ST Puts Piezo-Class Vibration Sensing and On-Chip AI Into a MEMS Package

STMicroelectronics announced the IIS3DWB10IS on 3 June 2026, a vibration sensor available from July at USD 25 each in 1,000-piece quantities. It measures vibration above 10 kHz of bandwidth with dynamic range up to 200 g and noise density as low as 35 µg/√Hz — figures ST positions as comparable to piezoelectric sensors, which is the claim that matters.

Piezoelectric accelerometers have been the reference for machine condition monitoring for decades, and they are expensive, physically large, and need charge amplifiers and careful cabling. MEMS parts have been cheap and small and, until recently, not sensitive enough at the frequencies where bearing and gear faults announce themselves. A MEMS device that reaches piezo-class noise and bandwidth changes what a monitoring point costs, and therefore how many of them a plant can justify. The value of condition monitoring is heavily driven by coverage: one instrumented machine tells you about one machine, while a whole instrumented class lets you compare identical assets against each other, which is a far stronger signal than any single trace.

The part also embeds ISPU 2.0, an intelligent sensor processing unit rated at 40 MIPS and 40 MFLOPS — up to four times the previous generation — for signal processing and inference inside the sensor package. That places a first filtering stage at the point where the raw signal exists, which is exactly where bandwidth arguments say it belongs: a vibration sensor sampling at tens of kilohertz produces far more data than the conclusion drawn from it.

It is rated to 125 °C for harsh industrial environments. Andrea Torcelli, CTO of gearbox and drive maker Bonfiglioli, is quoted citing the high dynamic range for their target environments.