“Hi, Your health is pretty good based on your recent daily life, exercise frequency, and mental information.” Please do not surprise while the earphone tell you the above message one day. It will come true in the next few years. The multi-sensing single-chip technology developed by National Chip Implementation Center (CIC), National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) could realize the micro, cheap, and low-power single chip to let wearable and internet-of-thing (IOT) devices more smart and powerful!

As IOT and wearable devices will ramp up, sensor chip will be used more widely. Yole forecasts the year-over-year (YoY) growth rate of senor chip during 2014~2019 is 13% and the sensor market reaches $24 billion in 2019. Taiwan has the great semiconductor IC technology, the global market share of wafer manufacturing and design industry were as high as 60% and 12%; however sensor chip still is in its infancy, sensing chip design industry accounts less than 1% of global.

Sensor chip technologies currently are all owned in the foreign companies. The three categories (sports, environmental, biomedical) of sensor chip need to have three different processes since the sport sensor chip needs movable structure and the environmental and biomedical sensor needs gold or platinum metal. When a piece of wearable (such as smart phones, watches) or IOT device needs to have all these three sensing function, current technology is unable to integrate the different sensors together. Besides, current technology cannot integrate the sensor with system circuit. Thus, it is hard to make the minimum and low power devices, and increase the production cost.

This new technology, multi-sensing single-chip technology, is CIC collaborated with foundry to successfully integrate the movable structures with IC chip. Besides, it overcomes the difficulty to integrate the different metals in the semiconductor IC process to accomplish sport, environmental and biomedical sensors integration with IC. In the future single IC, it will include different sensor function, wireless, computing and memory.

It needs to use three different sensor chips, communication, and computing IC by current technology (left graph), NARL CIC multi-sensing single-chip technology could integrate these functions in one IC (right graph) to simplify the process, minimize the chip size and reduce the power consumption.

The multi-sensing single-chip technology is developed by Taiwan. It uses 8-inch wafer foundry, sensor/IC design and test technologies to realize the multi-sensing single chip by one standard process. The advantages of this technology are low cost, small size, low power, and flexible system integration. CIC will collaborate with foundry and assembly to promote the industrialization of this technology.

Since Taiwan academia has strong research capability, CIC also will co-work with academic research groups to development the innovative sensor chips. These emergency sensor chips could be production after the verification by company. The industry could cooperate with the academia to develop the key sensor single-chip IC for wearable and IoT devices by using CIC this new technology platform. Then Taiwan could play an important role in future smart sensor chip market to open a new opportunities for Taiwan IC industry.