January 29, 2007
Cashing in on gyros
The Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controller helped create a new market for accelerometers, most commonly used to deploy airbags and part of the product group known as Mems (microelectricalmechanical systems).
STMicroelectronics, Europe’s biggest chipmaker, has just created a standalone division for Mems for what its director, Benedetto Vigna, describes as an era of consumerisation of the technology.
He told us today he expects the success story to continue with the gyroscope – not that large spinning wheel on an axis, but a silicon chip version, activated electrically and disturbed in a range of only 10 to 100 atoms to detect side-to-side movement and orientation.
The PlayStation 3’s controller has an accelerometer and a gyroscope, making it more sophisticated than the Wii, but Sony has yet to exploit all the possibilities through software.
STMicro sees a big market in mobile phones for these Mems devices. Camera phones that need image stabilisation can benefit from accelerometers and gyroscopes combined. STMicro says its solution can be just 1mm thick, much smaller than standard piezoelectric sensors, while being cheaper and consuming less power.
Other applications include scrolling through Web pages or maps by just tipping the phone, location-based services and even a pedometer application that calculates distances walked and calories used.
Pictures on a handset can switch from portrait to landscape mode automatically as it’s rotated and silencing the phone in a meeting can be as simple as turning it face down and tapping it.
STMicro’s biggest market right now is computers, with around 30m laptop hard drives equipped with “free-fall” technology that “parks” them to avoid data loss if the notebook is dropped.
