Sensor trends in consumer applications

1. After smart sensors, wearable is undoubtedly a big explosive market.

Because smart phones start from the phone, such a basic communication function adds many intelligent functions. However, wearability is totally different. It starts from the original needs of people, which is more suitable for the convenience of using electronic products. For example, there are a lot of physical and sports detection, including physical signs, in wearable Therefore, it is more people-oriented products.

Wearable products have actually been up for a long time. Eight years ago, some American companies like Fitbit started to do it very early, but they didn't get up very quickly. There are several big reasons.

First, the hardware technology at that time was not good enough.

Second, the communication technology has not been well developed. The wearable sensor technology on 5g platform, including our motion sensor, has greatly reduced the power consumption, including MCU base, Bluetooth, etc., which is very different from that seven or eight years ago.

Now wearable is not only wearable, but also has formed a very close relationship with mobile phones. A large amount of computation can be done by mobile phones, but some very personalized human related calculations are completed in wearability. Including your watch, the watch is combined with TWS earphone, which forms a closed loop. The detection of human signs, including some simple communication, can be well completed.

2. In the future, sensors will find a balance between performance and price.

Price competition is of course an eternal theme in the consumer market.

Sensors provide two concepts, one is function and the other is performance. More and more applications are related to performance. Better performance requires more accurate sensors, or the following ASIC processing will be more complex. In the past, there were no requirements for sensors in mobile phone applications, mainly at the functional level, and there were no high-performance requirements. Maybe we would simply pursue low prices. But with the requirements for performance, the trend of future sensors will find a proper balance between performance and price.

The performance of the sensor involves two aspects: the first is the accuracy of a single sensor; the second is whether the combination of multiple data can be achieved. Through a variety of data, some things can be calculated to produce new performance and new data.

3. Location physical spatial information is very important.

In addition to the watches, headphones and so on, there are many consumer applications. We define them as industrial products, such as sweeping robots and POS machines. Now more and more motion sensors are installed on POS machines to track them. I believe that this concept will soon be applied to high-value logistics on a large scale.

At the same time, all smart home related applications, including even smart door locks, are also more and more installed with some positioning sensor systems based on motion sensors.

4. Modular sensors are definitely the direction.

With the development of the Internet of things, the basic configuration of each unit includes communication, algorithm, etc., and if the sensor module is used, it can receive more different signals and generate more data volume and value. Modularity is equivalent to extending one antenna of the sensor. For example, in urban navigation, in addition to motion sensing and gyroscope, magnetic sensors are also needed to be put together to do fusion algorithm, so that better positioning can be achieved.

5. New sensor applications will be added to mobile phones.

In the future, more and more new sensors will be added to mobile phones, on the one hand, because we may make full use of the big computing platform of mobile phones; on the other hand, we will rely on mobile phones to realize a new feature function. For example, in terms of vision, if the non intelligent infrared sensor is added to the mobile phone, users will have some new feelings, such as the image can still be seen in a very dark place. In addition, some new sensor functions, such as hand-held ultrasound, can be added to the mobile phone, which can truly achieve the effect of home use.