The road to recovery from MEMS sensors led by automotive safety

Data shows that in 2014, the market size of MEMS components will reach 8 billion U.S. dollars, with an increase rate of about 14%. One of the important sources of growth will be automotive electronics, and the main application will be automotive safety.

With the continuous advancement of automotive technology, electronic products such as sensors continue to be applied to the automotive industry, playing a vital role in the automotive field. Reports have pointed out that the MEMS sensor market is gradually recovering after experiencing a five-year recession in the past. A large part of its recovery power comes from the development of a new generation of automotive devices and new applications.

The MEMS sensor boom caused by puncture hazards MEMS sensors can achieve a major reversal in the automotive sector, thanks to car tires. In August 2000, Bridgestone Corporation announced the recall of 6.5 million tires on Ford-produced SUVs due to tire punctures. This incident prompted the US government to enact legislation, mandatory requirements since September 2007 Every light vehicle that comes out of the factory needs to install a tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS). In addition, the United States also announced that by 2012 all new vehicles must use anti-rollover “electronic stability control technology” to reduce the number of people who die each year due to vehicle rollover. At this point, how to use MEMS sensors to effectively improve the performance of automotive safety systems has become a topic of concern to global automotive modules and vehicle manufacturers.

Car safety, eternal topic safety first, this is the eternal topic of the automotive industry. Automotive safety systems are generally divided into active safety systems and passive safety systems. The so-called active safety is to prevent the occurrence of accidents and determine the probability of automobile accidents. Passive safety is the protection of car members or the protection of crashed vehicles or pedestrians in the event of an accident. The severity of the injuries of the members.

In the era of smart cars, active safety technology has become a highly anticipated emerging field. In general, automotive active safety systems involving body control include: automotive roll control, automotive anti-skid stability control, anti-lock braking systems, parking brakes, and tires Pressure monitoring, suspension adaptive adjustment of vehicles and road conditions, and other systems, and MEMS sensors play an important role in active safety systems. Due to their small size and high reliability, these sensors can be mounted on vehicle frames and suspensions to monitor the relative position of the car to the ground, allowing the car to adjust the suspension, as well as sudden steering of the car, poor weather or road surface. Provides maximum stability when uneven.

Rollover and stability control can be said to be a new improvement to today's active safety systems that require MEMS acceleration sensors and angular velocity sensors to sense body attitude. Since such sensors are often installed in locations where vibration is relatively harsh, the sensors are required to have high vibration shock resistance, which is also a technical difficulty for MEMS sensors.

Smart car safety system, two new development trends At present, one of the trends in the development of smart car safety systems is the rapid increase in the number of airbags and the loading rate of the stability control (ESC) system. We know that one of the characteristics of automotive technology development is that more and more components are electronically controlled. Therefore, as a result, the number and scale of electronic systems are continuously expanding. In particular, more MEMS sensors are required to sense different parts of the collision and the body posture. At the same time, the integration of multiple sensors reduces system complexity and system costs, and is another major trend in the development of automotive safety systems.