High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Foveon X3 sensor is a CMOSimage sensor for digital cameras, designed by Foveon, Inc. (now part of Sigma Corporation) and manufactured by National Semiconductor and Dongbu Electronics. It uses an array of photosites, each of which consists of three vertically stacked photodiodes, organized in a two-dimensional grid. Each of the three stacked photodiodes responds to different wavelengths of light, i.e., each has a different spectral sensitivity curve. This difference is due to that fact that different wavelengths of light penetrate silicon to different depths. The signals from the three photodiodes are then processed, resulting in data that provides the three additive primary colors, red, green, and blue.