ipXchange’s Post

Transcript

And I PX, we are again at Census Converge 2024, where we're meeting Lewis who? Is an award winner, and we're going to talk about why his company MI is an award winner. He's going to tell you all about motion sensors and how incredibly clever they are. So first of all, let's talk about why you've won an award. OK, well we developed the world's first three axis navigation grade chip scale multi access accelerometer. That's a mouthful. So tell me what that actually means. Well, Celeron meters and gyros are inertial sensors for all of you with designing things where you want to measure and monitor the movement or you want to do navigation platform stabilization for cameras, for example, you're going to use inertial sensor. And most time it's going to be a MEMS inertial sensor because they're the most affordable. And unbreakable and unbreakable, yeah, especially ours, right. So if you look at the motion sensor market, you can have a consumer, the consumer market where you know, without saying, without being derogatory way, but it's sort of at the lower end of technology, lower end of cost. And then you can go right down into, you know, sort of. Very ******** maybe defence type motion sensors. Incredibly expensive, incredibly accurate, yeah, but out of reach of the mainstream. So what? What What I understand from your business is you sort of sit in the middle. Yeah. Would that be right? Yeah, We actually we've developed an inertial sensor that give you the performance of a 15 to $20,000 sensor. Yeah, but at the cost of something that's industrial or even consumer grade. We're going to be licensing the technology to startups that we'd like to work with, enabling their applications and also large companies and projects that they have like R&D projects, new product applications that ideas that they have now for the first time. Will be affordable enough to be able to do them right So what's the technology that you bring in in terms of you know understanding how how how these products work you know we sort of understand how for instance, if you talk about maybe the GPS is not available or environments like that what what what's the what's the actual technology that sits behind how you do that obviously not giving away secrets, but what what's actually going on because this is a you know this is a very complicated. One might say. Bit bit black magic, isn't it? A bit. It's a bit. It's well, you know, we're we're in some strange areas here. In a way, Yeah. But there's one easy way to put it. We have a, we have a big *** mass. Right. So we got a meeting, we got a big proof mass, right. And we managed to put that proof mass in a hermetically sealed cavity, get the signals out of the proof mass. And that's a key part of our intellectual property or IP. And so we were the first to do that, first to do that at a commercial foundry where you can make many, many devices, large volume commercial foundry. And so we could stand up our production process at these foundries, work with them to make our devices in the millions or 10s of millions of units for industries like automotive, autonomous vehicles, healthcare, Med tech, sports, performance space, commercial space, specially low Earth orbit, which is a big focus of ours. So we're kind of robust enough to last and very challenging environments like space, but we're small enough and cheap enough to go into things. Like an AR headset. To do head tracking. As well as platform stabilization, stabilization for a camera, right, Right. So if you're familiar with the assured position, navigation timing, so you can do dead reckoning or you do navigation without the GPS when you're in that situation, when it gets blocked or jammed, it goes to the ICU, what we do. And the higher the grade that MU, the longer you could do GPS you could do. Position navigation without the GPS, right? So suddenly there's a, but it opens the door for a lot of different applications, not just replacing expensive parts in existing legacy systems, but also creating new markets or new ideas for application. So we like to work with subject matter experts, people that are designing things for different products and come up with new ideas because we may also change the actual design of the device as well. So I'm just trying to gather my thoughts. Well, while, while, while you're talking, because this is quite this is a complicated, this is a complicated area. Yeah. So if, if, if, if what would be the you you've mentioned things like drones potentially and medical. So if when when I asked you before we started chatting, I asked you what how would you solve the problem if you didn't exist and you said you wouldn't be able to. Yeah. Well, so if you, if you're familiar with Fitbit wearables, yes, they all wear a consumer grade devices. They use consumer grade MEMS. So I have one of these, but the data that it gives you is really kind of a glorified step counter. If you're trying to do AI or machine learning or what they call tiny ML, which is at the edge, you're trying to compute at the edge. You need higher accuracy data. For better software, right. So we always say that you can't software your way to a better sensor. We're starting off with a better sensor and then you're going to get better software from the better sensor. So what you just described there was if you are in, if you're if you're let's say doing edge computing or you're doing something you know involving AI and you're taking in a lot of data, we all know about that. But what you've just described there was. It's almost, you know, you're only as good as the sensor gives you. Yeah, in order to make that solution work. So that's why your your positioning senses are so key in those types of applications because. It's the old fashioned cliche, which is only as good as what you put in. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, we it's garbage in, garbage out. When you do AI, right. So you get you have to get the highest accuracy data that you can to build your datasets. That's like key. We're offering the highest value inertial data, the highest accuracy, which inertial data is very expensive. You go from a consumer grade device to industrial grade. It's the difference between 1 or $2000 per access. When you get the tactical or navigation grade, you're talking anywhere from. Five to 10,000 or more for access. So if you want a three axis, that's Romer, you're spending a lot. Yeah. So it depends on how badly you need the accuracy right now you may need the accuracy, but you can't afford the sensor now. You can't if you're working with us and we're, you know, collaborating with you, we're licensing the technology to you and we're actually looking for people that have really good, cool applications ideas because right now we should know. Maybe 30% of how of the total market they could address right now. Yeah, because people are going to look at and say, wait, I actually, I, I have an idea now I could do that. Now I get that, get that kind of data for my software for my center Fusion. And so I want to use it for this particular niche area. So we're really, really interested in that and kind of enabling the applications development. So that's very interesting because if you, if you know, we spend our whole, if you go and look at our library of videos. And you look at what we've been talking about in the last 12 months. We've been talking about machine learning, we've been talking about AI, we've been talking about sensors, we've been talking about low power. We've been talking about all those environments that you've just been talking about. But we've never been talking about, umm, sensor. We've never position sensor. That's very interesting because you all of a sudden made a point that in actual fact, if you want that kind of data, you need a very different kind of sensor. Your time has come because of the need. That higher use of high quality data that you can get before at the cost that you're offering it. That's right. That's right. So I mean IoT devices are edge devices. They all have multiple MEMS sensors. Yeah, not just inertial, but pressure sensor, magnetometer or time of flight sensor. That sensor right. But they're Mens. So MEMS technology enables these low cost sensors. Originally gyros, accelerometers came from defense, they came from missile guidance systems. And then we just kept. Drinking them and drinking them, and they eventually ended up in a smartphone from 2010. So that's when they were first adopted in Mass, right? So we're still at the beginning. And if you're young and you're doing design, get involved in robotics, get involved in space applications, pressure. Edge devices doing things at the edge, we work with AI chip companies, for example, to do more calculations at the edge because you're not going to be able to send your data to the cloud sometimes you're going to be stuck and you got to do things at the edge, you got to make decisions there so we're enabling that with much better data so you have much better software Yeah, OK, well we have a saying IP exchange, which is this must be alien technology. There's sometimes when I meet people and I think. It, you know, it, it's alien technology. And I think that you're right on the cusp of that. It takes a long time, yeah. It takes a long time to do R&D in this particular area. Yeah, like 10 to 15 years. Yeah. Yeah, we worked on the process technology for almost a decade. And then you're still taking risks because you don't know if it's gonna work, you don't know if you've patented it. So we kind of went through all of that and we went after a, in a market that only the big companies try to go after. They received a lot of government money for it. But they, they took, they, they took chances on technology that couldn't be transferred from a lab to a founder to a large volume foundry. We started our process technology development at the foundry. The other way around so that was a big difference, right, right. Yeah, manufacturability was really important from the beginning yeah. And my my cofounder and our. CTO developed a digital light processing chip, which is a really, really big deal in our space and that ended up in every overhead projector, most of the movie theater projectors that technology. So to be able to work with someone like, you know, amazing as far as long as we've been together. OK, So from from our point of view, this is an introductory where sensors 2020 tends to converge as they call it 2024. This is an award winner as far as I'm concerned. This is definitely right on the on the cusp of alien technology and understanding how you take, quite frankly, defense technology into the mainstream coming from the manufacturing starting point as opposed to the other end of how most people start. A company called me. I thank you very much for that introduction about that. Great. Thank you. We will talk more, I think definitely appreciate it. Thanks. Are you where my engineers, Sir?