Mike A. Horton | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Austin, Texas (USA) |
| Occupation(s) | CEO, Crossbow Technology |
| Spouse | Melissa Nguyen Horton |
| Children | Mica, Maya, Makayla |
Mike A. Horton is an American engineer and founder of a company producing sensor technology and sensor-based systems.
Mike Horton was born October 23, 1973, in Austin, Texas, the second of two children of Claude Wendell Horton Jr. and Elisabeth Alice Becker. [1]
Horton received a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. [2]
As of 2022 [update] Horton is a lecturer at Westminster Seminary California.[ citation needed ]
Following Horton's graduation, he co-founded Crossbow Technology in 1995 with his advisor A. Richard Newton. In 2003, MIT Technology Review magazine named him as one of the top young innovators under 35. [3]
After exploring potential uses of silicon microelectromechanical systems sensor technology and experimenting with early acceleration sensors from the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Sensor as well as commercial prototypes from Analog Devices, Horton and Newton formed a company to design and build products based on MEMS sensor technology. Crossbow Technology was founded in August, 1995. [4] The company's initial vision was to leverage microelectromechanical systems-based sensor technology for motion-based input devices which are now used in video game systems such as the Nintendo Wii.
The company refined the technology for application in commercial aerospace, and it became the first company to be approved by the FAA as a TSO (Technical Standard Order) holder FAA for a silicon microelectromechanical systems based attitude and heading reference systems. [5] An AHRS provides a solid-state replacement of unreliable mechanical gyroscopes as primary flight instruments, which can increase safety on general aviation aircraft. The company's MEMS-based inertial systems are also used in automated guidance of farm tractors and unmanned aerial vehicle systems. [6]
Starting in 2001, Horton worked with UC Berkeley professor's Kristofer S. J. Pister and David Culler to develop and produce commercially available hardware for the Smartdust and TinyOS research community. [7] These hardware platforms became known as "motes". The company produced several generations of "Motes" including the Mica2, Micaz, IRIS, iMote2, and TelosB. Applications range from crop monitoring to homeland security.
Horton was the company’s CEO from its inception until it was sold to Moog Inc. in 2011. The company’s systems were predominantly used in personal aircraft, construction and farming equipment, military weaponry, and video game consoles. He later became the CEO of Yabberz, along with his wife Melissa Horton. [8] [9]
MEMS is the technology of microscopic devices incorporating both electronic and moving parts. MEMS are made up of components between 1 and 100 micrometres in size, and MEMS devices generally range in size from 20 micrometres to a millimetre, although components arranged in arrays can be more than 1000 mm2. They usually consist of a central unit that processes data and several components that interact with the surroundings.
Draper Laboratory is an American non-profit research and development organization, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts; its official name is The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc. The laboratory specializes in the design, development, and deployment of advanced technology solutions to problems in national security, space exploration, health care and energy.
Smartdust is a system of many tiny microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) such as sensors, robots, or other devices, that can detect, for example, light, temperature, vibration, magnetism, or chemicals. They are usually operated on a computer network wirelessly and are distributed over some area to perform tasks, usually sensing through radio-frequency identification. Without an antenna of much greater size the range of tiny smart dust communication devices is measured in a few millimeters and they may be vulnerable to electromagnetic disablement and destruction by microwave exposure.
TinyOS is an embedded, component-based operating system and platform for low-power wireless devices, such as those used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), smartdust, ubiquitous computing, personal area networks, building automation, and smart meters. It is written in the programming language nesC, as a set of cooperating tasks and processes. It began as a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Intel Research, and Crossbow Technology, was released as free and open-source software under a BSD license, and has since grown into an international consortium, the TinyOS Alliance.
An attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) consists of sensors on three axes that provide attitude information for aircraft, including roll, pitch, and yaw. These are sometimes referred to as MARG sensors and consist of either solid-state or microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) gyroscopes, accelerometers and magnetometers. They are designed to replace traditional mechanical gyroscopic flight instruments.
Microfabrication is the process of fabricating miniature structures of micrometre scales and smaller. Historically, the earliest microfabrication processes were used for integrated circuit fabrication, also known as "semiconductor manufacturing" or "semiconductor device fabrication". In the last two decades microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microsystems, micromachines and their subfields, microfluidics/lab-on-a-chip, optical MEMS, RF MEMS, PowerMEMS, BioMEMS and their extension into nanoscale have re-used, adapted or extended microfabrication methods. Flat-panel displays and solar cells are also using similar techniques.
Crossbow Technology, Inc. was a California-based company with two main products. One was based on sensors and fibre optic gyroscope inertial sensor systems. This included inertial measurement units, attitude and heading reference systems, digital inclinometers and guidance, navigation and control units. The other was based on GPS and radios using cellular phone technology with multiple environmental sensors that included asset tracking products.
Sun SPOT was a sensor node for a wireless sensor network developed by Sun Microsystems announced in 2007. The device used the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for its networking, and unlike other available sensor nodes, used the Squawk Java virtual machine.
Microoptoelectromechanical systems (MOEMS), also known as optical MEMS, are integrations of mechanical, optical, and electrical systems that involve sensing or manipulating optical signals at a very small size. MOEMS includes a wide variety of devices, for example optical switch, optical cross-connect, tunable VCSEL, microbolometers. These devices are usually fabricated using micro-optics and standard micromachining technologies using materials like silicon, silicon dioxide, silicon nitride and gallium arsenide.
Kionix, Inc. is a manufacturer of MEMS inertial sensors. Headquartered in Ithaca, New York, United States, the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of ROHM Co., Ltd. of Japan. Kionix developed high-aspect-ratio silicon micromachining based on research originally conducted at Cornell University. The company offers inertial sensors, and development tools and application support to enable motion-based gaming; user-interface functionality in mobile handsets, personal navigation and TV remote controllers; and hard-disk-drive drop protection in mobile products. The company's MEMS products are also used in the automotive, industrial and health-care sectors. Kionix is ISO 9001:2008 and TS16949 registered.
SVTC Technologies was a technology services company that provided development and commercialization services for semiconductor process-based technologies and products. SVTC operated from 2004 to October 2012.
Microelectromechanical system oscillators are devices that generate highly stable reference frequencies to measure time. The core technologies used in MEMS oscillators have been in development since the mid-1960s, but have only been sufficiently advanced for commercial applications since 2006. MEMS oscillators incorporate MEMS resonators, which are microelectromechanical structures that define stable frequencies. MEMS clock generators are MEMS timing devices with multiple outputs for systems that need more than a single reference frequency. MEMS oscillators are a valid alternative to older, more established quartz crystal oscillators, offering better resilience against vibration and mechanical shock, and reliability with respect to temperature variation.
Pressure reference system (PRS) is an enhancement of the inertial reference system and attitude and heading reference system designed to provide position angles measurements which are stable in time and do not suffer from long term drift caused by the sensor imperfections. The measurement system uses behavior of the International Standard Atmosphere where atmospheric pressure descends with increasing altitude and two pairs of measurement units. Each pair measures pressure at two different positions that are mechanically connected with known distance between units, e.g. the units are mounted at the tips of the wing. In horizontal flight, there is no pressure difference measured by the measurement system which means the position angle is zero. In case the airplane banks (to turn), the tips of the wings mutually change their positions, one is going up and the second one is going down, and the pressure sensors in every unit measure different values which are translated into a position angle.
Richard Stephen Muller is an American professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley.
mCube is a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Jose, California, and offices at multiple locations in Hsinchu, Taipei, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. mCube manufactures and provide the world’s smallest microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) motion sensors, The Key enablers for New Internet of Moving Things (IoMT). Virtually anything that moves can take advantage of a motion sensor and thus it creates a huge market opportunity for MEMS manufacturers. By 2025, analysts predict more than 150 billion devices will be connected to the Internet and a large percentage of those devices will be in motion.
Kurt E. Petersen is an American inventor and entrepreneur. He is known primarily for his work on microelectromechanical systems. Petersen was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2001.
InvenSense Inc. is an American consumer electronics company, founded in 2003 in San Jose, California by Steve Nasiri. They are the provider of the MotionTracking sensor system on chip (SoC) which functions as a gyroscope for consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, gaming devices, optical image stabilization, and remote controls for Smart TVs. InvenSense provides the motion controller in the Nintendo Wii game controller and the Oculus Rift DK1. Its motion controllers are found in the Samsung Galaxy smartphones and most recently in the Apple iPhone 6.
Roger Thomas Howe is the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He was a faculty member at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984-1985, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985-1987, and at UC Berkeley between 1987-2005, where he was the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor. He has been a member of the faculty of the School of Engineering at Stanford since 2005.
A piezoelectric microelectromechanical system (piezoMEMS) is a miniature or microscopic device that uses piezoelectricity to generate motion and carry out its tasks. It is a microelectromechanical system that takes advantage of an electrical potential that appears under mechanical stress. PiezoMEMS can be found in a variety of applications, such as switches, inkjet printer heads, sensors, micropumps, and energy harvesters.
Vapor etching refers to a process used in the fabrication of Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and Nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). Sacrificial layers are isotropically etched using gaseous acids such as Hydrogen fluoride and Xenon difluoride to release the free standing components of the device.