MEMS Devices Enter Mobile Phone Markets

While maintaining excellent linearity in mobile phones, the need of multiband and multimode band switching at low insertion loss is driving the need for RF MEMS-based switches. Since this switching problem gets even more acute as new complex waveforms, such as WiMAX are added to this mix.

According to market research company ABI Research, it is expected that, driven by soaring sales of touch screen tablets and Smartphone, the market for MEMS sensor and MEMS audio devices in smartphones and tablet computers will be worth $1.5 billion in 2016. It is said that the MEMS market is going through a transition period when approaching maturity, the same with many other semiconductor market segments. To be successful in consumer electronics markets, enterprises have economies of scale and are able to supply a broad range of solutions. For instance, STMicroelectronics recently released a software tool called iNemo, which simplifies the OEMs task of fusing the outputs of multiple MEMS accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses and pressure sensors.

Based on this situation, merger and acquisition activity are increasing in the MEMS market over the next five years, as the larger player fill in the gaps of their integrated solution for OEMs, who must fuse the outputs of multiple MEMS sensors for a wider variety of applications than just tablets and phones. Over the next few years the number of MEMS vendors will decrease as larger suppliers acquire others. The largest vendors of MEMS include STMicroelectronics, Bosch, Texas Instruments and Freescale while the market includes a long tail of smaller specialist MEMS suppliers including VTI, InvenSense, and Memstech, ABI observed.

All the leading vendors are supplementing their portfolios of accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses, and pressure sensors with sensor-fusion software that simplifies the task of integrating their outputs into actionable information that apps can harness for gesture-recognition, automatic screen orientation, security tasks, and emergency safety reactions, such as shutting down before impact when free-fall is sensed.

STMicro recently released its iNEMO sensor fusion suite to OEMs, which can be used to translate raw MEMS sensor outputs into motion-activated commands.  Today the easiest path to motion-processing with MEMS sensors is to be license algorithms from GestureTek Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Hillcrest Laboratories Inc. (Rockville, Md.) or Movea Inc. (Grenoble, France). But with iNEMO, OEMs can roll-their-own motion processing algorithms.