Originally posted by Class A No, it is not "pretty clear".
There are Sony patents for sensor technology.
Where are the Nikon patents?
Of course Nikon likes to present themselves as a leader in sensor technology, but for all we know, they could be just buying Sony technology with null input on their behalf.
The rest of your post does not make sense to me either. It is fine for you to entertain your -- apparently Thom Hogan inspired (who is very much stabbing in the dark himself) -- assumptions, but please don't portray them as known facts.
We are now pushing 2 years where Nikon is Sony's only FF sensor customer. Sony's book-to-bill has been growing astoundingly in semi production at a time when the rest of the company is floundering. Between their FF supply to Nikon and dominance ni the small CMOS cellphone supply, Sony has been on a tear.
Google Nikon sensor patents and you will find plenty. And, in case you didn't know, Nikon manufactures phiotolithography equipment used in fabs:
Nikon Precision | Global Site
The issue for FF CMOS is wafer size and stitching, and the major economic issue is the substrate processing and fabrication on an industrial scale where multi-billion $ expenditures from a company like Sony Industrial are required and where Nikon is simply too small to leverage such a large industrial outlay (the plant size is measured in hectares for some of these assets):
Sony to invest $1bn in stacked-CMOS production for smartphones: Digital Photography Review
Nikon also works with Aptina, but Aptina's CMOS fab system until recently was not able to accommodate FF. They were a smaller foundry only started as a spin-off of Micron in 2008. Most CMOS systems were artisanal and small wafer until about 5 years ago. It was Canon and Nikon that opened up the larger sensor market. The market for large sensors is very limited, almost exclusively to SLR cameras and some astronomy equipment. the market for small sensor CMOS is enormous including the guy who stuck a camera down my water main last week.
So the idea that anyone can just order a FF sensor is nonsense. Hogan is right; you need in at the foundry phase both with money (proven market assets) and design (for this much $$$, what do you want?). Canon did their own, and that left Sony, and maybe Teledyne Dalsa (who also have a huge CMOS patent portfolio). No one is going to fab up and then stitch FF sensors for a small player like Pentax. To get there you need combined muscle which appears to have come from Sony and Nikon working together and Canon working alone. No Sony FF cameras manufactured for almost 2 years now and 100% of their supply going to Nikon's assembly system tells you something, especially when Pentax has nothing.
Oh, that's right. You lost an argument in another thread so you're back for more.