By hmimcu 
The development situation and future development trend of MEMS sensors
MEMS sensors have been widely used in various fields such as consumer electronics, automobiles, industries, medical care, and communications. With the development of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies, the application scenarios of MEMS sensors will become more diverse. MEMS sensors are one of the important underlying hardware for artificial intelligence. The richer and more accurate the data collected by sensors, the more perfect the functions of artificial intelligence will be.
The core of the IoT ecosystem is sensing, connection, and computing. With the continuous growth of networking nodes, the requirements for the number and intelligence of smart sensors are also increasing. In the future, new industrial fields such as smart home, industrial Internet, Internet of Vehicles, and smart cities will bring a broader market space for the MEMS sensor industry. Due to its unique advantages, the application of MEMS sensors is by no means limited to wearable devices. In the future, the transmission infrastructure in the fields of medical care, artificial intelligence, and automotive electronics will rely on MEMS sensors for layout.
Judging from the current global development trend, the automotive industry and consumer electronics markets have developed enough to become the basis for the development of MEMS sensors. In the future, the trend of intelligent modernization in medical, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, smart cities and other application fields is obvious, and the development potential of MEMS sensors is great.
Future technology development trends:
(1) MEMS and sensors present a trend of highly integrated and combined functions. Due to increasingly tight design space, cost, and power budgets, integrating multiple sensitive components on the same substrate to make a multifunctional combined MEMS sensor that can detect multiple parameters has become an important solution.
(2) Sensor intelligence and edge computing. Software is becoming an important part of MEMS sensors. With the further integration of multiple sensors, more and more data needs to be processed, and software makes it possible to fuse multiple data. The development of MEMS products must start from the definition of system applications, develop intelligent sensors with software fusion functions, and promote the wider application of artificial intelligence in the field of sensors.
(3) The demand for low power consumption and self-supply of sensors is increasing day by day. With the rapid growth of sensing requirements for applications such as the Internet of Things, the number of sensors used will increase sharply, and energy consumption will also double accordingly. The need to reduce sensor power consumption, use environmental energy harvesting to achieve self-supply, and enhance battery life will accompany the development of sensors and become increasingly intense.
(4) MEMS evolves to NEMS. With the miniaturization and diversification of terminal equipment, the rapid development of microelectronic processing technology, especially nano-processing technology, the evolution of smart sensors to smaller sizes is the general trend. Similar to MEMS, NEMS (Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems) is a micro-nano system technology that focuses on the nanoscale field, but with a smaller size.
(5) The rise of new sensitive materials. Thin film piezoelectric materials have better process consistency, higher reliability, higher yield, smaller area, and can be used in MEMS actuators, speakers, haptic and touch interfaces, etc. The drive mode of future MEMS devices is expected to shift from traditional electrostatic comb drive to piezoelectric drive.
(6) Larger wafer size. Compared with the 6-inch and 8-inch wafer manufacturing processes commonly used in the industry, a larger wafer size can greatly reduce costs and increase production, and the expansion of wafer size and the reduction of chip feature size are corresponding promotions. and promote each other. For example, MEMS products manufactured on 12-inch wafer process lines have emerged