Development trends of the nine-axis sensor market: multi-axis sensors

2020-11-06

MEMS device manufacturers are actively deploying nine-axis sensor market. Optimistic about the continued growth in demand for accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers in mobile devices, players such as STMicroelectronics, Bosch Sensortec, and InvenSense have been actively strengthening their product portfolios to prepare for nine-axis solution development and compete for the huge business opportunities.
Nine-axis MEMS solutions are about to be widely adopted in the mobile device market. With the increasing popularity of indoor navigation and gesture recognition applications in mobile devices, the shipment volume of MEMS devices continues to double, and the product lines of various manufacturers continue to expand (see Table 1), and the product design methods have also undergone significant changes; in addition to continuously integrating various devices and developing towards multi-sensor directions, microcontrollers (MCUs) have also begun to be introduced to achieve intelligent control and reduce the power consumption of terminal products.
STMicroelectronics MEMS technology marketing manager, Yu Zhengde, said that thinness, lightness, compactness, and longer battery life are the goals that mobile device original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are striving for; and MEMS sensors are also evolving into multi-axis integrated product designs in this trend, but this alone cannot significantly reduce the power consumption brought by the sensors, so the market needs MEMS devices to have intelligent switching functions, which has led to the need for MCU and multi-axis MEMS integration.

In fact, the design concept of combining multi-axis MEMS and MCUs has been proposed in the industry in the past, but there have been many technical challenges. This is mainly because the semiconductor processes used by MEMS and MCUs are different, and the miniaturization technology of devices in the past was not as mature as it is today, which often resulted in excessively large integrated devices, causing the magnetometer in the multi-axis MEMS to exacerbate system electromagnetic interference (EMI), affecting the user experience of mobile devices.
To meet the market demand for simplification of mobile device components, STMicroelectronics will launch a nine-axis MEMS motion sensor integrating an ARM Cortex-M0 MCU core in 2013. Its size is only 4 mm × 4 mm, which not only reduces the PCB space but also allows the MCU to intelligently control the on/off function of the motion sensor, preventing it from constantly running and consuming power, and centrally processing signals collected from various sensors to share the burden of the application processor.

CCID Consulting | 2019 Sensor Market Data (Forward)

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