“The evolution of MEMS started 200 years ago with the Industrial Revolution, the next major step was the invention of the transistor, and the third was the sensor”, said Vijay Ullal, group president of Maxim Integrated Products, adding, “motion, computation and sensing gives a truly intelligent machine that may be the rival of human beings. Any semiconductor company must do MEMS or go away.”
Ullal pointed out that the MEMS market very much fits the business model of analogue companies, being a fragmented market with thousands of customers, and offering the opportunity for companies to differentiate their products.
Ullal’s fellow panelist, Mark Martin, vice president and general manager of Analog Devices, said: “We’ve been developing MEMS for 20 years and we’ve been shipping them to customers since the early 90s. We’ve shipped 400m sensors, accelerometers and gyros. But now, with iconic products like the iPhone and the Wii, it’s starting to get big.”
Asked by Electronics Weekly why the MEMS industry had to be led by its customers, rather than taking the normal semiconductor industry route of pro-actively promoting pervasion by showing what its products can do, Martin replied: “That’s an excellent point. We have been a bit slow. We do help our customers. We provide algorithms and software. We’re not a one-way vendor – we educate the customers.”
However, another panelist Scott Smyser, vice president and general manager of VT Technologies, said: “There are so many uses that it is really our customers who are driving us. It is hard to keep up with our customers.”
Asked if the MEMS industry was getting closer to process standardization when it might be possible to envisage a fabless model for MEMS companies getting their manufacturing done at foundries, ADI’s Martin replied: “We are several years away from a standard process for MEMS. We are many, many years away from the level of broad standardisation that the semiconductor industry is used to in CMOS processing.”
Maxim’s Ullal added: “The volumes aren’t there for the foundry model. If you want the fastest turns, you have to do it yourself
