Increasing vineyard yields is important work and Memsic, the Massachusetts MEMS specialist, has found a way to do that with wireless sensor networks.
A sensor network provided by Memsic monitored the soil moisture levels, leaf conditions, humidity and temperature in a vineyard.
"The owner of the vineyard got pay-back in one season," says Memsic’s director of engineering, Mike Grimmer, "the system cost him $6-8m and delivered a 5% increase in profit in one year which paid for the system."
A ten node system would cost $6,000, Grimmer told EW, and a node would cover a quarter of an acre for a high density installation and an acre for a low density installation.
Memsic calls this product line its eKo applications area and it has been used in landslide warning, landfill monitoring, ground water contamination, solar farms, smart water grids, municipal irrigation projects, wildfire warning and pollution detection.
Another use for wireless sensor networks has been in the monitoring of stress on bridges.
The company has been investing for the last five years in magnetic sensors – a market which is growing at 24% CAGR. Memsic is selling 50m sensors a year which, it reckons, represents 15% market share.
It has found a robust market in military drone aircraft into which it sells inertial measurement control units which compute the aircraft’s dynamic motion, orientation and position and stabilise cameras for observation and mapping. "We are also selling them into robotics applications in Japan," said Memsic director Phil Lees.
Revenues grew 70% last year with about half of total revenues coming from the automotive and mobile markets.
