The NextSeq 550 Image Sensor Die

After sticking the NextSeq 550 image sensor under an XRay, it seemed like the next logical step was to boil it in acid. This may seem extreme, but it gave me a much cleaner die to look at:

And poking around revealed the information I’d been looking for. The die is marked “Micron Imaging C18B 2006”:

Micron Imaging is the old name for Aptima, which in a seemingly endless series of acquisitions is now owned by ON Semi. And googling that gives us the MT9P011. So my previous guess of MT9P031 doesn't seem too bad.

So, this still makes it a ~$30 camera (used in a $200K sequencer). Perhaps only a small fraction of the overall BOM cost. But goes not show that consumer grade components often work well for scientific applications.

UPDATE: I purchased a MT9P001I2STC-B-DR from digikey and decapped it. Here is the chip marking, which is the same as the NextSeq die above. I suspect this is therefore a compatible part:

I have some further notes on this sensor and have reverse engineered the header… there maybe practical experiments in the future! Stay tuned!