Article written by Peter Brown for Electronics 360
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) intellectual property (IP) startup Omnitron Sensors is set to accelerate the mass production of a MEMS step-scanning mirror for multiple emerging markets.
The company raised $13 million in funding, which will allow its MEMS IP step-scanning mirror to potentially be used in electronic designs such as:
Optical cross-connects in AI data centers
Optical subsystems in long-range lidar for autonomous vehicles
See-through displays in extended reality headsets
Precision laser spectrometry for methane gas detection
Additionally, the funding will be used to expand its engineering and operation teams.
Omnitron Sensors said in AI data centers, MEMS-based photonics boost transmission speeds and reliability in low power devices. Additionally, the MEMS step-scanning mirror is expected to be used in lidar subsystems, a market predicted to reach $6.3 billion by 2027, according to Yole Intelligence. Finally, the MEMS mirror would help with display quality in XR headsets and eyewear.
Omnitron Sensors, a startup based in Los Angeles, Calif.,announced today it has secured a $13 million series A funding round, which it will use to accelerate mass production of its first product: MEMS step-scanning mirror for multiple markets.
Speaking to EE Times in a briefing this week, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Eric Aguilar, said the MEMS industry has been frustrated by a lack of innovation when it comes to repeatable, reliable and scalable manufacturing processes for MEMS sensors and MEMS mirrors. He and his co-founder Trent Huang, who had previously worked at Lumedyne Technologies and then Google after it was acquired, came together in 2019 to develop a scalable manufacturing process for MEMS devices.
In doing so, they formed Omnitron Sensors and developed their own process, which they now offer to customers as fabrication IP, as well as offering their own MEMS sensors. The company said that production of MEMS sensors has typically been limited by expensive, laborious manufacturing methods for decades. Omnitron’s fabrication IP will hence address the need for mass MEMS device deployment in optical cross-connects in AI data centers, optical subsystems in long-range LiDAR for autonomous navigation, see-through displays in extended reality (XR) headsets and eyewear, and precision laser spectrometry for methane gas detection.
Eric Aguilar (Source: Omnitron Sensors)
The company’s MEMS mirror is sampling at the moment, with its 3D step-scanning mirror said to meet the specs of frequency modulated continuous waveform LiDAR. Aguilar said they are expecting to get their first wafers from the Silex Microsystems fab soon, and that Omnitron has three letters of intent (LOI) already from customers: two for automotive LiDAR and the third for methane gas sensing.
In his prepared statement along with today’s announcement, Aguilar said, “MEMS sensors are the intelligent microscale devices that allow us to touch the world through silicon. Yet old and inefficient manufacturing methods have prevented the kind of growth in MEMS that is typical in semiconductors. That’s about to change. Our MEMS fabrication IP offers a new paradigm for mass-producing affordable, precise sensors at scale. With major investment from Corriente Capital and with additional funding from L’ATTITUDE Ventures, our company can now deliver on the promise of our technology.”
He added in his briefing with EE Times that the company will also use the money to expand its engineering team. At present, the company has 12 people, and he is hoping to increase this to 25 people during this year. In response to a question about when we will see the first products in production with customers, he said that the company would deliver to the first three with whom they have LOIs within the next 18-24 months.
You can watch more in this video interview with Aguilar, in which he shows Omnitron’s first sensor, and talks about the background to the company’s formation and some of the market challenges they are addressing.
Omnitron is targeting three key markets with its MEMS sensor technology:
AI data centers: Improving throughput and energy efficiency with its MEMS-based photonics OXC for tensor architectures, which boosts transmission speed and reliability in a low-power device, enhancing AI workflow in data centers. According to New Street Research, this market will approach $30 billion in 2027.
LiDAR: Advancing affordability and reliability of LiDAR in AVs, with its MEMS step-scanning mirror targeting overall LiDAR subsystems market predicted to reach $6.3 billion by 2027, according to Yole Intelligence.
Resource-constrained XR headsets/eyewear: Omnitron said its MEMS mirror satisfies growing demand for XR optics, a market that IDTechEx expects will exceed $5 billion by 2034.
Omnitron Sensors, which makes MEMS sensor chips, has raised $13 million to create inexpensive sensors for self-driving cars. If it works, we could say goodbye to those big spinning domes atop autonomous vehicles.
The investment will fuel the expansion of Omnitron’s engineering and operations teams, accelerating the mass production of the company’s first product: a reliable, affordable microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) step-scanning mirror for multiple markets. MEMS have been used in everything from a Nintendo Wii to tire pressure sensors.
Corriente Advisors led the round with participation from longtime investor L’Attitude Ventures.
Streamlining the production of MEMS sensors — which have been limited by expensive, laborious manufacturing methods for decades — Omnitron’s fabrication intellectual property is the critical enabler for optical cross-connects (OXCs) in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, optical subsystems in long-range LiDAR for autonomous navigation, see-through displays in extended reality (XR) headsets and eyewear, and precision laser spectrometry for methane gas detection.
The sensors can go into OXCs for AI data centers, and optical subsystems for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), drones, XR headsets, toxic gas-detection systems and other connected electronics that are integral to our daily lives.
Sensor-driven markets
Omnitron Sensors has raised $13 million.
Omnitron is targeting major markets with its MEMS sensor technology:
Improving throughput and energy efficiency in AI data centers: Omnitron’s MEMS-based photonics OXC for Tensor architectures boosts transmission speed and reliability in a low-power device, enhancing AI workflow in data centers. According to New Street Research, this market will approach $30B in 2027.
Advancing affordability and reliability of LiDAR in autonomous vehicles: Omnitron’s MEMS step-scanning mirror targets an overall LiDAR subsystems market predicted to reach $6.3B by 2027, according to Yole Intelligence.
Enhancing display quality in resource-constrained XR headsets/eyewear: Omnitron’s MEMS mirror satisfies growing demand for XR optics, a market that IDTechEx expects will exceed $5B by 2034.
“MEMS sensors are the intelligent microscale devices that allow us to touch the world through silicon,” said Aguilar. “Yet old and inefficient manufacturing methods have prevented the kind of growth in MEMS that is typical in semiconductors. That’s about to change. Our MEMS fabrication IP offers a new paradigm for mass-producing affordable, precise sensors at scale. With major investment from Corriente Capital and with additional funding from L’Attitude Ventures, our company can now deliver on the promise of our technology.”
Origins
Omnitron Sensors’ MEMS chip.
Founded in 2019 by a core group of MEMS industry innovators, Omnitron Sensors has invented new MEMS fabrication IP that improves device performance and reliability and streamlines assembly to produce MEMS sensors for price-sensitive, high-volume markets.
Aguilar was pretty frank about how the company, which now has 12 people, got started. He used to work at companies like Google and Tesla, working on LiDAR systems. He thought of LiDAR as the “bane of my existence.”
He started the company with CTO Trent Huang, a quantum computing and MEMS manufacturing expert.
“I’m a nerd, and I’ve spent my career building or integrating sensors into robots so that they could see and operate in the real world. It’s [in] working with these sensors, specifically LiDAR, that I saw the promise of what LiDAR could do for robots. But I also directly experienced the frustration with using LiDAR in real-world applications. Even though billions of dollars have been spent in bringing LiDAR to the market, we don’t see it in every car. What is driving that issue is not necessarily a sexy word, but it’s reliability.”
He said the sensors often fail after just a few months of operating on the road. That has been the bottleneck for the big automakers, who don’t want to service a car for the sake of replacing a sensor.
Aguilar said, “That’s why LiDAR hasn’t made it into the market. And with my background in building these technologies, and being a good engineer, I would visit these suppliers and go, Hey, what the heck’s going on?”
He saw a big opportunity in the semiconductor fabrication processes and how to make them reliable. That’s why he formed the team five years ago, and went to work on a plan to replace one of the moving parts with tiny little mirrors made with MEMS tech, where mechanical features are etched into semiconductors so that they have tiny little moving parts. In this case, they’re little mirrors on a chip that can move.
Now on its third round of capital, the company is refining its chips, which contain a 10-millimeter-diameter mirror (that’s the gold part in the middle of the chips). It articulates 60 degrees, moving left and right, and it has a one-millisecond settling time. That’s very fast, and it meets the requirements of a LiDAR system, Aguilar said.
“That has been what has really got our customers interested. And because of that interest, we were able to secure three letters of intent, two in the automotive industry, one in the energy sector, and valued at hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.
How it works
A LiDAR dome sits atop this Waymo self-driving car.
LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. LiDAR systems measure distance by shooting a high-powered infrared laser at a target and closely measuring the pulse that bounces back. It works well whether it’s day or night.
A LiDAR sensor is a great solution in theory for a self-driving car. It senses the world around the car, which then analyzes whether there are any safety threats while a car is driving itself. It essentially reproduces the situational awareness that any human driver has.
But the LiDAR relies on a laser that it shoots out from the car. The light hits objects and bounces back, and that helps paint a picture of the environment in a digital form. The system receives the signal back and then calculates where the object is and in what direction it is moving. A processor takes all those points in a “point cloud” and then makes sense of all of the data.
Each LiDAR system has a laser. It also has a scanner, something that projects the laser into the world, and a receiver that gets the signal back.
The spinning device in a LiDAR sensor is scanning the environment, spraying out laser light and measuring the millions of points in a scene as the light bounces back. It’s scanning the environment. The mirror is akin to a big spinning disco ball. A photo detector is like a camera that captures the light.
It’s a moving component that spins the LiDAR around so it can get a 360-degree view of the environment. The challenge in a moving car is that this all has to happen fast because the environment changes as the car moves along.
The laser galvo, short for galvanometer, is an optical device that moves a mirror in response to electrical signals, usually in the laser galvo scanner. The movement of the mirror allows for precise control of the laser beam’s direction and focus. The MEMS chips can replace this device at a fraction of the cost.
“That’s the big disruption that we’re bringing to the market. And that’s what we’re changing inside of the LiDAR unit,” said Aguilar said. “It’s a lot cheaper and it’s more reliable. That’s what silicon does.”
Progress toward production
A wafer with a bunch of Omnitron Sensors’ MEMS chips on it.
To bring the product to market, the company had to design a new semiconductor process for manufacturing the MEMS devices to be smaller, cheaper and faster. The MEMS chip makers weren’t ready for this kind of advance, which is 10 times more dense than others on the market.
“We had to go back to first principles and design a whole new technology node for MEMS to bring this to the market. And it’s a huge leap in density. So we built a much denser chip that allows us to achieve this performance,” Aguilar said.
As an example, one feature dubbed the aspect ratio for the MEMS devices is normally about 20 to one, and for Omnitron Sensors, the aspect ratio is 100 to one, or a trench within the chip that is five times deeper than normal.
Now the company has been receiving its first chips back from low-volume manufacturing, and it’s testing the parts for reliability. The company is using foundries, or contract manufacturers that make chips, located in the U.S. to make the sensor chips.
But going from the “lab to the fab,” or from testing to fabrication, is where “a lot of these technologies and companies die,” Aguilar said.
Now the company is moving from building chips on a few wafers of silicon a week to thousands a month so it can prove the reliability for the automotive customers, Aguilar said. That means moving to bigger MEMS factories with higher capacity. That prompted the funding round.
For each vehicle, there are likely to be four MEMS mirrors, and two per LiDAR system. The MEMS sensor is smaller and cheaper and doesn’t require as much power. There are rivals out there, including MEMS chip makers in China, but Aguilar believes he has a technological edge.
Besides cars, there are telecom, augmented reality and space communications devices that can use the tech.
Article written by Logan Wright for Investors Hangout
Omnitron Sensors Lands Over $13M to Revolutionize MEMS Technology
Omnitron Sensors, a leader in the MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) domain, has successfully secured more than $13 million in its Series A funding round. This significant investment was spearheaded by Corriente Advisors, LLC, along with contributions from the seasoned investor L’ATTITUDE Ventures. The funding will catalyze the expansion of Omnitron’s engineering capabilities and operations, which is crucial for accelerating the mass production of their innovative products.
Transforming the MEMS Sensor Landscape
At the heart of Omnitron’s latest product offerings is a step-scanning mirror that promises to provide reliability and affordability across a range of industries. Historically, the production of MEMS sensors has been stifled by outdated manufacturing practices that are often both costly and labor-intensive. Omnitron’s technological breakthroughs are set to change that narrative.
Mark Hart III, CEO of Corriente Advisors, expressed a strong belief in the transformative power of Omnitron’s technology. He stated, “Omnitron Sensors has achieved the quantum leap in MEMS fabrication technology for which the industry has been waiting. By developing a fabrication process that produces high-performance, cost-effective, and durable MEMS sensors, Omnitron is poised to meet the pressing demands of various burgeoning markets.”
Targeted Market Segments
Omnitron is strategically focusing on several key markets, utilizing their MEMS sensor technology:
Enhancing AI Data Centers: Omnitron’s MEMS-based optical cross-connects (OXC) are designed to improve the efficiency and energy consumption of AI data centers, with projections indicating that this market could grow to around $30 billion in the near future.
LiDAR Technology in Autonomous Vehicles: The firm aims to tackle the accessibility and dependability of LiDAR for self-driving cars. Analysts forecast that the LiDAR subsystems market could approach $6.3 billion as advancements continue.
Improving XR Headset Displays: Their MEMS technology also addresses the growing needs for superior display quality in XR (extended reality) devices, which is projected to reach a market size of over $5 billion by the mid-2030s.
The Future of Manufacturing MEMS Sensors
In the words of Eric Aguilar, co-founder & CEO of Omnitron Sensors, “MEMS sensors are the intelligent microscale devices that allow us to touch the world through silicon. However, traditional manufacturing methods have inhibited the growth we see in semiconductor technologies. Our innovations are on the verge of changing that landscape. With significant backing from Corriente Capital and L’ATTITUDE Ventures, we are ready to meet the demands of the market with our next generation of MEMS sensors.”
The Essence of Omnitron Sensors
Founded in 2019, Omnitron Sensors has quickly positioned itself as a frontrunner in MEMS technology innovation. The firm specializes in the development of new MEMS fabrication techniques that enhance device performance and reliability, while also streamlining the assembly processes necessary to create cost-effective sensors for various high-demand markets. Applications include advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), drones, and gas detection systems, all of which play vital roles in contemporary technology.
For those wishing to reach out for further discussions about Omnitron’s cutting-edge innovations, visit their official website.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the significance of the funding received by Omnitron Sensors?
The funding will enable Omnitron to enhance its engineering and operational capabilities, boosting the production of their MEMS sensor technologies.
What markets is Omnitron targeting with its MEMS sensors?
Omnitron is focusing on AI data centers, autonomous vehicles through LiDAR sensors, and enhanced displays for XR devices.
How long has Omnitron Sensors been in operation?
Omnitron Sensors was founded in 2019 and has rapidly advanced its MEMS technology since then.
What is the main advantage of Omnitron’s MEMS technologies?
The main advantage lies in their ability to produce affordable and high-performance sensors that can meet demands across various high-volume markets.
Who are the key investors in Omnitron Sensors?
The key investors include Corriente Advisors, LLC and L’ATTITUDE Ventures, both of which bring substantial expertise and resources to support Omnitron’s growth.
