After a short introduction to the benefits of the CMOS pixel sensors technology for charged particle tracking, we will present its first applications in high-energy physics, namely the STAR and ALICE experiments. To illustrate the integration possibilities opened by CMOS pixels, we will then turn to three projects. First, the double-sided PLUME tracking layers, which feature extremely low material budget with two measurement points. They have been used in the first year of data taking of the Belle II experiment. Then we will discuss the SITRINEO table-top tracker dedicated to teaching activities. With the third project, MAPSSIC, we will enter the world of molecular imaging and show that CMOS pixel sensors can be used in living rat brains.
In the last part of this seminar we will introduce a recent game changer in the technology: the full depletion of the CMOS sensing volume. Radiation tolerance and time resolution have been improved by orders of magnitude enlarging even further the possibilities of applications from very large detection surface with low power to 4D-tracking.