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New Digital BMA020 Acceleration Sensor

Bosch Sensortec has launched the BMA020, expanding its selection of ultraflat, digital triaxial acceleration sensors. In this way, the Bosch subsidiary enables a broader penetration of MEMS sensors into consumer electronics market.

Many manufacturers in these markets are discovering what are in part spectacular new functions paired with user advantages made possible by MEMS sensors. But mass markets for consumer electronics have their own laws, presenting component manufacturers with quite different challenges to traditional MEMS markets. Bosch Sensortec has consequently initiated product diversification in order to offer big industry customers sensors of high quality and with performance matched to the particular purpose. The dominance, witnessed to date, of universal sensors capable of taking on so many different applications is receding, to make way for components like the BMA020 that are designed to meet specific market requirements.

The digital BMA020 triaxial acceleration sensor addresses applications that do not exhaust the full potential of the two performance models SMB380 (QFN package) and BMA150 (LGA package). Bosch's rigorous quality standards remain in place throughout. Typical applications are cell phones, notebooks, PDAs, sport articles and game controllers. With a 3 x 3 x 0.9 mm footprint, the sensor allows efficient and low-cost integration. The device can be used for easy scrolling of display content by manual movement, work as a step counter in sport articles, or operate with automatic wakeup, switching a mobile unit like a remote control, when touched, from battery-saving standby to normal mode in a thousandth of a second. Matching market demand, the new acceleration sensor is immediately available in large quantities; like all sensors from Bosch Sensortec it is fabricated RoHS compliant.

On standby the BMA020 manages with just 1 µA, well below the self-discharge of a rechargeable battery pack. Operating current of only 0.2 mA also promises long battery service life. Other key features are a user-programmable measurement range of ±2 to ±8 g, high resolution of 10 bits, output in SPI and I2C format, and conditioning of measured values by a programmable lowpass filter.

Contact:

Tel.: +49 711 811-7204,

Fax: +49 711 811-7656

E-mail: Ulf-Malte.Wuensch@bosch.com