Dr. Ying Lia Li (Lia) is the CEO and Founder of Zero Point Motion (ZPM), an early stage startup creating chipscale optical inertial sensors. Lia was awarded the 2021 Institute of Physics Clifford Paterson Medal and Prize, is a 2022 Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awardee and 2023 Sensors Converge Woman of the Year. Lia founded ZPM in 2020, setting up the company in Bristol, UK, after raising £2.658m seed investment. ZPM is a fabless B2B business developing and supplying high performance inertial sensors – chip scale gyroscopes and accelerometers packaged into 6-axis inertial measurement units (IMUs). Utilising the micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) supply chain used to manufacture existing chip scale inertial sensors, and exploit new developments in manufacturing chip scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs) to create IMUs with improved sensing abilities at lower noise levels than the traditional MEMS-only approach. Our vision is to create a new class of navigation devices which work everywhere, indoors or outdoors, in-hand or in-vehicle, free from the constraints of satellite-derived positioning.
Zero Point Motion is pioneering advancements in optically enhanced MEMS inertial sensors, leveraging cutting-edge silicon photonics technology to improve accelerometer and vibratory gyroscope sensitivities by 100-1000x. Through rigorous development efforts, we've successfully crafted and field-tested prototypes, marking a significant milestone in sensor technology. However, defining our product roadmap to eventually satisfy consumer product requirements remains a pivotal challenge in breaking into the $16Bn inertial sensor market. This talk highlights our journey's progress and underscores the obstacles we will encounter for our sensor technology to be adopted for widespread use within IoT, automotive and smartphone markets, including reducing sensor cost to <$10. Such challenges are shared by other technologies enhanced by silicon photonics such as LIDAR and biosensors, encompassing scalable manufacturing, wafer scale laser integration and ensuring performance over temperature and vibration.