Today's program featured a full day event with conference sessions on MEMS and nanotechnology. The sessions included presenters from Analog Devices, Freescale, VTI, Olympus and others.
Analog Devices (ADI) gave a nice overview of inertial MEMS -- accelerometers and gyros. These sensors have seen improvement over the last 10 years which resulted in price reduction driven by yield improvement and enhanced performance with better FEM simulation and design tools.
Analog Devices has shipped over 200 million MEMS devices to date with about 150 million going to the automotive industry. Automotive remains a lucrative market for them with about 50 million cars manufactured annually and 3/4 MEMS sensors going into every car.
However, ADI is predicting that consumer inertial MEMS applications will surpass automotive by 2011. Already, manufacturers such as Nintendo and SONY are enhancing their products with MEMS components. Other applications include hard drive protection (IBM, Apple) which can be thought of as "the airbag for PCs", picture stabilization for digital cameras, sports equipment such as golf clubs (SmartSwing), pedometers (Nike) , speedometers, baseball bats and football helmets (!?!) which, apparently, are used to let coaches know if a player is getting hit too much.
In addition to picture stabilization, digital camera makers such as Fujitsu are also quite excited about power savings which are enhanced by inertial sensors which tell the device to go to "sleep mode" as soon as it is put down. Cell phone makers also want the power saving features as well as hard drive protection.
The bottom line -- inertial sensors are now a mature technology and the prices are with robust and reliable performance. There seem to be new opportunities for designers to differentiate their products by adding inertial MEMS sensors.
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