The cover of OmniVision's prospectus showed its image sensor beside a quarter, to prove how small a camera could get. The Sunnyvale company made single-chip CMOS image sensors, the part that turns light into a digital picture. Older sensors needed several chips and more power. OmniVision squeezed the job onto one cheap chip. When it went public in July 2000, webcams and digital toys were its market, and camera phones were still a few years off.

Shaw Hong's Single Chip

OmniVision was incorporated in California in May 1995, with Shaw Hong as CEO and Raymond Wu among its top executives. The bet was on CMOS, the same cheap process used to make most computer chips. CCD sensors gave better pictures but cost more and drew more power. OmniVision wagered that CMOS sensors would get good enough, and that low cost and small size would then win. That would put a camera into products that had never had one.

Into Every Phone

OmniVision priced at $13 a share in July 2000 and listed on Nasdaq as OVTI, just as the tech market turned down. Camera phones then made image sensors a mass product, and OmniVision became one of the biggest suppliers. In 2015 a group of Chinese investors agreed to buy the company for $29.75 a share in cash, about $1.9 billion. The deal closed in January 2016. OmniVision later became part of China's Will Semiconductor.

Cover: Design: Camera Obscura, from Encyclopédie, A. J. Defehrt. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a camera obscura (the first image sensor).