Crossing the Chasm: from Academic Lab to Consumer Pockets
ABSTRACT
The increasing maturity of thin-film piezoelectric materials and the MEMS manufacturing ecosystem has enabled the rapid development of sensor systems based on piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs). Starting around 2008, I began research that resulted in new PMUT-based ultrasonic time-of-flight sensors, ultrasonic fingerprint sensors for biometric identification, and ultimately in founding and selling a startup company, Chirp Microsystems. These innovations made my university laboratory (then located at UC Davis) a hub of ultrasound innovation. In this talk, I will share some of the engineering that made our ultrasonic products possible, I will tell the story of bringing this technology from the university lab to the consumer market, and I will share some advice for future founders.
BIOGRAPHY
David A. Horsley is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, where he is co-director of the Institute for NanoSystems Innovation (NanoSI), and an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Horsley co-founded several deep-tech companies, most recently Chirp Microsystems (now part of TDK InvenSense), a manufacturer of MEMS-based ultrasonic sensors. Dr. Horsley was Co-Chair of the 2016 IEEE Sensors Conference, Co-Chair of the 2017 Transducers Research Foundation Napa Microsystems Workshop, and Co-Chair of the 2020 IEEE MEMS Conference. Dr. Horsley is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the UC Davis Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the 2016 NSF I/UCRC Association’s Schwarzkopf Award for Technological Innovation, the 2018 East Bay Innovation Award, and Northeastern University’s 2024 Global Network Accelerator Award. He has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific papers and holds over 30 patents.