Electronics Globalpress Summit Conference - News
roundup
Using cheap sensors to add cost-effective location and motion
capabilities to consumer products is the business of the Silicon
Valley company Sensor Platforms.
"Making use of what sensors are telling us requires a large
number of disciplines to come together. We supply the algorithms,
the heuristics and the chip," Ian Chen, executive vp at Sensor
Platforms told Electronics Weekly at the
Globalpress Summit
Conference in San Francisco yesterday.
One of Sensor Platforms' reference designs is for a 'natural
motion' interface for TVs. This means appointing device that allows
a TV viewer to manipulate images on a TV screen by moving a pointer
freely in three dimensional space. Sensor Platforms' reference
design for such a pointer can be implemented for a $10 BOM.
Other products cover position tracking, rotational media
vibration cancellers, and general purpose sensor control.
It helps GPS tracking in those situations where a signal gets
lost by providing low-power inertial navigation and dead reckoning.
It can also help with increasing vibration problems on HDDs as
these are using faster rotation speeds (>7200 RPM), smaller
track sizes and lighter platters which increase vibration, leading
to lower throughput and increased cost..
The 20 strong, San Jose company has ten IC designers and six
algorithm and software designers.