STMicroelectronics Driving the MEMS industry to Growth

Vishal Goyal, Senior Manager-Technical Marketing, Analog and MEMS Group [AMG], India, Asean and ANZ - STMicroelectronics shares with VARINDIA of how the MEMS industry is shaping up and what has been STâ€™s role in driving this sector to excellence -

Sensors are now spreading in the world and having a great influence in all aspects of our lives. They are bringing exciting ways of interacting with the world and are core to connected applications and a key building block of the Internet of Things (Smart Things, Smart Cities, Smart Industry, and Smart Home) and Smart Driving (Connected Car).

ST & the MEMS industry STMicroelectronics is at the center of the evolution of the MEMS and sensors industry, driving continuous innovation for more diverse applications of sensors and micro-actuators with wide-ranging product portfolio, reliable supply chain and strong ecosystem of global and local partners.

ST has established a worldwide ecosystem to cater to the mass market. It has a strong system know-how to support a global customer base. Ideally, the company has 1200 software evaluation licenses distributed in the last 6 months.

According to Gartner, MEMS-based smart sensors are set to gain maximum traction in the worldwide smart sensor market that is forecast to grow to $57.77 billion by 2022; at 18.1% CAGR. Market is primarily driven by factors such as growing concern toward security & surveillance, rising need for energy-efficient devices, growing consumer electronics sector, surge in automotive industry on a global basis, favourable government initiatives, and growing trend of miniaturization in sensors. The market for MEMS-based smart sensor is expected to hold the largest share of the studied market during the forecast period. MEMS help smart sensor to work in a smarter way by allowing it to handle huge amounts of data in a fraction of seconds. The APAC market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR between 2016 and 2022.

"ST has been enjoying the # 1 spot in MEMS Sensors for Consumer and Mobile and # 2 in MEMS Micro-Actuators," says Vishal Goyal, Senior Manager-Technical Marketing, Analog and MEMS Group [AMG], India, Asean and ANZ - STMicroelectronics.

Products from STMicroelectronics...

ST has designed a range of products keeping energy efficiency and size considerations in mind, which ensure the best performance for wearable device with ultra-low-power processing and connectivity, power and energy management and sensors.

STMicroelectronics also has in its portfolio a wide range of wearable devices. Wearable devices are electronic devices which are small and light weight, so can be worn by the user. They are getting adopted as watches, fashion accessory, fitness tracker, security devices or specialized medical gadgets. A wearable device may be independent in its functioning or it may act as accessory to other device such as tablet or Smartphone. In this case it is mainly used as input or output device with some computing power.

Wearable has the potential to change the world just as internet did. Smart Sensors and BLE have empowered devices with power of sensing and communication to take complex decisions. Wearables will create fundamentally new use cases and will do things which even smartphones cannot do. It is expected that healthcare and fitness will emerge as the largest category for wearable. A few examples of ST Wearable applications are -

Fashion

Activity monitor
Smart Watch
Glasses & Goggles
Pedometers

Sports

Environmental sensors (Real time monitoring of temperature, humidity and exposure to sun)
Inertial modules, pressure sensors (Activity monitoring & positioning)
Analog sensors (For heart monitoring)

Healthcare