At the MEMS Technology Summit Conference at Stanford University in October 2010²², Muenzel Horst (now President, Bosch Akustica) presented a vision for 7 trillion “sensory swarms” by 2017. This triggered one of the Summit organizers, Dr. Janusz Bryzek (now VP Development, MEMS and Sensing Solutions at Fairchild Semiconductor) to continue exploring high growth sensor opportunities. This resulted in a discovery of multiple pointers (summarized elsewhere in this document) to the trillion sensors in coming decade.

Based on his experience from MEMS startups, Bryzek believed that accelerated growth of sensor market to trillions will not be possible without a focused commercialization effort. This belief was reinforced by BSAC/UC Berkeley presentation by Vijay Ullal (now President, Fairchild Semiconductor) calling for creation of “Cooptition”, or cooperating competitors, jointly funding development of standard MEMS processes necessary to support accelerated growth of MEMS market from $10B to already visible $300B.

Along the way, Prof. Steve Walsh (UNM and MANCEF) suggested development of a Trillion Sensor Roadmap reusing MANCEF’s past Roadmaps experience, to provide early visibility of emerging sensor applications.

After presenting evolving concepts of the Roadmap at several 2012 meetings (IMAPS, iNEMI, SensorsCon, MEPTEC, MEMS Business Forum, COMS, MEMS in Motion, MIG Congress) and brainstorming the ideas with Steve Walsh, Robert Haak (Insight InterAsia, MANCEF), Robert Giasolli (Intactvascular, MANCEF), Bette Cooper (MEPTEC), Mike Pinelis (MEMS Journal), Karen Lightman (MIG), Michael McLaughlin (Yole), Job Elders (Xsens), Al Pisano (UC Berkeley), Roger Howe (Stanford University) and others, the concept of TSensors Summit Conference chaired by Janusz Bryzek was born.

In late 2012, Bryzek read book Abundance¹, which gave him an additional motivation to drive TSensors Summit.

Learning from Bryzek about TSensors initiative, Prof. Al Pisano decided to help, developing a conference “The Trillion Sensor Universe: Manufacturing Challenges”²³ at UC Berkeley on March 8, 2013.

While the TSensors Summit focuses on discovery of a trillion sensor applications and sensor types, a sister working group TSensor Systems chaired by Steve Walsh is focused on development of the Roadmap for supporting 2023 infrastructure including:

• Data Transfer and Communication.

• Algorithms, Analysis, Data Processing and Sensor Fusion.

• Data Storage and iCloud.