STMicroelectronics (Blog)

Motion sensing sits inside everything from wearables and wireless earbuds to drones, smart home appliances and industrial equipment. As these products become more widespread and longer-lasting, design teams must consider not only performance, power and reliability but also the materials inside each component. For STMicroelectronics, this is part of a broader responsible design approach, with sustainability considerations integrated from the start and not only in response to changing regulations.

Automotive safety has grown up in layers. Passive safety, things like seatbelts and airbags, reduces harm once a crash is already happening. Active safety, such as anti-lock braking and electronic stability control, steps in while you drive to help prevent the crash in the first place. The newest layer, predictive safety, uses driver assistance and automated driving to remove the mistake before it occurs. Electrification adds one more dimension, because the battery itself now needs surveillance.

Smart power distribution in cars is a unique challenge because it is one of those extremely rare design predicaments that affects all types of vehicles at once. Whether it is [one of the most cutting-edge supercars in the world], a luxury sports platform, a mainstream electric vehicle, or a model with a combustion engine, all must handle new ways of distributing power throughout their various zones and endpoints.

Ask four research houses where humanoid robots are headed and you will get four different answers. ABI Research expects a $6.5 billion market by 2030. Goldman Sachs Research projects $38 billion by 2035. Morgan Stanley models a humanoid economy approaching $5 trillion by 2050. And Gartner predicts that fewer than 20 companies will have humanoid robots in production by 2028. The forecasts differ because they measure different things over different horizons. The direction, however, is not in dispute.

Factories installed 542,000 industrial robots worldwide in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics. The more telling number sits inside that one: 64,542 of those machines were collaborative robots, designed to work next to people rather than behind fences. Cobots now account for roughly one in nine new industrial robots, and Interact Analysis expects shipments to nearly double to around 129,000 units a year by 2030. For decades, the rule of industrial robotics was separation.

Power designs now face the same demands at the same time: higher efficiency, smaller size, lower cost, and more power from the same space. For years, silicon has supported these designs. However, in a growing number of applications, it is close to its practical limits, and further optimization increases losses and heat. For this reason, gallium nitride (GaN) power transistors are receiving significant attention.

ST is releasing today a new EVLGANSPIN2-3PH evaluation board for the GANSPIN612, launched last January 2026, enabling our community to experiment with the new device and rapidly create a proof-of-concept. This release complements the GANSPIN611 and its EVLGANSPIN1-3PH evaluation board. Both GANSPIN devices bring a more efficient way to drive motor control applications, enabling a smaller system in some harsh environments.

ST is introducing an initiative to provide Rust drivers for many of our sensors, opening a new avenue for those looking to adopt this programming language in their embedded systems development. Obviously, we will continue to ship and maintain our C-based ecosystem.

ST is launching a new family of intelligent power modules (IPM) called SLLIMM Compact that’s 32% smaller than equivalent SLLIMM 2nd series modules while offering the lowest losses and highest efficiency at up to 20 kHz. Consequently, it enables smaller appliances like air conditioners to perform better. The SLLIMM Compact is also pin-to-pin compatible with competing solutions to help designers migrate to the new ST IPM.

The VL53L9 is ST’s highest-resolution 3D Time-of-Flight LiDAR sensor, with up to 2.3K zones, and it’s also the first with dual-scan flood illumination, which stands out from competing dot illumination by better detecting smaller objects and edges. The new module has a field of view of 54º x 42º and a range from 5 centimeters to 9 meters. It can stream data at up to 100 Hz, and its low-power mode requires only 150 mW.