Eric Aguilar

Omnitron Sensors
CEO

Biography

Eric Aguilar is co-founder and CEO of Omnitron Sensors. An award-winning entrepreneur, Eric is a recognized leader in Silicon Valley in the field of innovative sensor systems, particularly in relation to robotics and autonomous platforms.

Eric began his professional career at U.S. Navy Research Labs, where he built sensors that were fundamental to unlocking autonomous flight and other advanced capabilities in drones. He then joined a startup company that licensed Navy IP to build a revolutionary sensor that captured the attention of Google, which later acquired the company for U.S.$85M.

Eric then transitioned to developing autonomous systems. As an avionics lead at Google X Project Wing, his work enabled autonomous flight for the Project’s commercial delivery drones. After moving to Tesla—where he led a team of 300 engineers—he focused on the firmware integration efforts for Model 3, allowing for autopilot and high-volume production. Just prior to Omnitron, Eric led the sensor integration efforts for a fleet of robo-taxis at Argo AI, a self-driving company funded by Ford and VW. He is a former board member of Ascent Robotics.

Eric holds an engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University.

Presentation

Transforming the Sensor Market through a New Topology for MEMS

MEMS technology has become an integral part of our daily lives, enhancing the safety of our vehicles, empowering our smartphones with advanced sensing capabilities, and paving the way for groundbreaking AR/VR experiences. However, in recent years, fundamental innovation in the field of MEMS has been limited. This presents a prime opportunity for disruption, and Omnitron has risen to the challenge by introducing a revolutionary “New Topology for MEMS” that delivers an order of magnitude improvement in actuation power and sensitivity, heralding a new era in MEMS technology.

Leveraging a clever rearrangement in silicon processing techniques and a novel packaging methodology, Omnitron’s “New Topology for MEMS” offers a 10x improvement in capacitance per unit area, 5x deeper trenches, and a batch-level pretilt offset. On top of that, this topology, which has been proven through fabrication, is a scalable, cost-effective, and high-performance solution for the mass production of advanced sensors.

The speaker will elucidate the significance of this innovative topology by showcasing a 15mm MEMS step-scanning mirror designed for long-range LiDAR applications. This mirror provides a Figure of Merit (FOM) 5x better than any other MEMS mirror on the market.

Company Profile

Omnitron Sensors

Omnitron Sensors is rewriting the script on building high-performance low-cost sensors for the world of tomorrow. Leveraging its executive team’s extensive experience designing, fabricating, and using MEMS sensors, Omnitron has developed a “new topology for MEMS” that addresses some of the most pressing pain points in MEMS manufacturing.

Featuring the clever arrangement of silicon process steps and a new packaging method, Omnitron’s topology significantly improves performance to produce robust, rugged, reliable, repeatable, and low-cost MEMS sensors in high volumes by leveraging commercial MEMS foundries.

The company’s first proof point of its new topology for MEMS is a large, robust, low-cost, MEMS scanning mirror for long-range LiDAR.