Sunday, March 04, 2007
Benedetto Vigna: The Man Behind the Chip Behind the Wii
An interesting article in IEEE about where the designer of the MEMS motion sensor in Nintendo’s Wii wants to take it next.
Vigna says the Wii has been the biggest application of all “because the MEMS chip is the core of the product.” (To be sure, the motion detector doesn’t do the whole job by itself; an infrared system helps, by setting the player’s initial position.)
In recognition of his work, ST recently made Vigna the general manager of its MEMS product division. That means he has to plan for the long term.
First he wants to make the sensor even smaller, even cheaper, even tougher. “I want it to fit in all kinds of places—shoes and textiles, for instance, where it might be useful for medical monitoring,” he says.
“Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope, to measure rotation around three different axes. Today, such products are quite big, a cube 10 centimeters on a side. We want to do this in less than a 30-millimeter cube, to serve as an image stabilizer in cameras and to track a person’s position in the intervals when he can’t get a GPS signal.”
Better still, he adds, would be to throw in a magnetic detector, freeing the navigator from GPS altogether. It would be yet another marvel from Lilliput—the smallest compass ever sold.