MEMS Executive Congress — Karen Lightman, executive director of MEMS Industry Group (MIG), today announced the first open-source algorithm cooperative, Accelerated Innovation Community (AIC), during her opening remarks at MEMS Executive Congress US 2014.

Facilitated by MIG with support and innovation from inaugural AIC member, Freescale Semiconductor, the purpose of AIC is to reduce time-to-market, startup costs, risk and barriers-to-entry by encouraging inputs and collaboration from across the MEMS/sensors supply chain.

“When companies are developing products that use MEMS/sensors, they often have to develop algorithms from scratch. This inhibits innovation by compelling designers to reinvent the wheel on common algorithms every time they want to add or change functionality in their product,” said Karen Lightman, executive director, MEMS Industry Group. “Giving them access to an open-source library of introductory algorithms fundamentally changes the development paradigm. Product designers can use field-proven, open-source algorithms supplied by MIG member companies to jumpstart their development process, enabling them to gain all the benefits of MEMS/sensors that much faster.”

Steve Whalley, chief strategy officer at MIG and a former director of sensors at Intel, foresees the evolution of AIC: “Freescale played the role of catalyst in first realizing AIC, and we have been working closely with them to launch the MIG Open Source Sensor Fusion site. The site already includes open-source algorithms from Freescale, including C source library for 3-, 6- and 9-axis sensor fusion. Freescale will continue to populate the site over the coming months.”

Whalley added that MIG is already seeing more industry support for AIC: “Analog Devices, Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC), Carnegie Mellon University, Kionix, and NISThave already come on board, and PNI Sensor Corp. will contribute three algorithms: quaternion to heading pitch and roll; heart rate monitoring using PPG sensor; and step counting. We also fully expect other MIG member companies to add further algorithms to AIC over the next 30 to 60 days, providing a rich baseline algorithm capability to assist developers with sensor fusion solutions.”