As sensors are deployed ever closer to the body frames of machines and people, the host platform becomes an active source of error.  Deformation, thermal gradients, vibration, packaging stress, and dynamic loading are becoming more pronounced in emerging autonomous systems, including ultralight wearables, robots, and compact mobile platforms where traditional MEMS capacitive sensors will struggle - especially accelerometers and gyroscopes.

 

We believe that the whole sensing stack must be rethought from the ground up, to maximise all available capabilities of silicon: mechanics, photonics, and compute. At Zero Point Motion, we are building an inertial sensing platform that combines MEMS with silicon photonics in a new mass scalable 8’inch process, working with two world leading foundries, while also developing the surrounding architecture in-house: lasers, detectors, packaging, control, and design and test infrastructure. 

This creates new surprises and new challenges, but it also opens a much larger design space for trading performance, robustness, and manufacturability. The hardest problems do not sit neatly inside one field, but in the seams in-between them. I will share what it means to build a startup in that environment, why cross-disciplinary thinking is essential, and why the next generation of sensing systems will be defined as much by architecture and execution as by the transducer itself.