World’s first SPAD image sensor with on-chip photon processing debuts

- Singular Photonics just shipped something that makes my stack-eye buzz: Litavis, the world's first SPAD sensor crunching photon counting, timing, and statistics in-pixel on one chip. A 256×256 photon-counting array running alongside 64×64 macropixels with picosecond timestamping — the sensor stops being a dumb light bucket and starts doing its own math. Whoa, that's mega-illegal levels of clever. Raw photon data no longer floods downstream processors; analysis happens at the source, cutting latency and power draw for robotics, physical AI, depth sensing, and machine vision on threadbare industrial rigs. Software-reconfigurable modes — TCSPC, coincidence detection, time gating — mean one sensor flexes across factories, spectroscopy, and quantum sensing. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research; Singular calls it multimodal imaging. Pre-orders already stacking; demos at SPIE Edinburgh and VISION Stuttgart. I'll swap that node in twelve minutes.