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Nanusens embeds its MEMS sensors in digital design, crowdfunds for development

Nanusens embeds its MEMS sensors in digital design, crowdfunds for development

Technology News |
By Nick Flaherty



Nanusens has developed a fully digital circuit design to measure the capacitance of its nanosensors in a single CMOS chip and is raising funds for a sub-180nm design.

The design allows the sensor structure and its detection circuitry can be made at the same time within a chip using standard CMOS processes on whatever process node is required. As a result, ASICs can now be made with several different sensors embedded within them.

The integration of the sensor and digital controller as IP blocks can reduce cost and size as it replaces discrete sensor packages.

Nanusens is currently fundraising on Crowdcube to provide the funds to port this technology to a range of smaller nodes to meet customer requirements. It has exceeded its £300,000 target.

The digital detection circuit provides 3 microsecond switching, compared to 300 microseconds or even several milliseconds in conventional analog transconductance/charge amplifier circuits. This is key for applications requiring a very low sampling frequency, such as motion detector applications where the motion detector is typically used to wake up the rest of the device. If the device is in sleep mode most of the time, then the battery life is very dependent on the current consumption of the motion detector.

The fast switching of the digital detection circuit results in sub micro-ampere current consumption on the 180nm test chip, allowing twice the battery life.

“This is a major milestone for the company,” said Dr. Josep Montanyà, CEO of Nanusens, which is based in the UK to access the crowd funding with design in Spain.

“The first was successfully making our unique, nanoscale, sensor structures within the CMOS layers. This solves the problem that conventional MEMS have to be made on custom production lines that have limited production capabilities whereas we can make almost unlimited numbers of our sensors in CMOS fabs. These are available in standard packages such as LGA, QFN, WLCSP and others, but, like all other MEMS sensors, they require analog circuitry to detect tiny capacitance changes coming from nano-displacements of their devices in operation. Our breakthrough is the creation of a fully digital detection circuit as this can be scaled down to the process node being used for the sensor structure and pairs to form a complete sensor and detection solution.

“Being able to shrink the pair simultaneously enables us to take advantage of all the benefits of using smaller CMOS geometries such as reduced costs and, importantly, reduced power consumption of more than 10x compared to analog detection circuits. This is impossible for other MEMS sensor solutions as their structures cannot be shrunk neither can their analog circuits as their transistors need a large area to maintain the required low levels of noise.”

 “This is a revolution for the sensor industry,” said Montanyà. “Instead of being discrete packages on a PCB or a multi-die solution, all the required sensors can be integrated into an ASIC just like another IP block. This will provide a major reduction in the BOM, size and power requirements of many, multi-sensor devices, especially portable ones such as smart phones, ear buds, and smart watches. We are already in discussion with companies who want to license this IP.”

“Since our last raise we have made significant advances in our technology development, we have got our first patent granted, and we are currently testing devices in silicon with potential future customers evaluating them. With our technology we aim to enable a massive deployment of MEMS devices into all kinds of portable and electronic devices, using the funds from this round to help achieve this,” said the company.

Further details are at https://www.crowdcube.com/companies/nanusens/pitches/bdpADb

www.nanusens.com

 

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