Large and expensive sensors are history
These are either packaged into the familiar black unit with wire connections to be mounted on a PCB or fixed beside the main chip as a bare die. Both approaches are relatively expensive and large with no current way to reduce costs and size forming a barrier to the advancement of the sensor market.
Our sensors are ultra-small and ultra low cost
We have solved these two problems. Our breakthrough is being able to create the sensors directly within the control chip of the device, or ASIC, as the chip is being manufactured. This means that the sensors only take up a virtually insignificant amount of space by being in the chip itself instead of taking up space by being packaged beside it. Also, many different sensors can be built into a chip to make much smarter devices with a negligible increase in costs or space taken up inside the device.
Thus, Nanusens’ multi-sensor solution frees up space for more features and larger batteries to give a longer life in use. In addition, the power consumption is also dramatically reduced which helps extend the battery life even more.
Being able to include as many sensors as is required within a chip for almost no size or cost penalty is going to revolutionise the design of a whole new generation of smarter devices.
Technology
Nanusens is the only company to have perfected the building of MEMS within chips
- The sensors 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.
- 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.
Multiple sensors on one chip
- 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.
Wide range of embeddable sensors
- 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.
