Category Archives: Applications

Ambiq Micro, a developer of ultra-low power integrated circuits for power-sensitive applications, today announced the appointment Mike Noonen as interim Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect.  Mr Noonen brings over 25 years’ experience in semiconductors and has been on the Board of Directors of Ambiq Micro since February 2014. His career includes senior management roles in semiconductor businesses including National Semiconductor, NXP Semiconductors, and GlobalFoundries, and he is a board director at Quora Semiconductor, Kilopass, Adapteva Inc. and the Chairman of Silicon Catalyst, the first incubator for semiconductor start-ups.

Commenting on the appointment, Mike Noonen said, “Ambiq Micro has brought game-changing technology to semiconductors and new possibilities and value to IoT and wearable device makers. At a time when power consumption is the key criterion for designers, Ambiq Micro has developed the world’s most energy efficient ICs. I look forward to working with Scott Hanson and the Ambiq Micro team during this transition to accelerate the ultra-low power revolution they have created.”

Ambiq Micro co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Scott Hanson, added, “Mike’s wide-ranging semiconductor industry experience is going to be a great asset as we build upon the success achieved under Mark Foley’s leadership as CEO since 2012. Mike has a clear vision of how the industry is evolving and of the vital role that Ambiq plays in enabling designers of wearables and other battery-powered IoT devices to make their products more attractive to consumers through outstanding battery life. ”

Mr Noonen holds a BSEE from Colorado State University.

Flexing graphene may be the most basic way to control its electrical properties, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at Rice University and in Russia.

The Rice lab of Boris Yakobson in collaboration with researchers in Moscow found the effect is pronounced and predictable in nanocones and should apply equally to other forms of graphene.

The researchers discovered it may be possible to access what they call an electronic flexoelectric effect in which the electronic properties of a sheet of graphene can be manipulated simply by twisting it a certain way.

The work will be of interest to those considering graphene elements in flexible touchscreens or memories that store bits by controlling electric dipole moments of carbon atoms, the researchers said.

Perfect graphene – an atom-thick sheet of carbon – is a conductor, as its atoms’ electrical charges balance each other out across the plane. But curvature in graphene compresses the electron clouds of the bonds on the concave side and stretches them on the convex side, thus altering their electric dipole moments, the characteristic that controls how polarized atoms interact with external electric fields.

The researchers who published their results this month in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters discovered they could calculate the flexoelectric effect of graphene rolled into a cone of any size and length.

The researchers used density functional theory to compute dipole moments for individual atoms in a graphene lattice and then figure out their cumulative effect. They suggested their technique could be used to calculate the effect for graphene in other more complex shapes, like wrinkled sheets or distorted fullerenes, several of which they also analyzed.

“While the dipole moment is zero for flat graphene or cylindrical nanotubes, in between there is a family of cones, actually produced in laboratories, whose dipole moments are significant and scale linearly with cone length,” Yakobson said.

Carbon nanotubes, seamless cylinders of graphene, do not display a total dipole moment, he said. While not zero, the vector-induced moments cancel each other out.

That’s not so with a cone, in which the balance of positive and negative charges differ from one atom to the next, due to slightly different stresses on the bonds as the diameter changes. The researchers noted atoms along the edge also contribute electrically, but analyzing two cones docked edge-to-edge allowed them to cancel out, simplifying the calculations.

Yakobson sees potential uses for the newly found characteristic. “One possibly far-reaching characteristic is in the voltage drop across a curved sheet,” he said. “It can permit one to locally vary the work function and to engineer the band-structure stacking in bilayers or multiple layers by their bending. It may also allow the creation of partitions and cavities with varying electrochemical potential, more ‘acidic’ or ‘basic,’ depending on the curvature in the 3-D carbon architecture.”

Wearable electronics is one of the consumer market’s hottest topics. Indeed, giants like Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, and Huawei are now competing for a slice of a very promising pie. Under this context, Yole Développement (Yole) releases a technology & market analysis entitled Sensors for Wearable Electronics & Mobile Healthcare. According to this analysis, the wearable industry will reach 295 million units by 2020, with a market value of US$90B. According to Yole’s report, three markets will drive this impressive growth: consumer, healthcare, and industrial.

Sensors for Wearable Electronics & Mobile Healthcare report is a comprehensive analysis providing a deep understanding of the wearable landscape, applications and market drivers. With this new technology and market analysis, Yole proposes an overview of the sensors portfolio for the wearable markets including inertial, pressure, biosensor, environmental. This report also presents a detailed technology and applications roadmap.

“Wearable technology is expected to be part of the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution, bringing useful information directly to the user in a more natural and friendly way than with traditional electronic devices,” commented Guillaume Girardin, Technology & Market Analyst, MEMS & Sensors at Yole.

Yole expects the consumer market, which is mostly comprised of fitness bands and smart watches to grow faster than the other two. The healthcare market, which covers devices like hearing aids, blood pressure monitors, and back monitor sensors, is expected to grow at a lower rate, since this market has already been growing for many years. Regarding the industrial market, Yole expected slow, steady growth through 2019, with a significant uptick commencing in 2020.

Until recently, wearable electronics were often associated with the healthcare market – typically, bulky medical devices with only a few features and not optimized for “customer-friendly” usage. Often times, these devices including hearing aids and blood pressure monitors, perform a single task and are solely dedicated to patient monitoring and/or well-being.

“They are not “smart devices.” Indeed their only mission is to accurately complete a single task. At Yole, we believe that a large part of the healthcare market will evolve in association with the consumer market, eventually blurring the lines between healthcare and consumer devices,” said Dr. Benjamin Roussel, Activity Leader, Medical Technology at Yole.

And Yole’s report details: in fact, the healthcare market will slowly merge with the consumer one, resulting in personalized medicine that involves self-monitoring of one’s health with smart and reliable devices. However, these kind of devices, which require a highly accurate, highly reliable tracking of biological signs in a non-invasive fashion, are not expected for another few years.

From a technology point of view, the “More than Moore” strategy consulting and market research company, Yole, analyses in this new report, the impact on the MEMS industry. Indeed, the MEMS sensors industry has acquired from the smartphone market a strong experience in inertial sensors, microphones, and pressure or environmental sensors.

Based on this experience, the MEMS players have pushed the boundaries of performance and size. Sensors are now small enough, reliable enough, and accurate enough to be included in a pocket-sized device of only 9cm3, while delivering a performance comparable to a smartphone from 2013! These sensors are the ones that wearable devices identified by Yole’s analysts and listed in this new report, until 2018.
The integration of biosensors (HRM, sweat sensor, skin temperature) is more difficult due to lack of experience, and technical challenges. Moreover, battery limitation is pushing the industry towards more optimization, even on the hardware side, through either packaging innovation or new designs with lower power consumption. Software is another area that’s acquiring value, with sensor fusion creating smarter sensors. Such improvements have led to sublime new features like context awareness or “always-on” sensors, which has increased device intelligence.

“All these improvements will lead the global sensors market for wearable from 112 million units in 2014, to 835 million units by 2020, which is proof that this market is still in its infancy”, confirms Guillaume Girardin from Yole.

The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards “the Internet of things” — the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.

Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes — or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge.

Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it, even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous experimental ultralow-power converters had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.

Moreover, the researchers’ chip achieves those efficiency improvements while assuming additional responsibilities. Where its predecessors could use a solar cell to either charge a battery or directly power a device, this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.

All of those operations also share a single inductor — the chip’s main electrical component — which saves on circuit board space but increases the circuit complexity even further. Nonetheless, the chip’s power consumption remains low.

“We still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,” says Dina Reda El-Damak, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. “We need to regulate the input to extract the maximum power, and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best. And we want to do it without compromising the performance, at very limited input power levels — 10 nanowatts to 1 microwatt — for the Internet of things.”

Ups and downs

The circuit’s chief function is to regulate the voltages between the solar cell, the battery, and the device the cell is powering. If the battery operates for too long at a voltage that’s either too high or too low, for instance, its chemical reactants break down, and it loses the ability to hold a charge.

To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering, use an inductor, which is a wire wound into a coil. When a current passes through an inductor, it generates a magnetic field, which in turn resists any change in the current.

Throwing switches in the inductor’s path causes it to alternately charge and discharge, so that the current flowing through it continuously ramps up and then drops back down to zero. Keeping a lid on the current improves the circuit’s efficiency, since the rate at which it dissipates energy as heat is proportional to the square of the current.

Once the current drops to zero, however, the switches in the inductor’s path need to be thrown immediately; otherwise, current could begin to flow through the circuit in the wrong direction, which would drastically diminish its efficiency. The complication is that the rate at which the current rises and falls depends on the voltage generated by the solar cell, which is highly variable. So the timing of the switch throws has to vary, too.

Electric hourglass

To control the switches’ timing, El-Damak and Chandrakasan use an electrical component called a capacitor, which can store electrical charge. The higher the current, the more rapidly the capacitor fills. When it’s full, the circuit stops charging the inductor.

The rate at which the current drops off, however, depends on the output voltage, whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip. Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance. El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes. As the current drops, it charges a subset of those capacitors, whose selection is determined by the solar cell’s voltage. Once again, when the capacitor fills, the switches in the inductor’s path are flipped.

Imec and Holst Centre have developed a small NO2 sensor featuring a low power consumption in the mW range. The sensors have a low detection limit for NO2 (<10 ppb) and a fast response time. They are particularly well suited for air quality monitoring and serve as a solution to the increased demand for accurate local air quality monitoring for indoor and outdoor environments. The sensors are being tested in real-life situations, as part of an environmental monitoring platform.

While wearable technology that measures body parameters has become increasingly popular in recent years, the Intuitive Internet of Things (I2oT) is next on the horizon: connecting everybody and everything everywhere with data stored in the cloud, turning the massive amount of data in information to make the right decisions, to take the right actions exactly as we need or want. The I2oT is expected to manage the sustainability, complexity and safety of our world. It will increase our comfort and wellbeing in many ways.

Health issues resulting from poor air quality are a growing concern for consumers and accurate monitoring is becoming more and more in demand, for both outdoor and indoor environments.

Air quality is typically measured on just a few distinct locations per city, with specialized equipment. Many current gas sensors are large in size, have high power consumption and are too cost prohibitive to be implemented on a large scale for I2oT applications. Imec and Holst Centre have developed small, simple, low power and high quality autonomous sensors that wirelessly communicate with the environment and the cloud.

Imec and Holst Centre’s NO2 sensors were integrated in the Aireas air quality network, a multiple sensor network in the city center of Eindhoven (the Netherlands). The purpose was to test -in actual outdoor conditions and long term- the stability of the sensors, and benchmark them against established reference sensors. The sensors are operational since early May 2015 and contribute with valuable outdoor sensor data since then. During traffic rush hours, the sensors detect a significant increase of NO2 concentration up to the health safety limits.

Imec and Holst Centre are currently deploying a similar sensor network inside the Holst Centre building in Eindhoven to test the sensors for indoor air quality monitoring. This environmental monitoring platform today includes it proprietary NO2 sensor and commercial sensors for temperature, relative humidity and CO2. The measured levels can be monitored live, over the internet. In a next step, proprietary low-cost low-power sensors will be added for CO2, VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), Ozone, and particle matter.

The generated sensor data are transferred to the cloud, stored in a database and immediately available on (mobile) applications, explained Kathleen Philips, director of imec’s perceptive systems for the intuitive internet of things R&D program.

“Data fusion methodology and advanced algorithms enable us to combine data from different sensors such as temperature, several gasses, humidity, human presence detection and to derive contextual knowledge. This information contributes to a correct interpretation of the situation and helps us to take adequate actions to solve the problem. In this way, we have developed a context-aware intuitive sensing system.”

Companies interested in early application validation and development for distributed IoT networks and/or in the innovative technology and circuits to realize them are invited to become a partner in our R&D program. IP can also be licensed.

Photo: NO2 sensor + network hardware for wireless sensor network

Photo: NO2 sensor + network hardware for wireless sensor network

By Yann Guillou, Business Development Manager, SEMI Europe

Based on a need expressed by MEMS industry actors and with their strong support, SEMI has chosen to transform its MEMS Networking Tech Seminar and the MEMS Industry Forum of SEMICON Europa into a much larger, combined conference/exhibition event called the European MEMS Summit, giving actors in MEMS a worthy stage to showcase and talk about technology, business and applications. The first edition of this Summit will take place on September 17-18, 2015 in Milan, Italy and its theme will be “Sensing the Planet, MEMS for Life.”

With a stellar lineup of speakers, SEMI is hoping to cover the spectrum of issues pressing the MEMS industry today. The two-day program will be broken up into five segments, one dealing with the market and business, another with MEMS technology and three sessions appealing to the application of MEMS technology in consumer goods and wearables, the automotive industry and the Internet of Things.

Keynote speakers will include high-level representatives of MEMS giants Bosch Sensortec and STMicroelectronics as well as the largest MEMS fabless, InvenSense, and the largest IC foundry, TSMC. Be ready to hear “Smart” “Things” about “Sensors” and “MEMS” during their presentations titled:

  • Smart Systems for IoT, STMicroelectronics
  • Building Smart Sensors for a Connected World, TSMC
  • Internet of Sensors, InvenSense
  • MEMS Sensors: Enabler for the IOT, Bosch Sensortec

Attendees will leave the Summit with a better understanding of the evolution of MEMS in the marketplace and of the technological advances in MEMS and sensors.

MEMS foundries such as X-FAB and Tronics Microsystems will share their perspectives about the new challenges facing the industry and business opportunities. Focusing on the dynamics in China, SITRI will explain why it is critical to build a domestic MEMS business and will invite companies to revisit the Chinese market as a strategic element in their global business strategy.

Technology-wise, Yole Developpement will inform attendees about what to expect in the near future and how MEMS are contributing to sensing our world. Continuing with a technology focus, LETI will present the key emerging enabling technologies for MEMS they are developing. Focusing on thin film PZT materials, STMicroelectronics will explain how promising these materials are for actuators, opening a complete new field of applications. Covering packaging, ASE will address the integration aspect with flexible integration solutions enabling cost effecting HVM solutions.

The application sessions will give attendees an in-depth view of the new realm of opportunities open to those who develop MEMS technology. ARM will explain their strategy for IoT. Sensirion will describe the key success factors, addressing for instance the monolithic integration to enhance the miniaturization of the sensors. ams AG will present brand-new achievements in environmental sensor products while Infineon will talk about innovation in sensors for consumer products. IHS will highlight the changes in the automotive MEMS market and supplier landscape. Freescale and a few other companies will present their perspectives on this changing automotive landscape.

In addition, the event will present attendees with a chance to network in a dynamic and professional setting tailored to executives and engineers working in and for the MEMS industry. Milan will definitively be the city to visit in 2015 with the European MEMS Summit and the Universal Exposition taking place in the capital of Lombardi.

Rudolph Technologies, Inc. announced today that the MEMS company, Robert Bosch GmbH, has selected Rudolph to supply several different configurations of its F30 Inspection System for various steps in the front- and back-end fabrication processes of micro electrical mechanical systems (MEMS) devices. This win represents increasing business with tools beginning to ship in the second quarter 2015.

“We are thrilled that Bosch selected Rudolph’s inspection solutions for a variety of critical consumer goods and automotive applications,” said Mike Goodrich, vice president and general manager of Rudolph’s Inspection Business Unit. “The configurability of one base tool paired with a variety of high volume manufacturing (HVM)-proven handling options provides Bosch with the flexibility to apply these tools across numerous applications, improving overall tool utilization. Bosch’s challenge was handling the wide variety of substrates used in complex MEMS processes and we were able to meet their needs, providing handling solutions for frameless, ultrathin, film-frame and thicker non-traditional substrates.”

The MEMS industry is expanding, according to Yole Développement, and Bosch has experienced noteworthy growth in the past years. Zero defects is critical for the MEMS application of automotive sensors. The F30 system’s high speed and high sensitivity give the ability to free up expensive micro tools and focus on throughput and sampling inspection.

“A critical deciding factor for Bosch was the fact that Rudolph goes beyond traditional inspection by not only detecting defects but automatically classifying data so customers can quickly eliminate the source of the defect,” Goodrich added. “Our integrated software solutions will help Bosch meet the stringent automotive quality standards by enabling full characterization of the inspection data, resulting in high productivity and demonstrable quality.”

“It is rewarding to see that our customers value the R&D investments we made to elevate the value of our inspection solutions,” said Mike Plisinski, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Rudolph. “We see an increased demand for more intelligent process control solutions as pressure on quality and time-to-market continue to increase for our customers.”

Related news:

2014 top MEMS players ranking: Rising of the first MEMS titan

Growing in maturity, the MEMS industry gets its second wind

National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers and their colleagues have developed a “placenta-on-a-chip” to study the inner workings of the human placenta and its role in pregnancy. The device was designed to imitate, on a micro-level, the structure and function of the placenta and model the transfer of nutrients from mother to fetus. This prototype is one of the latest in a series of organ-on-a-chip technologies developed to accelerate biomedical advances.

The study, published online in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, was conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the University of Pennsylvania, Wayne State University/Detroit Medical Center, Seoul National University and Asan Medical Center in South Korea.

“We believe that this technology may be used to address questions that are difficult to answer with current placenta model systems and help enable research on pregnancy and its complications,” said Roberto Romero, M.D., chief of the NICHD’s Perinatology Research Branch and one of the study authors.

The placenta is a temporary organ that develops in pregnancy and is the major interface between mother and fetus. Among its many functions is to serve as a “crossing guard” for substances traveling between mother and fetus. The placenta helps nutrients and oxygen move to the fetus and helps waste products move away. At the same time, the placenta tries to stop harmful environmental exposures, like bacteria, viruses and certain medications, from reaching the fetus. When the placenta doesn’t function correctly, the health of both mom and baby suffers.

Researchers are trying to learn how the placenta manages all this traffic, transporting some substances and blocking others. This knowledge may one day help clinicians better assess placental health and ultimately improve pregnancy outcomes.

However, studying the placenta in humans is challenging: it is time-consuming, subject to a great deal of variability and potentially risky for the fetus. For those reasons, previous studies on placental transport have relied largely on animal models and on laboratory-grown human cells. These methods have yielded helpful information, but are limited as to how well they can mimic physiological processes in humans.

The researchers created the placenta-on-a-chip technology to address these challenges, using human cells in a structure that more closely resembles the placenta’s maternal-fetal barrier. The device consists of a semi-permeable membrane between two tiny chambers, one filled with maternal cells derived from a delivered placenta and the other filled with fetal cells derived from an umbilical cord.

After designing the structure of the model, the researchers tested its function by evaluating the transfer of glucose (a substance made by the body when converting carbohydrates to energy) from the maternal compartment to the fetal compartment. The successful transfer of glucose in the device mirrored what occurs in the body.

“The chip may allow us to do experiments more efficiently and at a lower cost than animal studies,” said Dr. Romero. “With further improvements, we hope this technology may lead to better understanding of normal placental processes and placental disorders.”

Related news: 

New ‘lab-on-a-chip’ could revolutionize early diagnosis of cancer

Single chip device to provide real-time 3-D images from inside the heart and blood vessels

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created stretchable, transparent conductors that work because of the structures’ “nano-accordion” design. The conductors could be used in a wide variety of applications, such as flexible electronics, stretchable displays or wearable sensors.

“There are no conductive, transparent and stretchable materials in nature, so we had to create one,” says Abhijeet Bagal, a Ph.D. student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work.

“Our technique uses geometry to stretch brittle materials, which is inspired by springs that we see in everyday life,” Bagal says. “The only thing different is that we made it much smaller.”

The researchers begin by creating a three-dimensional polymer template on a silicon substrate. The template is shaped like a series of identical, evenly spaced rectangles. The template is coated with a layer of aluminum-doped zinc oxide, which is the conducting material, and an elastic polymer is applied to the zinc oxide. The researchers then flip the whole thing over and remove the silicon and the template.

What’s left behind is a series of symmetrical, zinc oxide ridges on an elastic substrate. Because both zinc oxide and the polymer are clear, the structure is transparent. And it is stretchable because the ridges of zinc oxide allow the structure to expand and contract, like the bellows of an accordion.

“We can also control the thickness of the zinc oxide layer, and have done extensive testing with layers ranging from 30 to 70 nanometers thick,” says Erinn Dandley, a Ph.D. student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of the paper. “This is important because the thickness of the zinc oxide affects the structure’s optical, electrical and mechanical properties.”

The 3-D templates used in the process are precisely engineered, using nanolithography, because the dimensions of each ridge directly affect the structure’s stretchability. The taller each ridge is, the more stretchable the structure. This is because the structure stretches by having the two sides of a ridge bend away from each other at the base – like a person doing a split.

The structure can be stretched repeatedly without breaking. And while there is some loss of conductivity the first time the nano-accordion is stretched, additional stretching does not affect conductivity.

“The most interesting thing for us is that this approach combines engineering with a touch of surface chemistry to precisely control the nano-accordion’s geometry, composition and, ultimately, its overall material properties,” says Chih-Hao Chang, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and corresponding author of the paper. “We’re now working on ways to improve the conductivity of the nano-accordion structures. And at some point we want to find a way to scale up the process.”

The researchers are also experimenting with the technique using other conductive materials to determine their usefulness in creating non-transparent, elastic conductors.

Fairchild, a supplier of high-performance semiconductor solutions, today launched the FIS1100 6-axis MEMS Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), the company’s first MEMS product stemming from its strategic investments in MEMS and motion tracking. The FIS1100 IMU integrates a proprietary AttitudeEngine motion processor with best-in-class 9-axis sensor fusion algorithms to provide designers with an easy to implement, system-level solution for superior user experiences with up to ten times lower processing power consumption in a wide range of motion enabled, battery-powered applications.

Fairchild's FIS1100 Intelligent IMU is an easy-to-implement, system-level motion tracking solution that can reduce processor power consumption by as much as 10x. (Graphic: Business Wire)

Fairchild’s FIS1100 Intelligent IMU is an easy-to-implement, system-level motion tracking solution that can reduce processor power consumption by as much as 10x. (Graphic: Business Wire)

“The launch of Fairchild’s first MEMS product is a key milestone for the company as we take our unique design and manufacturing expertise and apply it towards system-level solutions that go beyond power,” said Fairchild Chairman & CEO Mark Thompson. “The advanced algorithms and deep applications know-how from the Xsens acquisition position us well in enabling our customers to develop advanced motion solutions in diverse, quickly growing segments within markets such as consumer, industrial, and health.”

The FIS1100 IMU, with its built in AttitudeEngine motion processor and XKF3 senor fusion, is a low power, highly accurate system solution that provides customers with the always-on sensor technology required for a range of application such as wearable sensors for sports, fitness, and health; pedestrian navigation; autonomous robots; and virtual and augmented reality.

“Motion tracking in consumer devices has expanded rapidly from game interfaces and smartphones into many new Internet of Moving Things applications,” said Jérémie Bouchaud, director and senior principal analyst, MEMS & Sensors, at IHS. “As designers look to differentiate their products with motion, the availability of an IMU with an integrated motion processor and a complete software solution, accelerates time to market while ensuring the best trade-off between competing goals such as small size, long battery life and motion tracking accuracy.”

The AttitudeEngine processes 6-axis inertial data at a high rate internally and outputs to the host processor at a lower rate matching the application needs, eliminating the necessity for high-frequency interrupts. This allows the system processor to remain in sleep-mode longer, providing consumers longer battery life without any compromises in functionality or accuracy. The bundled XKF3 high-performance 9-axis sensor fusion algorithms combine inertial sensor data from the on-chip gyroscopes and accelerometers and data from an external magnetometer. The sensor fusion also includes background auto calibration that enables excellent performance in terms of accuracy, consistency, and fluidity. When combined with the XKF3 sensor fusion algorithms, the FIS1100 is the world’s first complete consumer inertial measurement unit with orientation (quaternion) specifications, featuring pitch and roll accuracy of ±3° and yaw accuracy of ±5°.

The FIS1100 uses Fairchild’s proprietary MEMS process, designed specifically for inertial sensors. The process features several design elements for optimal performance, size and robustness. These include a 60µm device layer with high-aspect ratio, through silicon via (TSV) interconnects and vertical electrodes, as well as a single die gyroscope and accelerometer with a unique dual vacuum design.