From personal mobile devices, to wearables, smart homes, offices, cars, and more, people are using more and more sensors. Sensor functionality is evolving rapidly, from making our phones more intuitive and lighting solutions more intelligent to conserving battery power and enabling breakthrough medical technologies. Sensors therefore play a key role in many applications in fields such as mobile and consumer, automotive, or industrial. One thing is constant across the fields: the challenging demand for high performance (high sensitivity, low power consumption) often in combination with small size and low cost. This drives the need for sensor integration with electronics and other system components. For a sensor solutions provider like ams AG and process and equipment suppliers like APC, Boschman and Bühler this means that they have to be at the forefront of sensor integration to be competitive in their respective markets, a goal that can only be achieved by close collaboration.
HIOS – “Highly Integrated Optoelectronic Sensor” addresses this need for collaborative innovation for the growing market for intelligent light sensors. In particular HIOS aims to develop and launch the world’s first light sensor with fully integrated optical stack including multiple filters, lenses and an aperture replacing multiple discrete components. The 3D sensor, IC filter and Wafer Level Optics integration technology developed in the HIOS project enables to bring cost-efficient, very small, and high-performance sensor to the market but can also be applied to multiple other sensor applications.
For this reason a high-volume production environment for 3D / Through Silicon Via (TSV) has been set up by ams AG which is now extended by equipment and processes for on-chip inorganic optical filters and wafer level molding to form on-chip optical components.
Market opportunity lies in growth markets that have a high demand for low size and/or low cost, but cannot compromise on quality, and are therefore a perfect fit to the HIOS products. The three main markets are:
• Wearable Market
• Low Cost Consumer Market (smart phones, cellular)
• Smart Lighting Market
Objectives
1. Wafer Level Molding with best-in-class alignment accuracy and process control
2. Tailored Filter design with tightest pass bandwidth control; low stress filter deposition to enable multiple filters
3. Light sensors of smallest size and lowest system cost at best optical performance simplifying assembly and enabling a new class of very thin consumer products
