Market opportunities for advanced MEMS accelerometers and overview of actual capabilities vs. required specifications

The worldwide accelerometer business is split in two distinctive markets: The "movement monitoring and event detection" world in one hand, largely driven by the automotive business and low cost consumer business and the "measurement and control" world in the other hand, mainly driven by the aerospace and inertial navigation business and historically served principally by conventional relative high cost micro mechanical products. It took nearly 20 years until MEMS products achieved a commercial breakthrough in the automotive. Today, with a mature technology and high-volume production at low cost, MEMS acceleration sensors are in the best position to successfully move into traditional inertial applications and also to render possible newly emerging applications. The various domains constituting the worldwide market will be discussed in detail and required specifications for inertial sensing, tilt sensing and vibration sensing will be analyzed. Today, high performances MEMS capacitive accelerometers, offering the required long-term stability and vibration rectification error characteristics are produced to serve inertial guidance and navigation for aeronautic and defence applications. Furthermore, these products are offering advanced functionalities and are performing extremely well without degradation of specifications in rugged environments such as gun hard shocks with amplitudes higher than 20'000g. We propose to share qualification results and comment the actual performances available. Finally, future requirements will be presented and actual or future solutions will be discussed in more details.