Category Archives: Applications

Renesas Electronics, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the Renesas Synergy Platform, a new, easy-to-use, qualified platform designed to accelerate time to market, reduce total cost of ownership and remove many of the obstacles engineers face as they develop products for the growing Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial markets. The Renesas Synergy Platform achieves this by using an approach to new product design that lets embedded systems engineers start product development at the API level, giving them more time to design innovative and differentiated features.

“Engineering teams used to spend valuable development time writing software ranging from low-level peripheral drivers to complex communication and specialty stacks. This resulted in months of engineering resources spent integrating, testing, and maintaining software that didn’t differentiate the end-product in the market,” said Ali Sebt, Senior Vice President, Renesas Electronics Corporation. “By enabling engineers to start design at the software API level and enjoy a real-time control system without the need to build any baseline functionality, the Renesas Synergy platform accelerates embedded development, inspires innovation and enables differentiation.”

“With Synergy, Renesas has created an embedded design platform that is unique to the industry,” said Vin D’Agostino, Vice President, General Purpose Products Unit, Renesas Electronics America, Inc. “This software-first approach will make developing devices for the IoT, industrial and other markets easier by taking care of the low-level embedded software, real-time event management, secure connectivity, power management, and the robust GUIs needed.”

The Renesas Synergy Platform

The Renesas Synergy Platform integrates qualified software with a new family of MCUs and an ecosystem of tools and support options into one scalable and secure platform. It includes all rights and benefits to enable rich software development for an unlimited number of end products. There is no need to purchase a third-party commercial RTOS, communication stacks (TCP/IP, USB), file systems, graphic user interfaces and their associated development tools – all are included in the Renesas Synergy platform. As the Renesas Synergy Platform is a fully integrated product and not a set of separately sourced software and hardware components, Renesas provides technical support and licensing for the platform. This reduces the cost and time overhead required to manage relationships with different hardware and software component manufacturers.

Key elements of Renesas Synergy Platform include:

Renesas Synergy Software Package

The Renesas Synergy Platform uses qualified embedded software, tested to commercial standards with ensured compatibility across all Renesas Synergy MCUs. The Renesas Synergy Software Package (SSP) includes Express Logic’s X-Ware. X-Ware includes the premier ThreadX real time operating system (RTOS) plus X-Ware middleware NetX and NetX DUO IPV4 and IPv4/IPV6 TCP/IP stacks respectively, USBX USB Host/Device/OTG protocol stack, FileX® MS-DOS compatible file system and GUIX graphics runtime library. These are bundled in the Renesas application framework that is completely optimized for use with Renesas Synergy MCUs and compliant to the IEC/ISO/IEEE-12207 Software Life Cycle Process standard. Sold, maintained, and directly supported by Renesas, the software is guaranteed by Renesas to operate as per a published specification.

Renesas Synergy Microcontrollers

Within the Renesas Synergy Platform, there is a new, scalable MCU family that spans a wide spectrum of performance, power usage, safety, security, cryptography, connectivity, and graphics capabilities. The family provides customers a variety of choices to meet their requirements for IoT designs ranging from low-end, battery-powered products to complex communication and user interface hubs.

Renesas Synergy Tools, Kits, Solutions

The Renesas Synergy Platform’s Eclipse-based integrated solution development environment (ISDE) is available with C compilers from GNU and IAR Systems. Also available are Express Logic’s Windows based GUIX Studio graphic user interface prototyping tool and TraceX real-time event graphical analysis tool. Customers can begin full development with the purchase of any one of many low-cost Development or Starter Kits available for each of the Synergy MCU series. Renesas will also offer a number of Renesas Synergy Product Example kits, each one an example of an actual commercial product. Customers can leverage this information to modify the Product Examples to fit the needs of their own similar end products.

Renesas Synergy Gallery

Renesas recognizes the widely varied needs of product developers in the IoT space and their desire for plug-and-play add-on software components to reduce development time. Renesas satisfies this need with the Renesas Synergy Gallery, an online selection of quality software products from third-party software vendors that augment the Renesas Synergy Software Package. Customers may browse and download Renesas Synergy Software Package-compliant software for functions and features such as specialized communication stacks, control algorithms, and security services.

Renesas Synergy Support

All components of the Renesas Synergy platform are supported directly by Renesas, giving customers a single point of contact for integrated support spanning software, Renesas Synergy MCUs and hardware solutions. This unified support structure eliminates the struggle customers often encounter when trying to get hardware and software vendors to take ownership of a technical problem. Customers will not need to purchase service or maintenance contracts. Renesas warrantees the specification, provides regular feature upgrades and addresses all product questions through our global sales support organization.

Phase change random access memory (PRAM) is one of the strongest candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory for flexible and wearable electronics. In order to be used as a core memory for flexible devices, the most important issue is reducing high operating current. The effective solution is to decrease cell size in sub-micron region as in commercialized conventional PRAM. However, the scaling to nano-dimension on flexible substrates is extremely difficult due to soft nature and photolithographic limits on plastics, thus practical flexible PRAM has not been realized yet.

Low-power nonvolatile PRAM for flexible and wearable memories enabled by (a) self-assembled BCP silica nanostructures and (b) self-structured conductive filament nanoheater. CREDIT: KAIST

Low-power nonvolatile PRAM for flexible and wearable memories enabled by (a) self-assembled BCP silica nanostructures and (b) self-structured conductive filament nanoheater.
CREDIT: KAIST

Recently, a team led by Professors Keon Jae Lee and Yeon Sik Jung of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed the first flexible PRAM enabled by self-assembled block copolymer (BCP) silica nanostructures with an ultralow current operation (below one quarter of conventional PRAM without BCP) on plastic substrates. BCP is the mixture of two different polymer materials, which can easily create self-ordered arrays of sub-20nm features through simple spin-coating and plasma treatments. BCP silica nanostructures successfully lowered the contact area by localizing the volume change of phase-change materials and thus resulted in significant power reduction. Furthermore, the ultrathin silicon-based diodes were integrated with phase-change memories (PCM) to suppress the inter-cell interference, which demonstrated random access capability for flexible and wearable electronics. Their work was published in the March issue of ACS Nano: “Flexible One Diode-One Phase Change Memory Array Enabled by Block Copolymer Self-Assembly.”

Another way to achieve ultralow-powered PRAM is to utilize self-structured conductive filaments (CF) instead of the resistor-type conventional heater. The self-structured CF nanoheater originated from unipolar memristor can generate strong heat toward phase-change materials due to high current density through the nanofilament. This ground-breaking methodology shows that sub-10nm filament heater, without using expensive and non-compatible nanolithography, achieved nanoscale switching volume of phase change materials, resulted in the PCM writing current of below 20 uA, the lowest value among top-down PCM devices. This achievement was published in the June online issue of ACS Nano “Self-Structured Conductive Filament Nanoheater for Chalcogenide Phase Transition.” In addition, due to self-structured low-power technology compatible to plastics, the research team has recently succeeded in fabricating a flexible PRAM on wearable substrates.

Professor Lee said, “The demonstration of low power PRAM on plastics is one of the most important issues for next-generation wearable and flexible non-volatile memory. Our innovative and simple methodology represents the strong potential for commercializing flexible PRAM.”

In addition, he wrote a review paper regarding the nanotechnology-based electronic devices in the June online issue of Advanced Materials entitled “Performance Enhancement of Electronic and Energy Devices via Block Copolymer Self-Assembly.”

A simple way to turn carbon nanotubes into valuable graphene nanoribbons may be to grind them, according to research led by Rice University.

The trick, said Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan, is to mix two types of chemically modified nanotubes. When they come into contact during grinding, they react and unzip, a process that until now has depended largely on reactions in harsh chemical solutions.

The research by Ajayan and his international collaborators appears in Nature Communications.

To be clear, Ajayan said, the new process is still a chemical reaction that depends on molecules purposely attached to the nanotubes, a process called functionalization. The most interesting part to the researchers is that a process as simple as grinding could deliver strong chemical coupling between solid nanostructures and produce novel forms of nanostructured products with specific properties.

“Chemical reactions can easily be done in solutions, but this work is entirely solid state,” he said. “Our question is this: If we can use nanotubes as templates, functionalize them and get reactions under the right conditions, what kinds of things can we make with a large number of possible nanostructures and chemical functional groups?”

The process should enable many new chemical reactions and products, said Mohamad Kabbani, a graduate student at Rice and lead author of the paper. “Using different functionalities in different nanoscale systems could revolutionize nanomaterials development,” he said.

Highly conductive graphene nanoribbons, thousands of times smaller than a human hair, are finding their way into the marketplace in composite materials. The nanoribbons boost the materials’ electronic properties and/or strength.

“Controlling such structures by mechano-chemical transformation will be the key to find new applications,” said co-author Thalappil Pradeep, a professor of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Chennai. “Soft chemistry of this kind can happen in many conditions, contributing to better understanding of materials processing.”

In their tests, the researchers prepared two batches of multi-walled carbon nanotubes, one with carboxyl groups and the other with hydroxyl groups attached. When ground together for up to 20 minutes with a mortar and pestle, the chemical additives reacted with each other, triggering the nanotubes to unzip into nanoribbons, with water as a byproduct.

“That serendipitous observation will lead to further systematic studies of nanotubes reactions in solid state, including ab-initio theoretical models and simulations,” Ajayan said. “This is exciting.”

The experiments were duplicated by participating labs at Rice, at the Indian Institute of Technology and at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. They were performed in standard lab conditions as well as in a vacuum, outside in the open air and at variable humidity, temperatures, times and seasons.

The researchers who carried out the collaboration on three continents still don’t know precisely what’s happening at the nanoscale. “It is an exothermic reaction, so the energy’s enough to break up the nanotubes into ribbons, but the details of the dynamics are difficult to monitor,” Kabbani said. “There’s no way we can grind two nanotubes in a microscope and watch it happen. Not yet, anyway.”

But the results speak for themselves.

“I don’t know why people haven’t explored this idea, that you can control reactions by supporting the reactants on nanostructures,” Ajayan said. “What we’ve done is very crude, but it’s a beginning and a lot of work can follow along these lines.”

MEMSIC announced the launch of its latest addition, the INS380, to its portfolio of Inertial Systems enabled with SmartSensing technology targeted to a broad range of precision motion sensing applications. The portfolio offering consists of Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), Vertical Gyros (VG), Attitude and Heading Reference Systems (AHRS), Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) and Tilt measurement systems in a variety of packages suited for system designers to end equipment manufacturers.

The latest product from MEMSIC, the INS380SA, is a complete inertial navigation system with a built-in 48-channel GPS receiver. The SmartSensing technology enables a turnkey system with better than 0.01 m/s velocity measurement accuracy. The integrated 3-axis magnetometer allows for accurate operation when the GPS signal is lost or when the vehicle comes to a stop.

SmartSensing technology provides users with sensor fusion and performance in critical motion sensing applications. SmartSensing combines enhanced and patented Kalman-based algorithm with proprietary temperature, motion and alignment calibration for consistent and high accuracy performance over a wide range of extreme operating conditions. Applications include unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, platform stabilization, avionics, precision agriculture, construction, and more.

“With over 400 man-years of design and development experience and knowledge in designing IMUs and sophisticated MEMS sensor solutions,” said Masoud Beheshti, VP and General Manager of MEMSIC’s system division. “MEMSIC is in a very unique position in the industry to help enable designer’s unprecedented size, accuracy and cost, with our SmartSensing technology.”

Europe’s leading nanoelectronics institutes, Tyndall National Institute in Ireland, CEA-Leti in France and imec in Belgium, have entered a €4.7 million collaborative open-access project called ASCENT (Access to European Nanoelectronics Network). The project will mobilize European research capabilities at an unprecedented level and create a unique research infrastructure that will elevate Europe’s nanoelectronics R&D and manufacturing community.

ASCENT opens the doors to the world’s most advanced nanoelectronics infrastructures in Europe. Tyndall National Institute in Ireland, CEA-Leti in France and imec in Belgium, leading European nanoelectronics institutes, have entered into a collaborative open-access project called ASCENT (Access to European Nanoelectronics Network), to mobilise European research capabilities like never before.

The €4.7 million project will make the unique research infrastructure of three of Europe’s premier research centres available to the nanoelectronics modelling-and-characterisation research community.

ASCENT will share best scientific and technological practices, form a knowledge-innovation hub, train new researchers in advanced methodologies and establish a first-class research network of advanced technology designers, modellers and manufacturers in Europe. All this will strengthen Europe’s knowledge in the integral area of nanoelectronics research.

The three partners will provide researchers access to advanced device data, test chips and characterisation equipment.  This access programme will enable the research community to explore exciting new developments in industry and meet the challenges created in an ever-evolving and demanding digital world.

The partners’ respective facilities are truly world-class, representing over €2 billion of combined research infrastructure with unique credentials in advanced semiconductor processing, nanofabrication, heterogeneous and 3D integration, electrical characterisation and atomistic and TCAD modelling. This is the first time that access to these devices and test structures will become available anywhere in the world.

The project will engage industry directly through an ‘Industry Innovation Committee’ and will feed back the results of the open research to device manufacturers, giving them crucial information to improve the next generation of electronic devices.

Speaking on behalf of project coordinator, Tyndall National Institute, CEO Dr. Kieran Drain said: “We are delighted to coordinate the ASCENT programme and to be partners with world-leading institutes CEA-Leti and imec. Tyndall has a great track record in running successful collaborative open-access programmes, delivering real economic and societal impact. ASCENT has the capacity to change the paradigm of European research through unprecedented access to cutting-edge technologies. We are confident that ASCENT will ensure that Europe remains at the forefront of global nanoelectronics development.”

“The ASCENT project is an efficient, strategic way to open the complementary infrastructure and expertise of Tyndall, Leti and imec to a broad range of researchers from Europe’s nanoelectronics modelling-and-characterisation sectors,” said Leti CEO Marie–Noëlle Semeria. “Collaborative projects like this, that bring together diverse, dedicated and talented people, have synergistic affects that benefit everyone involved, while addressing pressing technological challenges.”

“In the frame of the ASCENT project, three of Europe’s leading research institutes – Tyndall, imec and Leti – join forces in supporting the EU research and academic community, SMEs and industry by providing access to test structures and electrical data of state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies,” stated Luc Van den hove, CEO of imec. “This will enable them to explore exciting new opportunities in the ‘More Moore’ as well as the ‘More than Moore’ domains, and will allow them to participate and compete effectively on the global stage for the development of advanced nano-electronics.”

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 65384.

CEA-Leti is hosting its seventh workshop on innovative memory technologies following the 17th annual LetiDays Grenoble, June 24-25, on the Minatec campus.

Topics at LetiWorkshop Memory on June 26 will range from short-term to long-term memory solutions, including:

  • Flash memories for embedded or stand-alone applications
  • Resistive memory technologies, such as phase-change memories, conductive bridging memories, oxide-based memories
  • Innovative ideas covering non-volatile logics and bio-inspired architectures

The workshop will feature presentations by industrial and academic researchers with two main sessions in the morning. The first one, “NVM vision on standalone and embedded markets”, includes presentations by STMicroelectronics, Silicon Storage Technology and HGST, and the second one, “Emerging memory opportunities,” includes talks from Yole, IBM and Micron.

The afternoon is dedicated to niche applications and outlooks such as “NVM in disruptive applications”. This session will include talks on security applications, radiation effects and FPGA. The final session, “Memories for biomedical & neuromorphic applications”, features talks from Clinatec and the University of Milan.

Invited speakers are:

– STMicroelectronics, Delphine Maury

– SST, Nhan Do

– HGST, Jeff Childress

– CEA-Leti, Fabien Clermidy

– Yole Developpement, Yann De Charentenay

– IBM, Milos Stanisavljevic

– CEA-Leti, Gabriel Molas

– Micron, Innocenzo Tortorelli

 

 –      CEA-Tech, Romain Wacquez

–      University of Padova, Alessandro Paccagnella

–      CEA-Leti, Boubacar Traore

–      CEA-Leti, Jeremy Guy

–      CEA-Clinatec, François Berger

–      University of Milan, Daniele Ielmini

–      CEA-Leti, Daniele Garbin

 

Visit LetiWorkshop Memory for registration and other information.

Two young researchers working at the MIPT Laboratory of Nanooptics and Plasmonics, Dmitry Fedyanin and Yury Stebunov, have developed an ultracompact highly sensitive nanomechanical sensor for analyzing the chemical composition of substances and detecting biological objects, such as viral disease markers, which appear when the immune system responds to incurable or hard-to-cure diseases, including HIV, hepatitis, herpes, and many others. The sensor will enable doctors to identify tumor markers, whose presence in the body signals the emergence and growth of cancerous tumors.

This image shows the principle of the sensor. CREDIT: Dmitry Fedyanin and Yury Stebunov

This image shows the principle of the sensor.
CREDIT: Dmitry Fedyanin and Yury Stebunov

The sensitivity of the new device is best characterized by one key feature: according to its developers, the sensor can track changes of just a few kilodaltons in the mass of a cantilever in real time. One Dalton is roughly the mass of a proton or neutron, and several thousand Daltons are the mass of individual proteins and DNA molecules. So the new optical sensor will allow for diagnosing diseases long before they can be detected by any other method, which will pave the way for a new-generation of diagnostics.

The device, described in an article published in the journal Scientific Reports, is an optical or, more precisely, optomechanical chip. “We’ve been following the progress made in the development of micro- and nanomechanical biosensors for quite a while now and can say that no one has been able to introduce a simple and scalable technology for parallel monitoring that would be ready to use outside a laboratory. So our goal was not only to achieve the high sensitivity of the sensor and make it compact, but also make it scalabile and compatibile with standard microelectronics technologies,” the researchers said.

Unlike similar devices, the new sensor has no complex junctions and can be produced through a standard CMOS process technology used in microelectronics. The sensor doesn’t have a single circuit, and its design is very simple. It consists of two parts: a photonic (or plasmonic) nanowave guide to control the optical signal, and a cantilever hanging over the waveguide.

A cantilever, or beam, is a long and thin strip of microscopic dimensions (5 micrometers long, 1 micrometer wide and 90 nanometers thick), connected tightly to a chip. To get an idea how it works, imagine you press one end of a ruler tightly to the edge of a table and allow the other end to hang freely in the air. If you touch the latter with your other hand and then take your hand away, the ruler will start making mechanical oscillations at a certain frequency. That’s how the cantilever works. The difference between the oscillations of the ruler and the cantilever is only the frequency, which depends on the materials and geometry: while the ruler oscillates at several tens of hertz, the frequency of the cantilever’s oscillations is measured in megahertz. In other words, it makes a few million oscillations per second!

There are two optical signals going through the waveguide during oscillations: the first one sets the cantilever in motion, and the second one allows for reading the signal containing information about the movement. The inhomogeneous electromagnetic field of the control signal’s optical mode transmits a dipole moment to the cantilever, impacting the dipole at the same time so that the cantilever starts to oscillate.

The sinusoidally modulated control signal makes the cantilever oscillate at an amplitude of up to 20 nanometers. The oscillations determine the parameters of the second signal, the output power of which depends on the cantilever’s position.

The highly localized optical modes of nanowave guides, which create a strong electric field intensity gradient, are key to inducing cantilever oscillations. Because the changes of the electromagnetic field in such systems are measured in tens of nanometers, researchers use the term “nanophotonics” – so the prefix “nano” is not used here just as a fad! Without the nanoscale waveguide and the cantilever, the chip simply wouldn’t work. Abig cantilever cannot be made to oscillate by freely propagating light, and the effects of chemical changes to its surface on the oscillation frequency would be less noticeable..

Cantilever oscillations make it possible to determine the chemical composition of the environment in which the chip is placed. That’s because the frequency of mechanical vibrations depends not only on the materials’ dimensions and properties, but also on the mass of the oscillatory system, which changes during a chemical reaction between the cantilever and the environment. By placing different reagents on the cantilever, researchers make it react with specific substances or even biological objects. If you place antibodies to certain viruses on the cantilever, it’ll capture the viral particles in the analyzed environment. Oscillations will occur at a lower or higher amplitude depending on the virus or the layer of chemically reactive substances on the cantilever, and the electromagnetic wave passing through the waveguide will be dispersed by the cantilever differently, which can be seen in the changes of the intensity of the readout signal.

Calculations done by the researchers showed that the new sensor will combine high sensitivity with a comparative ease of production and miniature dimensions, allowing it to be used in all portable devices, such as smartphones, wearable electronics, etc. One chip, several millimeters in size, will be able to accommodate several thousand such sensors, configured to detect different particles or molecules. The price, thanks to the simplicity of the design, will most likely depend on the number of sensors, being much more affordable than its competitors.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have found a way to use tiny diamonds and graphene to give friction the slip, creating a new material combination that demonstrates the rare phenomenon of “superlubricity.”

Led by nanoscientist Ani Sumant of Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) and Argonne Distinguished Fellow Ali Erdemir of Argonne’s Energy Systems Division, the five-person Argonne team combined diamond nanoparticles, small patches of graphene – a two-dimensional single-sheet form of pure carbon – and a diamond-like carbon material to create superlubricity, a highly-desirable property in which friction drops to near zero.

According to Erdemir, as the graphene patches and diamond particles rub up against a large diamond-like carbon surface, the graphene rolls itself around the diamond particle, creating something that looks like a ball bearing on the nanoscopic level. “The interaction between the graphene and the diamond-like carbon is essential for creating the ‘superlubricity’ effect,” he said. “The two materials depend on each other.”

At the atomic level, friction occurs when atoms in materials that slide against each other become “locked in state,” which requires additional energy to overcome. “You can think of it as like trying to slide two egg cartons against each other bottom-to-bottom,” said Diana Berman, a postdoctoral researcher at the CNM and an author of the study. “There are times at which the positioning of the gaps between the eggs – or in our case, the atoms – causes an entanglement between the materials that prevents easy sliding.”

By creating the graphene-encapsulated diamond ball bearings, or “scrolls”, the team found a way to translate the nanoscale superlubricity into a macroscale phenomenon. Because the scrolls change their orientation during the sliding process, enough diamond particles and graphene patches prevent the two surfaces from becoming locked in state. The team used large-scale atomistic computations on the Mira supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to prove that the effect could be seen not merely at the nanoscale but also at the macroscale.

“A scroll can be manipulated and rotated much more easily than a simple sheet of graphene or graphite,” Berman said.

However, the team was puzzled that while superlubricity was maintained in dry conditions, in a humid environment this was not the case. Because this behavior was counterintuitive, the team again turned to atomistic calculations. “We observed that the scroll formation was inhibited in the presence of a water layer, therefore causing higher friction,” explained co-author Argonne computational nanoscientist Subramanian Sankaranarayanan.

While the field of tribology has long been concerned with ways to reduce friction – and thus the energy demands of different mechanical systems – superlubricity has been treated as a tough proposition. “Everyone would dream of being able to achieve superlubricity in a wide range of mechanical systems, but it’s a very difficult goal to achieve,” said Sanket Deshmukh, another CNM postdoctoral researcher on the study.

“The knowledge gained from this study,” Sumant added, “will be crucial in finding ways to reduce friction in everything from engines or turbines to computer hard disks and microelectromechanical systems.”

Suppliers of MEMS-based devices rode a safety sensing wave in 2014 to reach record turnover in automotive applications, according to analysis from IHS, the global source of critical information and insight.

Mandated safety systems such as Electronic Stability Control (ESC) and Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) – which attained full implementation in new vehicles in major automotive markets last year – are currently driving revenues for MEMS sensors. Those players with strong positions in gyroscopes, accelerometers and pressure sensors needed in these systems grew as well, while companies in established areas like high-g accelerometers for frontal airbags and pressure sensors for side airbags also saw success.

Major suppliers of pressure sensors to engines similarly blossomed – for staple functions like manifold absolute air intake and altitude sensing – but also for fast-growing applications like vacuum brake boosting, gasoline direct injection and fuel system vapor pressure sensing.

Bosch was the overall number one MEMS supplier with US$790 million of devices sold last year, close to three times that of its nearest competitor, Sensata (US$268 million). Bosch has a portfolio of MEMS devices covering pressure, flow, accelerometers and gyroscopes, and also has a leading position in more than 10 key applications. The company grew strongly in ESC and roll-over detection applications, and key engine measurements like manifold absolute pressure (MAP) and mass air flow on the air intake, vacuum brake booster pressure sensing and common rail diesel pressure measurement.

Compared to 2013, Sensata jumped to second place in 2014 ahead of Denso and Freescale, largely on strength in both safety and powertrain pressure sensors, but also through its acquisition of Schrader Electronics, which provides Sensata with a leading position among tire pressure-monitoring sensor suppliers.

While Sensata is dominant in TPMS and ESC pressure sensors, it also leads in harsh applications like exhaust gas pressure measurement. Freescale, on the other hand, is second to Bosch in airbag sensors and has made great strides in its supply of pressure sensors for TPMS applications.

Despite good results in 2014, Denso dropped two places compared to its overall second place in 2013, largely as a result of the weakened Yen. Denso excelled in MAP and barometric pressure measurement in 2014, but also ESC pressure and accelerometers. Denso has leadership in MEMS-based air conditioning sensing and pressure sensors for continuous variable transmission systems, and is also a supplier of exhaust pressure sensors to a major European OEM.

Secure in its fifth place, Analog Devices was again well positioned with its high-g accelerometers and gyroscopes in safety sensing, e.g. for airbag and ESC vehicle dynamics systems, respectively.

The next three players in the top 10, in order, Infineon, Murata and Panasonic, likewise have key sensors to offer for safety. Infineon is among the leading suppliers of pressure sensors to TPMS systems, while Murata and Panasonic serve ESC with gyroscope and accelerometers to major Tier Ones.

The top 10 represents 78 percent of the automotive MEMS market volume, which reached $2.6 billion in 2014. By 2021, this market will grow to $3.4 billion, a CAGR of 3.4 percent, given expected growth for four main sensors — pressure, flow, gyroscopes and accelerometers.  In addition, night-vision microbolometers from FLIR and ULIS and humidity sensors from companies like Sensirion and E+E Elektronik for window defogging will also add to the diversity of the mix in 2021.

Auto_MEMS_H1_2015_Graphic

DLP chips from Texas Instruments for advanced infotainment displays will similarly bolster the market further in future. More details can be found in the IHS Technology H1 2015 report on Automotive MEMS.

Read more: 

What’s next for MEMS?

Growing in maturity, the MEMS industry is getting its second wind

Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) and TSMC announce a collaboration to develop a series of advanced IP subsystems for the Internet of Things (IoT) to accelerate time to market and simplify the design process for mutual customers. These IP platforms, complemented by highly optimized reference design flows, bring together the breadth of Imagination’s IP with TSMC’s advanced process technologies from 55nm down to 10nm.

The IoT IP subsystems in development include small, highly-integrated connected solutions for simple sensors which combine an entry-level M-class MIPS CPU with an ultra-low power Ensigma Whisper RPU for low-power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Smart and 6LowPan, as well as OmniShield multi-domain hardware enforced security, and on-chip RAM and flash. The advanced RF and embedded flash capabilities from TSMC enable Imagination to push the boundaries of IoT integration.

At the higher end, highly-integrated and sophisticated audio and vision sensors will be a key component of future mutual customers’ SoCs for a wide range of IoT applications such as smart surveillance, retail analytics and autonomous vehicles. As part of the collaboration, Imagination and TSMC are working together to realize reference IP subsystems that bring together Imagination’s PowerVR multimedia IP, MIPS CPUs, Ensigma RPUs and OmniShield technology to create highly-integrated, highly-intelligent connected audio and vision sensor IP platforms. These IP subsystems will leverage advanced features such as GPU compute, power-managed CPU clusters and on-chip high-bandwidth communications, demonstrating that high-performance local processing and connectivity can be integrated efficiently and cost-effectively.

Tony King-Smith, EVP marketing, Imagination, says: “We have been working with TSMC for more than two years on advanced IP subsystems for IoT and other connected products. Many of our licensees rely on TSMC to provide them with leading-edge, low-power, high-performance silicon foundry capabilities. Through our ongoing collaboration with TSMC, we are focused on creating meaningful solutions that will help our mutual customers quickly create differentiated, secure and highly integrated products.”

Suk Lee, TSMC senior director, Design Infrastructure Marketing Division, says: “In order to simplify our customers’ designs and shorten their time-to-market, TSMC and our ecosystem partners are transitioning from chip-design enablers to subsystem enablers. We are working closely with Imagination, an established IP leader, as part of our new IoT Subsystem Enablement initiative to help companies get their IoT and connected products to market more quickly and easily.”