Paignton, UK – 23 October 2023. Nanusens has announced that Sandhiprakash (Sandhi) Bhide has joined the company as a business advisor.
Nanusens CEO, Josep Montanyà, said, “We are at a crucial phase in the development of the company. We have silicon proven technology. We have a signed license deal with more in the pipeline. Our MEMS-within-CMOS™ is a genuine disruptive technology. It will change the world of MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) so we have recruited several industry-leading advisors with decades of commercial experience and contacts in MEMS to help us bring it to market. We are delighted that Sandhi Bhide is joining us as he has more than 40 years of experience in the electronics industry including 22 at Intel.”
Sandhi, added, “It is my esteemed honour and privilege to join Nanusens as a Business Advisor. Nanusens has the right technology, the right solutions and IP, and the right leadership at the top to turn Nanusens into commercial success. I am thrilled and excited, and looking forward to helping turn Nanusens into a global player in the MEMS market. From my experience with IoT at Intel, I know that Nanusens has solved the issues that have being holding back the mass deployment of IoT and therefore AIoT. These issues are that MEMS sensors cannot currently be manufactured in the huge volumes and very low costs needed. Instead of custom manufacturing lines for sensors, Nanusens has patented ways of making MEMS sensors in any of the giant CMOS fabs to take advantage of their huge production capabilities, high yields and ultra-low costs. It’s a game changer for MEMS.”
Technology backgrounder
Nanusens is the only company to have perfected the building of sensors within chips. The sensors, called MEMS or Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, are built using the standard chip manufacturing techniques, called CMOS, that are used to build the electronic circuits on chips and at the same time as the rest of the chip circuitry. This means that chips with Nanusens embedded sensors can be made in any of the many CMOS fab in virtually unlimited numbers and with the high yields that are normal in such fabs with all the benefits of low unit costs that fab production provides.
A key new innovation by the company is development of a novel control circuit that measures the capacitance changes within the sensor to provide sensor data. Like the sensor itself, this is also a digital IP block so it can be incorporated in the floor plan of the device’s control chip, or ASIC, using standard EDA tools. This pairing for sensors and control circuitry as IP is unique as no other sensor solution can be turned into an IP block and made using standard CMOS techniques within the layers of the chip structure. This also significantly reduces the complexity and bill of materials costs for an AIoT device.
Nanusens has already built accelerometer sensors into an ASIC chip using this unique technology. It is developing many other different types of embedded sensors such as gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor, microphone, IR imagers and gas sensor as most of these are variants on the accelerometer design. These open up many other massive markets for its embedded sensors such as smartphones, earbuds, wearables, automotive, medical equipment and aerospace, to name but a few. As a result, the company has started a Series A funding round.
Nanusens pressure sensor with detection circuitry (right) created within the CMOS layers of an ASIC (left)
