STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics (“ST”) develops semiconductor technologies with over 50,000 employees mastering the semiconductor supply chain with advanced state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities. ST is an integrated device manufacturer (IDM) with more than 200,000 customers and thousands of partners to design and build products, solutions, and ecosystems that address their challenges and opportunities, and is committed to support a more sustainable world.

ST’s broad technology and product portfolio, including microcontrollers and microprocessors, MEMS sensors and actuators, digital, analog and RF CMOS, silicon carbide, gallium nitride, image sensors, optics and photonics, will be critical to enable the immersive technologies that will power the metaverse. Through sensing, computing and connecting, ST supports the necessary components, devices, tools and solutions enabling gateways into the metaverse through a multitude of input devices, such as AR/VR devices, wearables, hearables and emerging product categories including smart clothing and biosensing.

Immersive eXtended Reality (XR) devices and applications have a fundamental requirement for highly efficient sensors. As an example, for head and hand tracking and movement in an immersive environment, the accuracy and speed of sensors is critical to ensure realistic user interfaces and to mitigate cybersickness. Enabling this level of performance requires a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which also has the effect of increasing the power consumption, and a larger device size, which are both undesirable. ST develops sensors that can not only achieve the desired performance but do it while achieving low SNR and small form factors. In addition, ST adds “intelligence” to the sensors. ST sensors have built in AI capabilities on-board to provide contextual awareness and processing at the edge to enable advanced user interface controls.

As another example, ST’s image sensors enable gaze tracking and eye tracking functions, as well as scene understanding and mapping, which when combined with ST’s time-of-flight (ToF) sensors provides a robust platform for users to interact with the virtual content and enable spatial computing by supporting simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. With ST’s MEMS and image sensors, compelling user experiences can be realised. As the digital and physical worlds merge in the metaverse, security becomes even more important. ST offers a range of solutions under the ST Secure portfolio including mobile security, user authentication and secure connectivity, to ensure that users are protected as they transact in the metaverse.

In summary, ST technologies facilitate interactions with and within the metaverse to deliver the ideal user experiences through multiple modalities of intelligent sensing (MEMS and optical), actuating, robust computation with machine learning & edge AI, and secure connectivity with the goal to enable platforms with ultra-low latency, ultra-low power, high performance with security and privacy. In addition, ST’s technologies, devices and tools provide our customers and partners the ability to create innovative metaverse solutions for a multitude of applications relying on digital twins such as smart mobility, power & energy, cloud-connected autonomous things, smart homes, smart industries and smart cities of the future.