Dec 12, 2012 Demand for recently opened MEMS fabrication platform increasing; company now taking orders for May 2013 NF-Shuttle
InvenSense, Inc. (NYSE: INVN), the leading provider of MotionTracking™ devices, for consumer electronics, today announced that its 3rd NF-Shuttle, that allows 3rd-party developers to build MEMS prototypes on the company’s proprietary MEMS fabrication process, is scheduled to launch on January 7. The company also announced it is now taking orders for its 4th NF-Shuttle, which is slated to launch in May 2013. NF-Shuttle designs are fabricated on the same NF Platform that produced several hundred million inertial MEMS units for InvenSense.
Fari Assaderaghi, Vice President of Advanced Technology at InvenSense noted, “Opening our NF Platform, this past May, to outside developers was a precedent-setting event for the MEMS industry. We are finding the decision to be rewarding to InvenSense, universities, research institutions and other MEMS developers that are seeking to accelerate their development timeframes. We are excited about the demand we have experienced to date and are looking forward to increasing our subscriber base over the coming year.”
Professor Bernhard Boser, Professor of Electrical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley said, “For a DARPA-funded project on next-generation gyroscopes, we were in need of a fabrication process that allows for tight integration of a mechanical transducer and ultra-low noise electronics, and one that would provide silicon in a quick turnaround time. We found the InvenSense NF-Shuttle to be particularly well suited for our needs. Due to our success with the program, we are looking forward to fabricating additional designs on the NF Platform.”
About the NF-Shuttle
The InvenSense NF-Shuttle is a silicon CMOS-MEMS platform where mask costs are split amongst multiple users as they can purchase "seats" on the same mask. This approach reduces production costs for participants to a fraction of the total and thus provides a greater opportunity to verify their advanced designs and prototypes in silicon. To learn more about participating in InvenSense’s NF-Shuttle Program, please contact InvenSense at nfshuttle@invensense.com
About InvenSense’s Proprietary Fabrication Platform
The InvenSense NF Platform is able to combine MEMS on CMOS (also known as CMOS-MEMS) in a small, cost effective standard package resulting in significant performance, reliability, integration and cost benefits. The combining of a MEMS wafer with an industry standard CMOS wafer allows InvenSense to reduce the number of MEMS manufacturing steps, perform wafer-level testing, and use chip-scale packaging, thereby reducing back-end costs of packaging and testing and improving overall yield. The InvenSense approach is proven to address MEMS electrical interconnect issues, hermetically seals MEMS structures at the wafer level and enables standard low-cost semiconductor packaging and testing. The NF Platform has enabled the development of world class inertial sensors with the industry’s lowest noise performance, lowest power consumption, and smallest package size. Two leading semiconductor foundries, Global Foundries and TSMC, installed the InvenSense patented and proprietary fabrication platform on their 8” CMOS production lines.
InvenSense Inc. (NYSE: INVN) is the world’s leading provider of MotionTracking™ solutions for consumer electronic devices. The company’s patented NF Platform and patent-pending MotionFusion™ technology address the emerging needs of many mass-market consumer applications via improved performance, accuracy, and intuitive motion- and gesture-based interfaces. InvenSense technology can be found in consumer electronic products including smartphones, tablets, gaming devices, optical image stabilization, and remote controls for Smart TVs. The company’s MotionTracking products are also being integrated into a number of industrial applications. InvenSense is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and has offices in China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and Dubai.
