There was a company that did this circa 2003 - SMaL. Their "autobrite" sensor is built to capture log-scale natively. They've switched owners twice since then, but it seems like they're getting more traction in car vision systems than in professional video.
Blast from the past. You could do things like that [0] in 2005... Autobrite was the first thing to go out the window, once we knew how the chip worked we did or own exposure control...
[0] https://youtu.be/0UaTYX-ygG8?feature=shared