Category Archives: Applications

New work from Carnegie’s Russell Hemley and Ivan Naumov hones in on the physics underlying the recently discovered fact that some metals stop being metallic under pressure. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters.

Metals are compounds that are capable of conducting the flow of electrons that make up an electric current. Other materials, called insulators, are not capable of conducting an electric current. At low temperatures, all materials can be classified as either insulators or metals.

Insulators can be pushed across the divide from insulator to metal by tuning their surrounding conditions, particularly by placing them under pressure. It was long believed that once such a material was converted into a metal under pressure, it would stay that way forever as the pressure was increased. This idea goes back to the birth of quantum mechanics in the early decades of the last century.

But it was recently discovered that certain groups of metals become insulating under pressure-a remarkable finding that was not previously thought possible.

For example, lithium goes from being a metallic conductor to a somewhat resistant semiconductor under around 790,000 times normal atmospheric pressure (80 gigapascals) and then becomes fully metallic again under around 1.2 million times normal atmospheric pressure (120 gigapascals). Sodium enters an insulating state at pressures of around 1.8 million times normal atmospheric pressure (180 gigapascals). Calcium and nickel are predicted to have similar insulating states before reverting to being metallic.

Hemley and Naumov wanted to determine the unifying physics framework underlying these unexpected metal-to-insulator-to-metal transitions.

“The principles we developed will allow for predictions of when metals will become insulators under pressure, as well as the reverse, the when-insulators-can-become-metals transition,” Naumov said.

The onsets of these transitions can be determined by the positions of electrons within the basic structure of the material. Insulators typically become metallic by a reduction in the spacing between atoms in the material. Hemley and Naumov demonstrated that for a metal to become an insulator, these reduced-spacing overlaps must be organized in a specific kind of asymmetry that was not previously recognized. Under these conditions, electrons localize between the atoms and do not freely flow as they do in the metallic form.

“This is yet another example of how extreme pressure is an important tool for advancing our understanding principles of the nature of materials at a fundamental level. The work will have implications for the search for new energy materials.” Hemley said.

Communication and computer systems are forecast to account for the greatest percentage of IC sales in every geographic region—Americas, Europe, Japan, and Asia-Pacific—this year, according to data released in the 2015 edition of IC Insights’ IC Market Drivers, A Study of Emerging and Major End-Use Applications Fueling Demand for Integrated Circuits. Communications applications are expected to capture just over 41 percent of IC sales in Asia-Pacific and 39 percent of the revenue in the Americas region this year.  Computer applications are forecast to be the largest end-use market in Japan and Europe, accounting for nearly one-third of ICs sales in both regions in 2015 (Figure 1).

Fig. 1

Fig. 1

Consumer systems are forecast to be the third-largest end-use category for ICs in the Americas, Japan, and Asia-Pacific regions in 2015. In Europe, automotive applications are expected to remain the third largest end-use category for ICs this year.

Collectively, communications, computers, and consumer systems are projected to account for 85.7 percent of IC sales in the Americas this year compared to 77.9 percent in Japan and 90.8 percent in Asia-Pacific. Communications, computer, and automotive applications are forecast to represent 82.3 percent of IC sales in Europe in 2015.

For more than three decades, computer applications were the largest market for IC sales but that changed in 2013 when the global communications IC market took over the top spot due to steady strong growth in smartphones and weakening demand for personal computers. Globally, communications systems are forecast to represent 38.1 percent of the $310.5 billion IC market this year compared to 35.2 percent for computers, and 12.2 percent for consumer (Figure 2). IC sales to the automotive market are forecast to represent only about 8 percent of the total IC sales this year but from 2013-2018, this segment is projected to rise by a compound average growth rate (CAGR) of 10.8%, highest among all the end-use applications.

Fig. 2

Fig. 2

IC Market Drivers 2015—A Study of Emerging and Major End-Use Applications Fueling Demand for Integrated Circuits examines the largest, existing system opportunities for ICs and evaluates the potential for new applications that are expected to help fuel the market for ICs.

By Paula Doe, SEMI

In this 50th year anniversary of Moore’s Law, the steady scaling of silicon chips’ cost and performance that has so changed our world over the last half century is now poised to change it even further through the Internet of Things, in ways we can’t yet imagine, suggests Intel VP of IoT Doug Davis, who will give the keynote at SEMICON West (July 14-16) this year.  Powerful sensors, processors, and communications now make it possible to bring more intelligent analysis of the greater context to many industrial decisions for potentially significant returns, which will drive the first round of serious adoption of the IoT. But there is also huge potential for adding microprocessor intelligence to all sorts of everyday objects and connecting them with outside information, to solve all sorts of real problems, from saving energy to saving babies’ lives. “We see a big impact on the chip industry,” says Davis, noting the needs to deal with highly fragmented markets, as well to reduce power, improve connectivity, and find ways to assure security.

The end of the era of custom embedded designs?

The IoT may mean the end of the era of embedded chips, argues Paul Brody, IBM’s former VP of IoT, who moves to a new job this month, one of the speakers in the SEMICON West TechXPOT program on the impact of the IoT on the semiconductor sector.  Originally, custom embedded solutions offered the potential to design just the desired features, at some higher engineering cost, to reduce the total cost of the device as much as possible. Now, however, high volumes of mobile gear and open Android systems have brought the cost of a loaded system on a chip with a dual core processor, a gigabit of DRAM and GPS down to only $10.  “The SoC will become so cheap that people won’t do custom anymore,” says Brody. “They’ll just put an SoC in every doorknob and window frame.  The custom engineering will increasingly be in the software.”

Security of all these connected devices will require re-thinking as well, since securing all the endpoints, down to every light bulb, is essentially impossible, and supposedly trusted parties have turned out not to be so trustworthy after all. “With these SoCs everywhere, the cost of distributed compute power will become zero,” he argues, noting that will drive systems towards more distributed processing.  One option for security then could be a block chain system like that used by Bit Coin, which allows coordination with no central control, and when not all the players are trustworthy. Instead of central coordination, each message is broadcast to all nodes, and approved by the vote of the majority, requiring only that the majority of the points be trustworthy.

While much of the high volume IoT demand may be for relatively standard, low cost chips, the high value opportunity for chip makers may increasingly be in design and engineering services for the expanding universe of customers. “Past waves of growth were driven by computer companies, but as computing goes into everything this time, it will be makers of things like Viking ranges and Herman Miller office furniture who will driving the applications, who will need much more help from their suppliers,” he suggests.

Intel Graphics

Source: Intel, 2015

Adding context to the data from the tool

The semiconductor industry has long been a leader in connecting things in the factory, from early M2M for remote access for service management and improving overall equipment effectiveness, to the increased automation and software management of 300mm manufacturing, points out Jeremy Read, Applied Materials VP of Manufacturing Services, who’ll be speaking in another SEMICON West 2015 program on how the semiconductor sector will use the IoT. But even in today’s highly connected fabs, the connections so far are still limited to linking individual elements for dedicated applications specifically targeting a single end, such as process control, yield improvement, scheduling or dispatching.  These applications, perhaps best described as intermediate between M2M and IoT, have provided huge value, and have seen enormous growth in complexity. “We have seen fabs holding 50 TB of data at the 45nm node, increasing to 140 TB in 20nm manufacturing,” he notes.

Now the full IoT vision is to converge this operational technology (OT) of connected things in the factory with the global enterprise (IT) network, to allow new ways to monitor, search and manage these elements to provide as yet unachievable levels of manufacturing performance. “However, we’ve learned that just throwing powerful computational resources at terabytes of unstructured data is not effective – we need to understand the shared CONTEXT of the tools, the process physics, and the device/design intent to arrive at meaningful and actionable knowledge,” says Read.  He notes that for the next step towards an “Internet-of-semiconductor-manufacturing-things” we will need to develop the means to apply new analytical and optimizing applications to both the data and its full manufacturing context, to achieve truly new kinds of understanding.

With comprehensive data and complete context information it will become possible to transform the service capability in a truly radical fashion – customer engineers can use the power of cloud computation and massive data management to arrive at insights into the precise condition of tools, potentially including the ability to predict failures or changes in processing capability. “This does require customers to allow service providers to come fully equipped into the fab – not locking out all use of such capabilities,” he says. “If we are to realize the full potential of these opportunities, we must first meet these challenges of security and IP protection.”

Besides these programs on the realistic impact of the IoT on the semiconductor manufacturing technology sector, SEMICON West 2015, July 14-16 in San Francisco, will also feature related programs on what’s coming next across MEMS, digital health, embedded nonvolatile memory, flexible/hybrid systems, and connected/autonomous cars.  

MagnaChip Semiconductor Corporation, a Korea-based designer and manufacturer of analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products announced today that it has kicked-off an Internet of Things (IoT) task force and will offer diversified products with ultra-low power technology in anticipation of the fast growing IoT market. Gartner estimates that the processing, sensing and communications segments of the IoT market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.2 percent from $7B in 2013 to $43B by 2020. This rapid growth rate outpaces the rest of the semiconductor industry which is predicted to grow at a rate of 4.6 percent over the same period.

MagnaChip offers a 0.18 micron ultra-low power technology that enables System-on-a-Chip (SoC) applications with low active and low stand-by power consumption. This new process features very low start-up voltage and enables DC-DC Boost Converters to be suitable for IoT applications. Another important technology feature is operational efficiency. This process allows for low electrical current draw, which is suitable for IoT devices such as solar cells, thermoelectric generators, vibration energy harvesters and electromagnetic harvesters.

Based on its already developed 0.18 micron ultra-low power technology, MagnaChip also plans to provide a diversified portfolio within the ultra-low power sector. This includes 0.13 micron ultra-low power EEPROM, Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) and mixed-signal technologies. Ultra-low power technology is a key element for conserving energy usage within IoT devices. IoT applications demand an always on, low-power energy source and long battery life which are requirements that MagnaChip’s ultra-low power technology enables.

MagnaChip also offers 0.18 micron and plans to offer 0.13 micron Silicon on Insulator (SOI) RF-CMOS technologies, which is suitable for use in antenna switching, tuner and Power Amplifier (PA) applications. Switches and tuners are core components of wireless Front-End-Modules (FEMs) for cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity in IoT devices. MagnaChip’s CMOS based FEMs reduce manufacturing cost and time to market while providing competitive performance for multiband and multimode smartphones, tablets and other IoT devices.

Furthermore, MagnaChip’s 0.13 and 0.18 micron BCD technologies support high-voltage (up to 100V) and high-efficiency power ICs such as voltage regulators and converters, Power-over-Ethernet and smart LED Lighting solutions, which are essential power elements in IoT applications. With the combination of power devices with lower Specific On-Resistance (Rsp, defined as drain-source resistance times device area, Rds*A), improved isolation and higher reliability, MagnaChip’s 0.13 and 0.18 micron BCD processes will help our foundry customers to design IoT products with smaller and more power efficient characteristics.

“We believe there is tremendous growth opportunity in the IoT market and our participation is part of our overall strategy to broaden our product portfolio in new markets,” said YJ Kim, MagnaChip’s interim Chief Executive Officer. “MagnaChip’s IoT task force and business consortium with key business partners will reinforce our position as a key manufacturing service provider in the expanding IoT market.”

The key to better cellphones and other rechargeable electronics may be in tiny “sandwiches” made of nanosheets, according to mechanical engineering research from Kansas State University.

Gurpreet Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering, and his research team are improving rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The team has focused on the lithium cycling of molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, sheets, which Singh describes as a “sandwich” of one molybdenum atom between two sulfur atoms.

In the latest research, the team has found that silicon carbonitride-wrapped molybdenum disulfide sheets show improved stability as a battery electrode with little capacity fading.

The findings appear in Nature’s Scientific Reports in the article “Polymer-Derived Ceramic Functionalized MoS2Composite Paper as a Stable Lithium-Ion Battery Electrode.” Other Kansas State University researchers involved include Lamuel David, doctoral student in mechanical engineering, India; Uriel Barrera, senior in mechanical engineering, Olathe; and Romil Bhandavat, 2013 doctoral graduate in mechanical engineering.

In this latest publication, Singh’s team observed that molybdenum disulfide sheets store more than twice as much lithium — or charge — than bulk molybdenum disulfide reported in previous studies. The researchers also found that the high lithium capacity of these sheets does not last long and drops after five charging cycles.

“This kind of behavior is similar to a lithium-sulfur type of battery, which uses sulfur as one of its electrodes,” Singh said. “Sulfur is notoriously famous for forming intermediate polysulfides that dissolve in the organic electrolyte of the battery, which leads to capacity fading. We believe that the capacity drop observed in molybdenum disulfide sheets is also due to loss of sulfur into the electrolyte.”

To reduce the dissolution of sulfur-based products into the electrolyte, the researchers wrapped the molybdenum disulfide sheets with a few layers of a ceramic called silicon carbonitride, or SiCN. The ceramic is a high-temperature, glassy material prepared by heating liquid silicon-based polymers and has much higher chemical resistance toward the liquid electrolyte, Singh said.

“The silicon carbonitride-wrapped molybdenum disulfide sheets show stable cycling of lithium-ions irrespective of whether the battery electrode is on copper foil-traditional method or as a self-supporting flexible paper as in bendable batteries,” Singh said.

After the reactions, the research team also dissembled and observed the cells under the electron microscope, which provided evidence that the silicon carbonitride protected against mechanical and chemical degradation with liquid organic electrolyte.

Singh and his team now want to better understand how the molybdenum disulfide cells might behave in an everyday electronic device — such as a cellphone — that is recharged hundreds of times. The researchers will continue to test the molybdenum disulfide cells during recharging cycles to have more data to analyze and to better understand how to improve rechargeable batteries.

Other research by Singh’s team may help improve high temperature coatings for aerospace and defense. The engineers are developing a coating material to protect electrode materials against harsh conditions, such as turbine blades and metals subjected to intense heat.

The research appears in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. The researchers showed that when silicon carbonitride and boron nitride nanosheets are combined, they have high temperature stability and improved electrical conductivity. Additionally, these silicon carbonitride/boron nitride nanosheets are better battery electrodes, Singh said.

“This was quite surprising because both silicon carbonitride and boron nitride are insulators and have little reversible capacity for lithium-ions,” Singh said. “Further analysis showed that the electrical conductivity improved because of the formation of a percolation network of carbon atoms known as ‘free carbon’ that is present in the silicon carbonitride ceramic phase. This occurs only when boron nitride sheets are added to silicon carbonitride precursor in its liquid polymeric phase before curing is achieved.”

Take a material that is a focus of interest in the quest for advanced solar cells. Discover a “freshman chemistry level” technique for growing that material into high-efficiency, ultra-small lasers. The result, disclosed Monday, April 13 in Nature Materials, is a shortcut to lasers that are extremely efficient and able to create many colors of light.

That makes these tiny lasers suitable for miniature optoelectronics, computers and sensors.

“We are working with a class of fascinating materials called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites that are the focus of attention right now for high-efficiency solar cells that can be made from solution processes,” says Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“While most researchers make these perovskite compounds into thin films for the fabrication of solar cells, we have developed an extremely simple method to grow them into elongated crystals that make extremely promising lasers,” Jin says. The tiny rectangular crystals grown in Jin’s lab are about 10 to 100 millionths of a meter long by about 400 billionths of a meter (nanometers) across. Because their cross-section is measured in nanometers, these crystals are called nanowires.

The new growth technique skips the costly, complicated equipment needed to make conventional lasers, says Jin, an expert on crystal growth and nanomaterial synthesis.

Jin says the nanowires grow in about 20 hours once a glass plate coated with a solid reactant is submerged in a solution of the second reactant. “There’s no heat, no vacuum, no special equipment needed,” says Jin. “They grow in a beaker on the lab bench.”

“The single-crystal perovskite nanowires grown from solutions at room temperature are high quality, almost free of defects, and they have the nice reflective parallel facets that a laser needs,” Jin explains. “Most importantly, according to the conventional measures of lasing quality and efficiency, they are real standouts.”

When tested in the lab of Jin’s collaborator, Xiaoyang Zhu of Columbia University, the lasers were nearly 100 percent efficient. Essentially every photon absorbed produced a photon of laser light. “The advantage of these nanowire lasers is the much higher efficiency, by at least one order of magnitude, over existing ones,” says Zhu.

Lasers are devices that make coherent, pure-color light when stimulated with energy. “Coherent” means the light waves are moving synchronously, with their high and low points occurring at the same place. Coherence and the single-wavelength, pure color give lasers their most valuable properties. Lasers are used everywhere from DVD players, optical communications and surgery to cutting metal.

Nanowire lasers have the potential to enhance efficiency and miniaturize devices, and could be used in devices that merge optical and electronic technology for computing, communication and sensors.

“These are simply the best nanowire lasers by all performance criteria,” says Jin, “even when compared to materials grown in high temperature and high vacuum. Perovskites are intrinsically good materials for lasing, but when they are grown into high-quality crystals with the proper size and shape, they really shine.”

What is also exciting is that simply tweaking the recipe for growing the nanowires could create a series of lasers that emit a specific wavelength of light in many areas of the visible spectrum.

Before these nanowire lasers can be used in practical applications, Jin says their chemical stability must be improved. Also important is finding a way to stimulate the laser with electricity rather than light, which was just demonstrated.

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge have unravelled one of the mysteries of electromagnetism, which could enable the design of antennas small enough to be integrated into an electronic chip. These ultra-small antennas – the so-called ‘last frontier’ of semiconductor design – would be a massive leap forward for wireless communications.

In new results published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers have proposed that electromagnetic waves are generated not only from the acceleration of electrons, but also from a phenomenon known as symmetry breaking. In addition to the implications for wireless communications, the discovery could help identify the points where theories of classical electromagnetism and quantum mechanics overlap.

The phenomenon of radiation due to electron acceleration, first identified more than a century ago, has no counterpart in quantum mechanics, where electrons are assumed to jump from higher to lower energy states. These new observations of radiation resulting from broken symmetry of the electric field may provide some link between the two fields.

The purpose of any antenna, whether in a communications tower or a mobile phone, is to launch energy into free space in the form of electromagnetic or radio waves, and to collect energy from free space to feed into the device. One of the biggest problems in modern electronics, however, is that antennas are still quite big and incompatible with electronic circuits – which are ultra-small and getting smaller all the time.

“Antennas, or aerials, are one of the limiting factors when trying to make smaller and smaller systems, since below a certain size, the losses become too great,” said Professor Gehan Amaratunga of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “An aerial’s size is determined by the wavelength associated with the transmission frequency of the application, and in most cases it’s a matter of finding a compromise between aerial size and the characteristics required for that application.”

Another challenge with aerials is that certain physical variables associated with radiation of energy are not well understood. For example, there is still no well-defined mathematical model related to the operation of a practical aerial. Most of what we know about electromagnetic radiation comes from theories first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in the 19th century, which state that electromagnetic radiation is generated by accelerating electrons.

However, this theory becomes problematic when dealing with radio wave emission from a dielectric solid, a material which normally acts as an insulator, meaning that electrons are not free to move around. Despite this, dielectric resonators are already used as antennas in mobile phones, for example.

“In dielectric aerials, the medium has high permittivity, meaning that the velocity of the radio wave decreases as it enters the medium,” said Dr Dhiraj Sinha, the paper’s lead author. “What hasn’t been known is how the dielectric medium results in emission of electromagnetic waves. This mystery has puzzled scientists and engineers for more than 60 years.”

Working with researchers from the National Physical Laboratory and Cambridge-based dielectric antenna company Antenova Ltd, the Cambridge team used thin films of piezoelectric materials, a type of insulator which is deformed or vibrated when voltage is applied. They found that at a certain frequency, these materials become not only efficient resonators, but efficient radiators as well, meaning that they can be used as aerials.

The researchers determined that the reason for this phenomenon is due to symmetry breaking of the electric field associated with the electron acceleration. In physics, symmetry is an indication of a constant feature of a particular aspect in a given system. When electronic charges are not in motion, there is symmetry of the electric field.

Symmetry breaking can also apply in cases such as a pair of parallel wires in which electrons can be accelerated by applying an oscillating electric field. “In aerials, the symmetry of the electric field is broken ‘explicitly’ which leads to a pattern of electric field lines radiating out from a transmitter, such as a two wire system in which the parallel geometry is ‘broken’,” said Sinha.

The researchers found that by subjecting the piezoelectric thin films to an asymmetric excitation, the symmetry of the system is similarly broken, resulting in a corresponding symmetry breaking of the electric field, and the generation of electromagnetic radiation.

The electromagnetic radiation emitted from dielectric materials is due to accelerating electrons on the metallic electrodes attached to them, as Maxwell predicted, coupled with explicit symmetry breaking of the electric field.

“If you want to use these materials to transmit energy, you have to break the symmetry as well as have accelerating electrons – this is the missing piece of the puzzle of electromagnetic theory,” said Amaratunga. “I’m not suggesting we’ve come up with some grand unified theory, but these results will aid understanding of how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics cross over and join up. It opens up a whole set of possibilities to explore.”

The future applications for this discovery are important, not just for the mobile technology we use every day, but will also aid in the development and implementation of the Internet of Things: ubiquitous computing where almost everything in our homes and offices, from toasters to thermostats, is connected to the internet. For these applications, billions of devices are required, and the ability to fit an ultra-small aerial on an electronic chip would be a massive leap forward.

Piezoelectric materials can be made in thin film forms using materials such as lithium niobate, gallium nitride and gallium arsenide. Gallium arsenide-based amplifiers and filters are already available on the market and this new discovery opens up new ways of integrating antennas on a chip along with other components.

“It’s actually a very simple thing, when you boil it down,” said Sinha. “We’ve achieved a real application breakthrough, having gained an understanding of how these devices work.”

Sensor shipments are getting a big boost from the spread of embedded measurement functions for automated intelligent controls in systems and new high-volume applications—such as wearable electronics and the huge potential of the Internet of Things (IoT)—but sales growth is being pulled down significantly by price erosion in this once high-flying semiconductor marketplace, according to IC Insights’ new 2015 O-S-D Report—A Market Analysis and Forecast for Optoelectronics, Sensors/Actuators, and Discretes.

Average selling prices (ASPs) for all types of semiconductor sensors are forecast to fall by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of -5 percent in the next five years, which is double the rate of decline in the previous five years (2009-2014), says the new IC Insights report. Unit volume growth is expected to climb by a strong CAGR of 11.4 percent in the 2014-2019 timeframe and reach 19.1 billion sensor shipments worldwide in five years and revenue growth is projected to rise by an annual rate of 6.0 percent in the forecast period. In comparison, sensor sales grew by a CAGR of 17.1 percent between 2009 and 2014 to reach a new record high of $5.7 billion last year, according to analysis found in the 360-page annual O-S-D Report, which also covers actuators, optoelectronics, and discrete semiconductors.

ASP erosion is partly a result of intense competition among a growing number of sensor suppliers pursuing new portable, consumer, and IoT applications. Sensor ASPs are also being driven much lower because many new high-volume applications require rock-bottom prices. The fall in prices is not only undermining revenue growth in the highly competitive sensor segment, but it is also now squeezing profit margins among suppliers.

Semiconductor sensors make up nearly two-thirds of the total sensor/actuator market segment, according to the 2015 O-S-D Report. As shown in Figure 1, acceleration/yaw sensors (i.e., accelerometers and gyroscope devices) remained the largest sensor category, in terms of dollar sales volume, accounting for 26 percent of the total sensor/actuator market. The acceleration/yaw sensor category continued to struggle due to price erosion and a significant deceleration in unit growth to just 1 percent in 2014, which resulted in a 4 percent drop in worldwide sales to $2.4 billion after falling 2 percent in 2013. Magnetic-field sensors (including electronic compass chips) rebounded in 2014 with an 11 percent increase in sales to set a new record high of about $1.6 billion after slumping 1 percent in 2013. Pressure sensor sales remained strong in 2014, growing 15 percent to a new record-high $1.5 billion after climbing 16 percent in 2013.

sensor shipments

Figure 1

 

The forecast in the O-S-D Report shows total sensor sales growing 7 percent in 2015 to $6.1 billion after rising just 5 percent in 2014. Sensor shipments are projected to climb 16 percent in 2015 to 12.9 billion units after a 13 percent increase in 2014.

About 80 percent of the sensors/actuators market’s sales in 2014 came from semiconductors built with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology—primarily pressure and acceleration/yaw sensors and actuator devices.  MEMS-based product sales grew about 5 percent to a record-high $7.4 billion in 2014 from $7.0 billion in 2013.  Sensors accounted for 53 percent of MEMS-based semiconductor sales in 2014 ($3.9 billion) while 46 percent of the total ($3.5 billion) came from actuators, such as micro-mirrors for displays and digital projectors, microfluidic devices for inkjet printer nozzles and other application, radio frequency (RF) MEMS filters, and timekeeping silicon oscillators.

In terms of unit volumes, sensors represented 80 percent of the 5.1 billion MEMS-based semiconductors shipped in 2014 (4.1 billion) with the remaining 20 percent being actuators (about 1.0 billion).

After dropping slightly more than 1 percent in 2012 and being flat in 2013, sales of MEMS-based semiconductors recovered in 2014 with actuators ending a two-year decline, rising 7 percent, and pressure sensors continuing double-digit growth with a 15 percent increase in the year.  Sales of MEMS-based sensors and actuators are forecast to grow 7 percent in 2015 to $7.9 billion and reach $9.8 billion in 2019, representing a CAGR of 12.0 percent from 2014.

The market for MEMS has been growing at a fast rate.  Gyroscopes and accelerometers will account for a significant amount of the MEMS revenues.  But growth will come as a result of a wide variety of emerging MEMS and will be driven by the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), where MEMS devices will replace conventional sensors, and by the introduction of new sensor technologies.  The new Semico Research report “MEMS Market Update: The New Driving Forces” projects that MEMS shipments will reach 43.3 billion units by 2018.

“Going forward, industrial and home automation are the new drivers for MEMS innovation as more devices with new sensing technologies are connected to the IoT,” says Tony Massimini, Semico Research’s Chief of Technology. “MEMS are growing in part as they replace conventional non-MEMS sensors in automotive and industrial applications. Accelerometers and microphones will account for the bulk of these shipments.  Magnetometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and actuators will also have significant volumes.”

Key findings of the report include:

  • Sales of MEMS devices exceeded $14.3 billion in 2014.
  • MEMS unit shipments grew 36.6 percent annually in 2014.
  • From 2013 to 2018, Semico projects a CAGR of 28.4 percent for MEMS units.
  • By 2018, industrial will be the second largest market reaching $5.3 billion.

In its recent report “MEMS Market Update: The New Driving Forces” (MP109-15), Semico Research presents the MEMS market and forecasts by the device type and  by key end use markets.  Readers will see which MEMS are growing fastest and in which market segments.

The report also discusses the latest trends in Sensor Fusion, the use of MEMS and sensors in IoT, and collaboration among companies and organizations involved with MEMS and sensors.  The report is 52 pages long and includes 26 tables and 27 figures.

Imagination Technologies announces that South Korea based MEMS sensor development company Standing Egg has licensed Imagination’s MIPS Warrior M-class CPU for use in its next-generation sensor hubs targeting an expanding range of products including mobile devices, IoT, wearables, and automotive.

Standing Egg develops MEMS sensor products including accelerometers, gyroscopes, pressure sensors, and others. With its planned MIPS-based sensor hub chips, modules and boards, Standing Egg will provide a means to integrate and process data from these different sensors.

In its selection of an MCU-class CPU for its next-generation products, Standing Egg compared MIPS CPUs to other competing CPU IP cores. Performance, power and area were key decision criteria, and according to Standing Egg, the MIPS M5100 surpassed other CPUs on these metrics. Standing Egg also determined that the MIPS M5100 CPU can process sensor signals faster and with lower power – an important design consideration for the company. The security features in the MIPS CPU, including anti-tamper technology, also played a key role in the decision.

Jongsung Lee, CEO, Standing Egg, says: “Standing Egg’s sensors are designed and built by us so we control every element from concept to packaging. When it came to selecting a CPU, we chose MIPS for its outstanding performance efficiency and features. Its ability to handle sophisticated algorithms as well as its signal processing capability make the MIPS M5100 ideal for our next-generation sensor hubs, and we already have interest in these products from several customers. Imagination’s full line of IP, including connectivity IP and cloud services, is quite appealing for sensor hub applications.”

Says Jim Nicholas, vice president, MIPS business operations, Imagination Technologies: “Standing Egg is innovating in MEMS sensor development across design, manufacturing, testing and packaging, and we are delighted that they have chosen MIPS for their next design. This is one example of the increasing traction that we are seeing for MIPS across Asia and around the globe. IoT and wearables are particularly hot areas for MIPS Warrior CPUs, as companies look for leading-edge CPUs with features like hardware virtualization, enhanced security and hardware multi-threading that will give them an edge in designing their next-generation devices.”

Standing Egg plans to release sensor hub products based on MIPS M5100 CPU in the second half of 2015, with an FPGA version available in advance.

Standing Egg is a professional MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) sensor development company located in Korea.