MegaChips Partners with Bosch Sensortec
MegaChips Corporation has announced a partnership with Bosch Sensortec to provide a complete reference design for use in smartphones, wearables and other personal devices allowing consumers to monitor their activities in real time. Available immediately, the reference design provides both context and location awareness for health, fitness and indoor navigation monitoring and tracking applications.
Research firm ABI forecasts 42 million wearable fitness and health devices would be shipped in 2014, up from 32 million in 2013. This market growth is fueled by the proliferation of low-power microchips and sensors such as those from MegaChips and Bosch Sensortec. MegaChips' ultra-low power frizz, combined with the SiTime SiT1602 programmable MHz oscillator and the Bosch Sensortec MEMS sensors BMI160, BMM150 and BME280 provide more meaningful data, easy interpretation, higher accuracy and ultra-low power critical for longer battery life.
"With each generation, devices are getting smaller and more accurate," said Utah Iwasaki, manager, business development MegaChips Technology America Corporation. "Our new joint solution with first-rate sensors from Bosch enables longer lasting wearable devices that collect more accurate data on movement, speed, distance and direction. We can, for instance, track how someone is moving their arms and legs, which is great for golf swing analysis."
Jeanne Forget, director global marketing at Bosch Sensortec said, "MegaChips has an excellent reputation for providing high-performance, ultra-low power chips that are important in consumer electronics. We are delighted to partner with MegaChips to complement our broad MEMS sensor portfolio. With our joint technologies we can create superior wearable devices that give people tremendous benefits in their everyday lives, such as longer battery life and new applications."
Piyush Sevalia, executive vice president of marketing at SiTime Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of MegaChips, said, "SiTime's groundbreaking MEMS and programmable analog technologies allow us to deliver game-changing MEMS timing solutions. Our MHz and kHz solutions provide the best accuracy, the smallest size and the lowest power, all of which are ideally suited for wearable electronics and internet of things (IoT)."
Added Iwasaki, "We are developing technology to help people get healthier, and are in joint discussions with major wearable companies to bring these portable electronics to market quickly. As more people are engaging in some form of digital examination, the ability to collect real-time information about our bodies and our behaviour is crucial and will pave the way for changing how we manage our health and fitness. Bosch is the best partner for us to team up with to help empower this important evolution."
Frizz is a motion sensor hub with a 32bit DSP based motion engine called "ParaForce" that can realize high performance calculations used in processing algorithms with ultra-low power consumption in lieu of a microprocessor, which often runs at hundreds of MHz and consumes much higher power, thereby extending the runtime of portable devices. To facilitate a faster development cycle, MegaChips can provide an algorithm for indoor navigation, which utilizes the special functions from the ParaForce engine that are inside frizz. This innovative product is designed to accurately track altitude, motion, speed and direction. It empowers wearables that recognize sleep patterns, watch over elderly and find children lost in stores/malls.
