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The 2019 MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit in Grenoble showcased how sensors were being designed to make physical-world data smaller, more efficient and more useful to digital systems. Its ten highlights ranged from MEMS market forecasts and design priorities to spectral sensing, smart parking, retinal implants and event-based vision. These are conference-era reports and projections—not a measure of what is available or proven today.
What the summit covered
Organized by SEMI, the two-track meeting brought together sensor makers and application developers. The common thread was translating measurements of motion, sound, light, gases and other physical conditions into information that devices and services can act on. The highlights below summarize what speakers and companies presented, with figures attributed to EE Times’ October 1, 2019 report.
1. MEMS growth—and where it was expected
Yole Développement put the global MEMS market at $11.6 billion in 2018 and forecast an 8.2% compound annual growth rate through 2024, according to EE Times. That rate was a forecast made in 2019, not a verified account of what the market subsequently achieved.
The report grouped opportunities into three broad bands: slower-growing established MEMS products; faster-growing environmental MEMS, microfluidics, microbolometers, thermopiles and RF MEMS; and emerging areas such as microspeakers and ultrasonic fingerprint sensing. STMicroelectronics separately said that MEMS, sensors and actuators represented about 10% of a $465 billion global semiconductor market in 2018, and reported shipments of more than 20 billion MEMS and imaging sensors and around 5 billion actuators that year. These are company figures reported by EE Times, not independently audited totals.
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2. Six design priorities for smart sensors
Andrea Onetti, then STMicroelectronics’ analog and MEMS group vice president for its MEMS sensor division, described six priorities for sensor development:
- Higher accuracy
- Lower power consumption
- Smaller size
- Higher reliability
- Greater energy efficiency
- More intelligence
Onetti also compared contemporary sensor performance with that of a decade earlier. As reported by EE Times, he cited power use reduced by a factor of two, size down 70%, cost down 75%, accelerometer noise improved 73%, gyroscope temperature stability improved 83%, and full-scale range increased 100%. These are his conference-reported comparisons, not independently validated benchmarks.
3. Cloud simulation as a MEMS development tool
OnScale CEO Ian Campbell made the case for combining multiphysics simulation with cloud computing so design teams could explore options before building costly physical prototypes. He described using digital qualification to examine how packaging and assembly variation affect a device, and feeding foundry process data back into design work. This was OnScale’s presentation of its approach; it does not establish that simulation can replace physical prototyping across MEMS development.
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4. Spectral sensing closer to the sample
ams presented compact optical sensing aimed at applications such as health monitoring and smart agriculture. Verena Vescoli, the company’s senior vice president of R&D, discussed uses including color matching, cosmetics and skin-tone work, health diagnostics, and analysis of food and agriculture. EE Times described a silicon sensor with wafer-level optics and a stressed-plant example spanning 300–1000 nm. The range belongs to that presentation example, not to every ams sensor or spectral-sensing application.
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Finland-based Okmetic Oy received the summit award for an industrial patterning platform intended to tailor silicon substrates to device designs. The reported examples included buried cavities, poly-Si-filled through-silicon vias and patterned multilayer silicon-on-insulator (SOI). Okmetic customer support engineer Päivi Sievilä said designers could specify crystal properties, SOI thickness and pattern layout. EE Times also reported a goal to double capacity by 2020; that was a plan stated at the time, not confirmation that the expansion was completed.
6. Wearables and environmental sensing
Huawei linked personalized healthcare and lifestyle wearables to more intelligence at the sensor and the use of heterogeneous computing. Other areas of conference interest included gas and volatile organic compound (VOC) sensing, near-infrared and particle monitoring, and hyperspectral sensing for food and skin. These were themes and future-facing expectations discussed in 2019, rather than evidence that every wearable would incorporate those capabilities.
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7. PlacePod’s smart-parking example
PNI Sensor described PlacePod as a parking sensor system combining an RM3100 geomagnetic sensor, Bluetooth Low Energy, vehicle-detection algorithms and LoRa connectivity. EE Times said deployments included several cities and Nvidia headquarters. In one California Central Valley example, 16 sensors detected 350 parking violations and generated $10,500 in fines, according to the report. That is a reported deployment outcome, not a general estimate of savings, revenue or return on investment.
8. Audio-specific processing for voice interfaces
Knowles CTO Alexis Bernard argued that always-on voice devices benefit from processing designed specifically for audio. The approach he outlined combined microphone arrays, processing across audio streams, machine learning, contextual computing, power efficiency and an open digital signal processor (DSP) ecosystem. EE Times reported that Knowles’ IA8201 AISonic audio edge processor supported voice activation and multi-microphone processing.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteBernard cited 10 billion installed audio devices in 2020. This was a conference-era market figure attributed to him, not a measured current installed base. He also described the voice user interface as “part of a paradigm shift in how people will interact with technology.”
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9. Pixium Vision’s Prima retinal implant
Pixium Vision presented Prima, a subretinal photovoltaic chip for dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD). EE Times described the implant as measuring 2 × 2 mm and 30 microns thick, with 378 electrodes. In the reported system, glasses incorporating a camera and projector delivered pulsed near-infrared illumination to the implant.
Pixium engineering manager Martin Deterre told the conference report that five patients in France had received implants and that a year of clinical study had been completed. The report also said no device-related serious adverse events had been observed. These are historical statements in the 2019 trade-press account; they do not establish present-day regulatory status, clinical evidence, availability or efficacy. They are not medical advice.
10. Insightness and event-based vision
Insightness presented a “silicon eye” that reports changes in image intensity rather than sending every conventional image frame onward for processing. The company described collision avoidance for drones, with possible outputs including a 3D position, depth map and motion map. EE Times reported the SEES2 sensor at a 7.2 μm pixel pitch and 1024 × 768 resolution, and said evaluation kits were offered to drone and robot manufacturers. The specifications and kit availability are historical reports from the summit, not confirmation of current products or stock.
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What connects the ten highlights
The presentations covered very different devices, but returned to a shared engineering problem: a sensor is useful only if its measurements can be collected and interpreted within the constraints of its application. In the examples at Grenoble, those constraints included power, size, accuracy, reliability, processing load and the environment in which the sensor had to operate. The applications ranged from agriculture and parking to audio, medicine and robotics; the roundup did not compare their products in side-by-side tests.
The source for the conference claims and product descriptions is Nitin Dahad and Anne-Françoise Pele’s EE Times roundup, published October 1, 2019: 10 Highlights at MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit. SEMI’s MSIG archive independently lists the article on that date: SEMI MSIG archive.
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