OmniVision to Fulfil Apple's iPhone 5 CMOS Needs

Apple is set to obtain 90% of all its CMOS image sensor needs from OmniVision for the forthcoming iPhone 5. The remaining 10% will come from Sony. The iPhone 5 is also said to have an 8 Mega Pixel camera.

There was a rumor that Sony would also supply Apple with 8 MP camera sensors for the iPhone but CEO of Sony, Howard Stringer said that the company was unable to meet the order in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, according to Seth Weintraub at 9to5 Mac.

The ordering for components by Apple shows that it is gearing up for production of its fifth generation iPhones. Usually they unveil a new iPhone at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference but on Monday the keynote was a software centric event focussing around the release of the iCloud distributed computing environment.

In March most reports had indicated Apple was not looking for suppliers of components and the iPhone 5 might miss the fiscal year 2011 which ends in September. However the orders for CMOS image sensors to OmniVision and getting Avago Technologies to build power amplifiers for the WCDMA version of the device seem to prove otherwise.

Of the five amplifiers three will be manufactured by Avago and the remaining two will most likely be sought from TriQuint Semiconductor.