MEMS Sensor Market: Opportunities and Challenges Coexist

Wii's success made Nintendo become the largest market-capitalizing company in Japan. The success of the iPhone and iPad pushed Apple to the altar of the world's largest market capitalization company, and the common hardware that contributed to the key user experience of these three landmark products was the sensor.

"Sensors" are the five features of the electronic information age. Using sensors to obtain more real-world information and supplemented by information processing systems, they provide convenient conditions for a wide variety of innovative applications. Sensors are the most traditional way to subvert traditional electronics in the 21st century. Good partner. Under this background, many emerging market demands emerged, which objectively once again promoted the innovation of sensor technology.

The future development of sensor technology is mainly reflected in the following aspects: First, the development of new sensitive materials is used to improve accuracy and response speed. Through the development of new sensitive materials, new sensors have been developed, mainly new technologies such as optoelectronics, microelectronics, and biochemistry. Second, miniaturization while reducing power consumption. There will be micro- and nano-scale micro devices, while reducing power consumption. Third, the trend toward integration and intelligence, namely the integrated manufacturing technology of sensors and ICs and the integrated manufacturing technology of multi-parameter sensors, and the intelligence of signal detection based on the integration.

In recent years, with the rise of consumer electronics, the application of sensors in a variety of consumer electronics products has escalated, especially in the entertainment and mobile Internet applications, and the addition of MEMS technology has given the sensor a larger stage. Compared with traditional sensor technology, MEMS is small in size, light in weight, low in cost, low in energy consumption, high in reliability, easy to mass produce, and highly intelligent. As a technology that is on the eve of rapid development, the extensive use of MEMS will bring profound influence to human development in many fields, such as information, aerospace, medicine, and biology. It can be said that with the popularization of MEMS sensors, based on smaller size, higher performance and smart MEMS sensors, it will also bring about the creative applications of electronic products that change the world. We only need to expect the application of a new end consumer electronic product. revolution.

At present, MEMS sensors are mainly used in the automotive and consumer electronics fields. The automotive industry is an important application area for sensors. Each car will have 40 to hundreds of sensors, and the development trend of intelligent cars will also promote the automotive market demand for sensors. Its application direction and market requirements include vehicle anti-lock braking system (ABS), electronic body stabilization program (ESP), electronically controlled suspension (ECS), electric hand brake (EPB), ramp start assist (HAS), tire pressure monitoring (EPMS) ), engine image stabilization, vehicle inclination measurement, and heartbeat detection in the car. Among them, the electronic body stabilization program ESP has received great attention from MEMS manufacturers. Because its active anti-skid function requires more sensors and advanced processing systems, it will drive the demand for automotive electronic MEMS traditional application market.

MEMS sensors are used in consumer electronics for motion/fall detection, navigation data compensation, game/human interface, power management, GPS enhancement/blind zone elimination, speed/distance counting, other sports and health care applications, and more. These MEMS technologies have greatly improved the user experience and brought new electronic consumer products. The accelerometer is the largest application product in this market. The recent rapid growth of gyroscopes has become the second largest application after accelerometers.

With the aging of the population and the soundness of the Chinese health care system, various remote monitoring and high-precision treatment equipment will be introduced more and more. The healthcare market has gradually become another major market for MEMS sensor applications. MEMS has a miniature feature that can replace organ implantation and trace detection. The main development directions are intravascular surgery and intracranial surgery and cell surgery.

Excluding these three areas, MEMS also have a great application in the military.

With the advancement of science and technology and the continuous improvement of people’s living standards, people’s requirements for mobile phones have already surpassed simple communication functions, requiring that mobile phones be more intelligent, humane, and entertaining. Analysts predict that with the continuous development of real-time Internet access and sensor technology for smart phones, smart phones will soon become the largest wireless sensor network on the planet. Therefore, we believe that typical sensors such as image sensors, fingerprint sensors, optical sensors, and acceleration sensors will have a broader market. At the same time, as people's needs continue to increase, it will continue to innovate in driving sensor technology. We also believe that more new sensor applications and technologies will emerge in the future.

Although the sensor products are facing huge market opportunities, they are also faced with challenges. The main challenges include the emerging technological challenges MEMS applications bring to manufacturers, such as emerging MEMS applications such as context awareness, location, and remote monitoring.

In the portable market, customer demand is the real market demand. As customers are eager to apply more and more speech technologies to portable devices such as video conferencing and speech recognition, this requires higher performance MEMS microphones. In particular, MEMS microphones with a high signal-to-noise ratio, a flat frequency response, a wide dynamic range, and a strong MEMS microphone can record various types of high-quality music. Accelerometers play a vital role in LBS services. High-performance accelerometers require precise tilt information for magnetometer calibration.

In the future, with the increasing development of the Internet of Things, the advancement of sensor technology and the promotion of new market demands, sensor applications in environmental protection and medical fields will show an increase. With the increasing market demand for environmental monitoring, early warning and emergency response, environmental protection sensors will become emerging markets for sensors. With the rapid development of China's medical electronics, especially the portable medical electronics industry, the Chinese medical device market is growing at a rate of 15% per year, and the scale of China's MEMS sensor market is expected to further expand. In addition, emerging new products and new applications have also become an important guarantee for the continued development of this market.

The emergence of numerous emerging opportunities requires semiconductor manufacturers to provide highly integrated and highly stable sensor modules. Wu Yanbin, marketing manager of ADI's Micro-Electro-Mechanical Division, emphasized that ADI continues to focus on developing the core technology of sensors to provide the best industrial-grade accelerometers and gyroscopes. At the same time, ADI will continue to provide more highly integrated sensors to meet the needs of different markets and shorten the development cycle and learning curve for customers. For example, ADI's latest gyroscope products integrate only four core sensors in a single-axis gyroscope chip, providing unmatched sensor performance such as stability, vibration suppression, and lower zero-g offset. As the demand for higher performance gyroscopes increases in the market, the number of changes that can be accomplished within one hour using MEMS manufacturing processes is a major challenge encountered in the design and development of sensor technology. Under normal circumstances, these sensors have been tested in a wide range of harsh environments, which brings further challenges to the existing MEMS sensor packaging technology.