UltraSense Systems is using its proprietary AI-enabled 3D ultrasound technology to develop smart touch user interface solutions for smartphones, cars, home appliances, IoT, and medical devices. The company has raised a total of $24 million to date from firms such as Artiman Ventures, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Abies Ventures (Japan), Asahi Kasei Ventures (Japan), Hui Capital (China), and Sony Innovation Fund (Japan).
UltraSense’s MEMS-based ultrasound technology enables precise, highly localized, buttonless interactions with any surface materials including metal, glass, wood, ceramic, and plastic. UltraSense says it has created the world’s smallest ultrasound sensor system-on-a-chip. We spoke with Mo Maghsoudnia, the company’s Founder and CEO, about his vision for the company, main applications, market potential, and current commercial traction.
MEMS Journal: What’s the brief history of UltraSense? Why did you decide to start the company?
Mo Maghsoudnia: Our story began in 2018 at the famous Specialty’s Coffee in Santa Clara, California. It was there where my co-founders and I decided to start UltraSense and launch a journey of changing the way we interact with our everyday devices. Our team was inspired by the vast use cases for ultrasound from previous work with fingerprint sensors and its possibilities to disrupt many markets.
The main applications adopting virtual buttons include smartphones, wearables, and automotive. Source: UltraSense Systems Inc.
MEMS Journal: What’s your vision for UltraSense? How do you see the company in 3-5 years?
Mo Maghsoudnia: The world has gone digital, so why do we still interact with our everyday devices in an analog, mechanical way? Think about the number of mechanical buttons you touch every day, from your toothbrush, coffee maker, phone and car. Mechanical buttons are hard to replace and is why they are still so prevalent today. We are at the start of an evolution that will allow product designers to easily replace mechanical buttons with sold-state digital buttons under any type of material surface. Our multi-mode, AI-powered, sensing platform integrates all the key elements to replicate the touch input function of a mechanical button, but in a digital way. Going forward we will continue to innovate with backlighting, as well as incorporate tactile feedback support to provide a completely integrated solution to enable smart surfaces.
MEMS Journal: What’s your core technology and why is it unique?
Mo Maghsoudnia: First and foremost, we are a multi-mode touch solution of ultrasound and strain sensing in a monolithic silicon die. To definitively detect a touch, it requires more than a single mode solution such as a strain gauge, which has been the typical solution up until now. With ultrasound, we can discern the intended touch of the user due to the localization of the active touch area. By tightly coupling our unique integrated sensor architecture with machine learning algorithms, we can train to detect intended touches and reject accidental touches.
The key advantage of the UltraSense technology is that it tightly couples ultrasound and strain sensing with machine learning (ML) algorithms to learn intended touches and reject accidental touches. Source: UltraSense Systems Inc.
MEMS Journal: Which applications are you pursuing first and why those applications?
Mo Maghsoudnia: We are proud of achieving the significant milestone of having our buttonless solution adopted by a leading smartphone maker as our first customer. Smartphones are a key focus for us. They have the most complex UI/UX requirements which simply cannot be met with legacy sensors (piezo-resistive, for example).
MEMS Journal: Does your technology enable any new applications? If so, which applications?
Mo Maghsoudnia: Smart surfaces will further change the way we interact with products in the coming years. The definition of a “smart surface” is a solid surface with underside illumination to show the user where to touch. We expect to see many new applications where seamless surfaces provide interaction, light, and haptic feedback.
There is growing demand for adopting buttonless solutions in a dozen or more automotive use cases, with up to 60 sensors per vehicle. Source: UltraSense Systems Inc.
MEMS Journal: What’s the approximate market size for your technology?
Mo Maghsoudnia: We see a huge TAM for our sensor and module solutions, with tens of billions of sensors. We are estimating the TAM to be more than $10 billion for our key focus areas including smartphones, consumer, IoT, and automotive.
MEMS Journal: How do you compare to competing solutions?
Mo Maghsoudnia: We offer a unique sensing platform with multiple modalities for detecting touch and force. This is augmented with our convolutional neural network to deliver the most reliable UI/UX solution. We believe that legacy touch sensors (such as piezo-resistive) cannot resolve the challenges in smart surfaces.
MEMS Journal: What were your main business and technological milestones in 2020 and 2021?
Mo Maghsoudnia: It has been a little over 3 years since our inception. During this period, we have gone from the initial concept to having a commercially qualified solution in smartphones. We are very excited to see the commercialization of our solutions in various markets now.
MEMS Journal: How are you progressing with customer traction?
Mo Maghsoudnia: We have 40+ customer engagements, including the top smartphone and automotive OEMs, with active evaluations or close commercialization of our solutions. We expect to see several products in volume production next year.
*****************
This article is a part of MEMS Journal's ongoing market research project in the area of MEMS based ultrasonic sensors. If you would like to receive our comprehensive market research report on this topic, please contact Dr. Mike Pinelis at [email protected] for more information about rates and report contents.
Copyright 2021 MEMS Journal, Inc.
Comments