After more than a decade in the business, Tronics has sold more than one million high performance inertial MEMS sensors. These products were primarily high-performance accelerometers and gyroscopes. In markets where yearly volumes are typically in the thousands, one million is a significant number. High-performance inertial MEMS have been one of Tronics key businesses for about 15 years. The company has been involved in all aspects of the sensor products -- from MEMS design to MEMS manufacturing, through ASIC integration, packaging, test and calibration.
Designing and manufacturing such products requires know-how that is significantly different from that needed for lower performance products, such as consumer accelerometers and gyroscopes. The key technologies that have allowed Tronics' success in this field are the use of thick SOI, well-controlled high-aspect ratio DRIE, as well as high vacuum and low stress packaging.
In addition to the principal technological elements, manufacturing of high-performance inertial MEMS requires experience in the following challenging activities: keeping tight control of all process steps with the ability to fully understand the failure modes down to the root causes, achieving good yields with a relatively low number of wafers processed, ensuring 100% individual component traceability on all tests performed, gathering significant reliability and stability data, and mastering the use of high performance characterization tools.
One million units delivered is a significant milestone, not only because the typical sales price is somewhere between several tens of dollars to several hundreds of dollars, but also because in these markets, the volumes are typically thousands per year rather than millions per year.
"16 years after founding the company, it is very satisfying for me to see our millionth high performance inertial sensor delivered, and I want to thank our longtime customers for their trust", said Stephane Renard, founder of Tronics. Tronics has been serving several markets where high-performance inertial MEMS are either well established or gaining ground. Some examples are oil exploration, medical devices, aeronautical instrumentation, and vehicle control.
There is significant growth in these markets as MEMS performance is challenging some of the older, more expensive technologies, especially for the gyroscope. Tronics says that its strength resides in the ability to design and manufacture customer-specific high-performance inertial MEMS relatively quickly, thanks to its broad knowledge base. Tronics intends to remain a key player in the field of custom high-performance inertial MEMS design and manufacturing.
Tronics is an international, full-service MEMS manufacturer. With wafer fabs in France and the USA, and representation in Asia, Tronics provides local support to customers on three continents, and offers one of the broadest technology portfolios in the industry. Tronics' services range from MEMS design, to high-volume MEMS manufacturing. Founded in 1997, Tronics has more than 15 years of experience in developing, manufacturing, and packaging accelerometers, gyroscopes, micro-pumps, pressure sensors, switches, bio-detectors and other MEMS devices.
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This article is a part of MEMS Journal's ongoing market research project in the area of high performance inertial MEMS and non-MEMS based sensors. If you would like to receive our comprehensive market research report on this topic, please contact Dr. Mike Pinelis at mike@memsjournal.com for more information about rates and report contents.
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