Colibrys confirm the launch of the IRIS™ accelerometer family, the world's best open-loop MEMS accelerometer, to displace the traditional vibrating quartz and electromechanical solutions. MEMS establishes a new competition to historical high-end motion sensors, as typically offered by Honeywell, by pushing the boundaries of its performance, offering higher robustness at reduced cost in safety critical and harsh environment applications.

The first product released based on IRIS™ technology is RS9010.A. This ±10g sensor specifically designed for AHRS (Attitude Heading and Reference Systems) and mid accuracy navigation application offers an order of magnitude improvement over existing leading MEMS technology and now seriously compete with traditional vibrating quartz and electromechanical solutions. This product uses an open loop electronic interface, specifically designed for long term stability. The enhanced sensor design provides an overall composite repeatability of bias better than 1.5mg (17) for ±10g and a scale factor repeatability of 500ppm (17). The vibration rectification coefficient is 150μg/g².

“RS9010 will enable the AHRS designers to obtain excellent performance at reduced cost while benefitting from the inherently rugged MEMS sensor, which open new application opportunities and simplifies sensor handling during the manufacturing process” commented Soheil Habibi, Business Development Manager for Colibrys inertial sensors.

He added further “IRIS™ is a big step forward in realizing our vision to commercializing μg stability accelerometers with high shock resistance and high operating temperature, displacing the established vibrating quartz and electromechanical solutions. We believe that in near future, we will have μg stability accelerometers and high stability gyros based on MEMS technology, enabling a wide range of existing and new applications in the Defense and Aerospace markets”



About MEMS Technology

MEMS (Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems) are highly miniaturized devices that can realize a number of physical sensing functions including fluidics, optics and mechanics on a silicon chip using techniques similar to traditional integrated circuit process technology. MST (Microsystems) merge these sensing and or actuating functions combining them with electronic signal process chips to create highly miniaturized systems that enable enhanced levels of perception, control and performance.

Download Application Notes or call your local BFi OPTiLAS office for more details.

Colibrys release a new generation of sensors for harsh environment

BFi OPTiLAS Ltd is pleased to announce the addition of a new generation of sensors from Colibrys to its product range.

Colibrys is a world-leading supplier of standard and semi-custom MEMS based motion sensors to the harsh-environment (Military, Aerospace and Energy) and safety critical (Industrial and Instrumentation) applications. These include extremely low noise, shock resistant seismic sensors, high stability high shock inertial accelerometers and DC coupled capacitive vibration sensors.

VS9000 Wide Bandwidth Capacitive Accelerometers

New wide-bandwidth capacitive accelerometers from Colibrys have set new performance standards on vibration sensing and are set to take a share of the market in HUMS, aeronautics and railway technologies and automotive crash testing applications that have typically used piezoresistive sensors.

The recognized high performance level of capacitive sensors, well proven for inertial and seismic applications, is now also available for vibration sensing. The ever increasing requirements on vibration sensors in terms of reliability, long term stability, signal to noise, robustness, size and power can not be met anymore by the current piezoresistive sensor technology. The new extended bandwidth of the Colibrys capacitive sensors, combined with a high degree of miniaturization, make this new product family ideally suited to meet the increasing requirements of vibration measurement systems.

“It is part of our strategy to provide new advanced sensors for a wide range of vibration applications” said Philippe Krebs, Business Development Manager at Colibrys for vibration sensing. “This new VS9000 product has already been successfully qualified for safety critical railway technologies applications to improve security and comfort of passengers and demonstrators have already been integrated on bridges for preventive monitoring of the structure.”

MS9000 Inertial Sensors for the Harsh Environment

The MS9000 accelerometer is a new extra small, high end product dedicated to applications in the field of inertial sensing. The product has excellent long term bias stability, with an integrated temperature sensor suitable for the harsh environment.

These high quality sensors conform to MIL-STD-883-E as typically required by the aerospace, military and geophysical markets for which they were designed.

This new generation of products comes in a LCC20 (8.9mm x 8.9mm) ceramic package, some three times smaller than current sensors and in a variety of g ranges from ±2g to ±200g. These sensors can operate over extended temperature ranges, with just a few milli g bias stability guaranteed over the extended lifetime.

“These products have already been qualified by multiple preferred leading edge clients for AHRS, missile guidance and industrial applications, giving us strong confidence that the MS9000 is offering extremely competitive performance” commented Soheil Habibi, Business Development Manager for Inertial Sensing at Colibrys. “The smaller package size allows our customers to realize more compact and higher accuracy guidance and navigation systems especially in applications where performance and reliability are a pre-requisite. This product is a further step in our plan to offer compact and competitively priced sub milli g stability accelerometers in the coming year.”

MAGNETICS® new XFLUX cores are distributed air gap toroidal cores made from 6.5% SiFe material. A true high temperature material, with no thermal aging, XFLUX offers lower losses than powder iron cores and superior DC Bias performance.

For technical information regarding material characteristics and core parameters, refer to the XFLUX bulletin.

The LM085 grade of 200°C-rated materials is an 85 permeability material developed for high bias, low acoustic noise applications (low magnetostriction). LM085 exhibits excellent loss characteristics from 1 kilohertz to beyond 1 megahertz. LM085 demonstrates a limited rise of amplitude permeability as compared to our other higher-permeability materials, exhibiting 155% of its initial permeability at 2500 Gauss. This limited increase in permeability is applicable in the design of inductors exposed to widely varying AC flux, can tolerate limited inductance swing, and require a higher-permeability material.

For DC-biased applications, LM085 maintains 90% of its initial permeability at 14 Oersted. If considered for wideband applications, the permeability versus frequency characteristic varies by less than 10% from DC to 100 megahertz. Saturation flux density is beyond 14,000 Gauss. Temperature coefficient of permeability is -451 ppm/°C.

The LM085 material grade is immediately available in select toroidal sizes and can be sampled in specific shapes upon request. Please contact Micrometals, Inc., at (714) 970-9400 for more information or to arrange for samples to be sent for your evaluation. T94-LM085 core is currently priced at $0.376 each at 1000 pieces and lead time for production quantities is typically 8 weeks. Prices are subject to revision, please contact the Micrometals Sales Department for current pricing.