Breaking the Sensor Ceiling: The Next Shift in Semiconductor MEMS

Ever wondered what enables the creation of chip-scale sensors in your phone, car, drone, or robot? The answer is micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), one of the quiet success stories of modern engineering. MEMS brought sensors to semiconductor scale, from microphones, timing oscillators and pressure sensors, to inertial sensors: accelerometers and gyroscopes that measure motion to underpin navigation and autonomy when the outside world cannot be trusted.

MEMS has now reached a ceiling, and inertial sensing feels it most. Electrical readout demands dense electrode arrays that constrain designs and amplify the effects that drive drift: packaging stress, vibration susceptibility, temperature swing, and parasitics. Drift accumulates and navigation accuracy decays over time. These problems are brutally hard to eliminate because they are system-level, coupled across mechanics, electronics, packaging, and the real world, so performance does not improve by moving to smaller process nodes.

Breaking this ceiling is not an incremental tweak. This talk explains what it takes, and how we are doing it at Zero Point Motion by using silicon photonics as a new readout building block. By measuring motion with light, we open a path to extreme precision and, ultimately, quantum-limited regimes, redefining what “semiconductor-grade” sensitivity can mean. We close with why defining this next generation of sensors requires talent beyond traditional MEMS and semiconductor silos.