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.