The global market for MEMS surpassed US$50B in 2019 with 8% growth in value estimated over the next five years. This significant growth is projected from incumbent sectors of automotive and consumer, and from new applications in medical, machine health, smart buildings, new base stations, and edge computing. Unlike CMOS technologies, the highly diversified MEMS market typically requires a unique manufacturing process for each product. From 2018 to 2023, 14 new production-volume fabs (200 to 300 mm) will be added for MEMS and sensors in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Europe. For future technologies, strong R&D trends are seeking alternatives to silicon–sensors made on paper, plastics, and textiles. Maintaining relevant technology for CNDN will require agility to access new sources of commercial and R&D fabrication, and heterogeneous integration and packaging.

Our strategy will be to lower barriers to implementing designs in existing MPW processes by (1) attracting international customers to help make process runs more affordable and frequent, and (2) creating verified cells in the standard MIDIS process (for resonators, gyroscopes and accelerometers) for use as de-risked reference designs.