920 x 1,200	6,500 cd/m2 (90%)	In the lineup for AR and VR headsets
ECX344A	1.3-type (33.0 mm diagonal)	3,552 x 3,840	1,000 cd/m2 (20%)	Announced August 24, 2023 for VR and AR head-mounted displays; 6.3 µm pixel pitch; up to 90 fps; samples planned for November 2023 at 150,000 yen

ECX344A

The ECX344A was announced on August 24, 2023 as a 1.3-type, 4K (3,552 x 3,840) OLED microdisplay intended mainly for VR and AR head-mounted displays. SSS said it reached this size and resolution by applying the miniaturization processes it had developed for camera EVFs, together with its own pixel drive circuits. The panel covers 96% of the DCI-P3 color space and runs at up to 90 fps. To reduce the residual images that matter in head-mounted displays, it shortens the illumination time to one fifth of that of the existing ECX339A (a 20% duty drive) while still reaching 1,000 cd/m2. The display has three operating modes: a normal 4K mode, an upscale mode that converts 2K to 2.5K input to 4K, and a foveated scan mode (compare foveated rendering) that keeps the center of the image at full resolution and lowers the resolution at the edges. SSS said the foveated mode, combined with 2.5K upscaling, cuts the amount of data transferred by about 60%.

ECX350F

The ECX350F, announced on September 24, 2024, is a 0.44-type Full HD panel aimed at AR glasses. SSS said its 5.1 µm pixels (about 5,000 ppi) were the industry's smallest and its peak brightness of up to 10,000 cd/m2 the industry's highest, a claim it limited to OLED microdisplays with three full-color subpixels per pixel, according to its own research at the time of the announcement. The brightness is roughly double that of the earlier ECX348E. A new circuit design and assembly process reduced the bezel on the long sides to 1.14 mm, which brought the panel's short side to 7.99 mm, 24% less than the earlier product. A variable black frame function lets the panel itself place lower-resolution video anywhere in the active area. In AR glasses the black area stays see-through, a task the application processor previously had to handle by generating the black signal.

XR work

Apple Vision Pro

Apple's Apple Vision Pro uses two micro-OLED displays, one per eye. In an August 2023 report, UploadVR described the headset as "heavily supply constrained due to the limited production capacity of its sole OLED microdisplay supplier Sony". Citing a report by Wayne Ma of The Information, UploadVR also said that Apple was testing microdisplays from BOE and SeeYA Technology for future headsets. After the headset's release, iFixit's February 2024 teardown measured pixels of 7.5 µm and a lit area of 3660 by 3200 pixels per display, and concluded that "the display panels are most likely made by Sony", possibly as a custom version of its microOLED displays.

AR glasses

Several makers of display glasses have named Sony microdisplays in their products. When Xreal announced the Xreal Air 2 and Air 2 Pro in October 2023, Auganix reported them as the first AR glasses to use SSS's latest 0.55-inch micro-OLED displays, at 4,032 pixels per inch. In May 2025 MIXED reported that Rokid's AR Spatial glasses use 0.68-inch Sony micro-OLED displays at 1,200p, 90 Hz and 600 nits peak brightness. Viture launched the Viture Luma Ultra in September 2025 with what Road to VR described as "Sony's latest micro-OLED panels", at up to 1200p and 1,250 nits peak brightness.

Sony headsets

In January 2024 Sony Corporation announced a spatial content creation system built around an XR head-mounted display and controllers; the headset was later sold as the Sony SRH-S1. Sony described its displays as "large-size, high-definition 1.3-type OLED Microdisplays with 4K resolution and a wide color gamut that covers up to 96% of DCI-P3". These are the same size, resolution class and color gamut figures SSS gives for the ECX344A, but Sony's announcement does not name the panel model or its maker.

Sensing

Outside displays, the SSS group develops sensors used for depth and motion sensing, including ToF image sensors at Sony Depthsensing Solutions and event-based vision sensors at Sony Advanced Visual Sensing. Its timeline lists a back-illuminated ToF sensor commercialized in 2017 and a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) depth sensor for smartphones commercialized in 2023.

See also

• Sony
• Micro-OLED
• Microdisplay
• Sony SRH-S1
• Depth sensing
• Samsung Display
• LG Display
• Japan Display