MEMS device manufacturers are making every effort to lay out the nine axis sensor market. It is optimistic that the demand of mobile devices for sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers will continue to grow. Companies such as Italian French semiconductor, boschsensortec and invensense have actively consolidated their product portfolios to prepare for the development of nine axis solutions and compete for huge business opportunities.
Nine axis MEMS solutions will soon be introduced into the mobile device market. With the increasing popularity of motion sensing applications such as indoor navigation and gesture recognition of mobile devices, the shipment of MEMS devices has not only continued to double, but also the product line of various manufacturers has continued to expand (see Table 1), and the product design method has also undergone major changes; In addition to the continuous integration of various devices and the development towards multiple sensing, microcontrollers (MCU) have also been introduced to achieve intelligent control and reduce the power consumption of terminal products.
Yu Zhengde, the MEMS technology marketing manager of Italian French semiconductor, said that thin, short and longer battery life are the goals that mobile equipment original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) strive to pursue; In this trend, MEMS sensors have gradually evolved into multi axis product design, but only this can not significantly reduce the power consumption brought by the sensor, so the market needs MEMS devices to have intelligent switching function, which also creates the integration demand of MCU and multi axis MEMS.
In fact, the design concept of the combination of multi axis MEMS and MCU has been put forward by the industry in the past, but there are many technical challenges. Mainly because the semiconductor process used by MEMS and MCU is different, and the technology of device miniaturization in the past is not as mature as today, it often makes the size of the integrated device too large, resulting in the magnetometer in multi axis MEMS aggravating the electromagnetic interference (EMI) of the system and affecting the user experience of mobile devices.
In order to meet the market demand for simplification of mobile device parts, STMicroelectronics will launch a nine axis MEMS motion sensor with armcortex-m0mcu core in 2013, with a size of only 4mm × 4mm can not only reduce the space occupied by the printed circuit board, but also intelligently control the switching function of the motion sensor through the MCU, so that it will not be in the running state and consume power all the time, and centralize the signals collected by various sensors to share the burden of the application processor.
