ISSCC preview: Sensors make all the difference

MANHASSET, NY — Sensor technologies and sensor circuit developments are taking front and center seat at next February's International Solid State Circuits Conference. Much of the discussion will center around MEMS sensors.

True to the conference theme--Sensing the future--, the leaing keynote on MEMS for automotive and consumer applications will have Jiri Marek, Senior Vice President at Robert Bosch talk about future scenarios where micro electromechanical systems will play a key role in sensing an everyday problem and simulateously provide a solution.

A few examples illustrate this future: a car skids then stabilizes itself without driver intervention; a laptop falls and is able to protect the hard drive automatically before hitting the floor; an airbag fires when triggered by a crash before the driver has a chance of maneuvring the steering wheel, thereby significantly reducing physical injury.

"In order to make these systems possible, sensors had to become smaller and more powerful, as well as more cost-effective, and less power-consuming," said Marek in a pre-conference statement.

Surface micro-machining make these possible and will lead to industrial mass-production for micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).

But that is enough to get past the development stages and into mass markets.

Besides leading-edge micromechanical processes, designers need to apply themslves to innovative and robust ASIC designs, learn how to apply thorough simulations of electrical and mechanical behaviour, and have a deep understanding of the interactions—mainly over temperature and lifetime—of the package and the mechanical structures.

Marek will detail how all this work was achieved at Bosch over 20 years of development activities, during which more than one billion sensors were produced, according to Marek.

He wil also have an outlook on rising new MEMS applications such as in energy harvesters and micro fuel cells.

Not to be outdone in the sensor arena, albeit in a more conventional one, Tomoyuki Suzuki, Senior Vice-President at Sony, will pay homage to the sensor that made all the difference in our interpretation of ourselves and our surroundings.

In his follow-on keynote Suzuki will trace how the digital camera was made possible by the original 1969 invention of the charge couple device for which its inventors received the Nobel prize in physics 30 years later.

The market for digital still cameras expanded and the CCD eventually gave way to the CMOS image sensor. "As the result of technology improvement, camera size has decreased by a factor of 500 in the last 25 years primarily due to pixel miniaturization in the image sensor," said Suzuki in a pre-ISSCC statement.

Today, a 10-Mpixel CMOS image sensor provides more than 70dB dynamic range, and "a high-speed read-out of 576M pixels/s (10M pixels at 50 frames/s) has been developed", said Suzuki.