This year, the MSEC or MEMS & Sensors Executive Congress had mCube exhibiting their incredibly small and low-power MC3672, an inertial sensor product. This is a three-axis accelerometer, and its size is only 1.1 x 1.3 mm. This tiny WLCSP packaged device is a low parasitic unit, with enormous possibilities of unobtrusive use as low power motion tracking in wearable design, and in a completely new set of applications in future.
Recently, mCube acquired Xsens and they were able to couple a sensor fusion software to their tiny accelerometer. This gave them the ability to sense body motion and capture solutions for health, entertainment, and fitness. The combination also allows them to control and stabilize inertial measurement units in industrial applications.
Almost all are aware of MEMS motion sensors, as tablets, smartphones, and wearables use them popularly. Use of the MC3672 accelerometer will generate more applications for these devices in the future. This could include new areas such as in the medical world, related to prevention and diagnostics of illness. For instance, when visually inspecting the throat, stomach, or intestines of a patient, physicians often need to perform invasive and unpleasant procedures.
In future, patients would be able to swallow a camera-pill that can wirelessly beam images from the inside of the body to a display for the physician to view. Miniature motion sensing incorporated within the camera-pill could allow medical practitioners to navigate the pill effectively by actuating and controlling it. This would allow them to monitor its location and orientation in real-time as it passed through the body. Images captured by the camera would enable precise diagnosis and investigation of any problems.
According to Dr. Sanjay Bhandari, Senior VP of mCube, a plethora of new applications will come into life based on the granular, precise measurement of motion, orientation, tilt, and heading of the sensor. For instance, some applications will be able to capture motion data to communicate it to cloud software services, and ultimately sharing it with networked systems for monitoring and analysis.
Achieving most of the envisaged applications is only possible with motion-sensing systems that are extremely small and drain very little power from an arrangement of energy harvesting or a battery.
Along with the low power consumption and small system size, all components in the system must adhere to the design features. The sensor interface uses Silicon and CMOS-based circuits that filter, amplify, and fit the analog to digital processors to work its magic.
The monolithic, single-chip design by mCube integrates both the CMOS and the MEMS within a clever extension using a standard CMOS-base process. This is a reliable procedure for handling high volumes and produces excellent yields. Within the chip, mCube has interconnected the MEMS and the CMOS very efficiently.
In future, mCube plans to integrate BLE or Bluetooth Low Energy into the MCU in its SIP package—they want to realize IoMT-on-a-Chip. They have protected their technology by 100 approved patents.
The acquisition of Xsens brought to mCube the 3D technology to track motion in the sensor world—a high-precision module for sensing motion in 9 degrees of freedom.
