Motion MEMS and Sensors, Today and Tomorrow

Abstract

Only 6 years passed since the dawn of the Motion Sensors Era in the Consumer market and now the world of MEMS Motion Sensors is completely different and it’s going to change even more in the future. If 2006 was the year of the Accelerometer adoption by Nintendo^TM in the Wii^TM Controller, 2010 was the year of the Gyroscope adoption by Smartphone manufacturers. And in both cases STMicroelectronics triggered the big volume production of those two micro-machined devices, previously known only by automotive customers and used only for active and passive safety applications. Moreover nowadays combinations of these two inertial products, also known as Six Degree-Of-Freedom Motion Sensors 6XDOF, are starting to appear in the market and most likely they will coexist with standalone accelerometers and gyroscopes, depending on customer needs in terms of compactness and performances. This paper reports the details of an innovative tri-axis silicon MEMS Coriolis’ gyroscope that fulfills the pressing market requirements for low power consumption, small size, slim form factor, high performances and low cost, but it addresses also the recent trends of the Six Degree-Of-Freedom 6XDOF and Nine-Degree-of-Freedom 9XDOF systems, realized by integrating the 6XDOF with a compass.