10 hot topics at the MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit

By Nitin Dahad and Anne-Françoise Pele, EE Times

The last half century has seen one technological wave after another, each with its own focus, from the personal computer and microprocessor to wired telephony and then on to mobile phones and smartphones. The next wave will be about connecting the physical world with the digital world, with a focus on sensors.

The annual MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit in Grenoble, organized by SEMI, is a premiere place to discover what the established large players and emerging startups are developing to bring us ubiquitous sensing. EE Times correspondents have been regular attendees  at the conference, and we were back this year for a packed two-track conference covering MEMS and imaging sensors.

The sessions covered everything from business and market forecasts to technologies, manufacturing, applications and of course, a technology showcase from a number of startups which often emerge as spinouts from the bedrock of research institutes such as Leti in France, imec in Belgium, ETH in Switzerland and Fraunhofer in Germany — and of course the many others in Europe not mentioned here.

To give a sense of the scale of the opportunity, STMicroelectronics’ said three trends are driving the sensor market: smart mobility, power & energy management, and the Internet of things (IoT), including industrial. MEMS, sensors and actuators are approximately 10% of the global $465 billion semiconductor market in 2018.  ST said the company shipped over 20 billion MEMS and imaging sensors and around 5 billion actuators in 2018.

Of course, with the venue being Grenoble, there was strong European participation in terms of both speakers and delegates. Grenoble and the region was twice referred to as “imaging valley” by speakers at the conference, alluding to the strong imaging cluster  there similar to the cluster around imec in Belgium. Laith Altimime, president of SEMI Europe pressed this point, saying, “It’s a great time for Europe in terms of our value proposition, and the opportunities arising from the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), digital health, IoT, smart cities and smart transportation. A lot of these are driving connected devices.”

In the opening keynotes, we heard from Alibaba Cloud, Tower Jazz, Microsoft, and VTT in Finland. Microsoft fielded a chip designer and now senior director of sensor development for HoloLens, Sunil Acharya, to present its keynote, where he delved into the sensors used in HoloLens 2 . Describing the device, he said, “It is an intelligent, expensive edge device. It’s like a computer sitting on your head, with mixed reality displays, lifelike holograms in front of you, and letting you interact with both the physical world and the digital world.” For the future, he said Microsoft plans to increase its ruggedness for military use, and continue to miniaturize, increase battery life and leverage the power of the cloud to enable more mixed reality experiences on its own as well as third party devices.

Laith Altimime, president of SEMI Europe, sets the scene for the European MEMS and imaging sensors at the conference in Grenoble . (Image: SEMI)

Alibaba Cloud’s lead solution architect in Europe, Yanchao Wang, talked about a world two decades from now when there will be an IP address for everything, and about the platform Alibaba Cloud has developed along with its AliOS operating system to “create the bridge between physical and digital worlds”. He like others talked about open connection platforms that works with all industry players. The focus for Alibaba, he said, was smart cities, smart manufacturing and smart life — for the latter it already has 50 million devices shipped on its smart life platform.

Avi Strum, senior vice president of the sensors business unit of Tower Jazz talked about the merits of optical fingerprint and 3D face recognition sensors for cellular security applications, and in particular the trend towards use of time of flight (ToF) and direct ToF sensors due mainly to cost. He hinted at rumors in China that Apple might return to using fingerprint recognition as well as facial recognition, adding, “Rumors in China often end up becoming true.” He also said that eventually, phones would use both fingerprint and facial recognition, and that the fingerprint would be optical.

If anyone had doubts about Finland's ability to build on its radio heritage , they were dispelled in the keynote from Antti Vasara, president and CEO of VTT in Finland. He highlighted the projects and spinouts from VTT, ranging from the first MEMS-based hyperspectral imaging camera, which is already being trialed in nanosatellites, as well as for detecting skin cancer and in agriculture; to their work on terahertz imaging and its deployment in airport security. He also highlighted work in micrometer scale photonics and solid-state lidar, which enables beam steering with no moving parts.

During the two days of the conference, we picked up 10 of the things that we thought worth a mention here to capture a flavor of the talks and the direction of the industry. You’ll find these on the following pages:

•        MEMS Growing Fast: 8.2% CAGR to 2024
•        Six Golden Rules for Smart Sensors
•        Cloud Simulation Surpasses Prototyping for MEMS Development
•        Spectral Sensing: The Lab-to-Sample Approach
•        Okmetic Oy Wins Award for its MEMS Silicon Wafer Manufacturing
•        Sensors Drive Wearables for Healthcare and Lifestyle
•        PNI Sensor Shows how Smart Parking Generates a Real ROI
•        New Voice Control Devices Demand Audio Specific Architectures
•        Sub-Retinal Wireless Chip Tackles Vision Loss and Blindness
•        Silicon Eye enabling Event-Based Vision

For the complete article please visit sister publication EE Times.