(Yicai Global) April 19 -- Trensor has managed to keep expanding production capacity to meet explosive global demand for its automotive pressure sensors despite the worldwide scarcity of chips and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Chinese pressure sensor producer’s chairman told Yicai Global today.

Trensor is speeding up production despite widespread semiconductor shortages in the industry, Zhou Jingxun, who is also company founder, said at the 2021 Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition.

Trensor, set up in 2009, is one of the largest producers of pressure sensors in China. Its products are used across a wide range of industries including automobile, shipping, engineering machinery, aviation and home appliances. The Wuxi, Jiangsu province-based company exports around 80 percent of its manufactured goods overseas to global industrial giants.

A certificate of honor from a well-known American multinational hangs on the wall in Trensor’s Wuxi offices.

“The client awarded us this certificate as Trensor was able to overcome all the odds, despite the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, to fulfill its orders,” Zhou said. Without Trensor’s efforts, a key project run by the client on the global level would have been aborted as Trensor was the sole supplier of pressure sensors used in the project, he added.

As of the end of March, Trensor had already received orders for twice its production output last year. Thankfully, its new CNY100 million (USD15 million) factory came into operation in 2020. The company plans to spend another CNY60 million this year to develop new products and make further improvements in smart manufacturing.

Self-Reliant

Trensor makes its own chips, setting it apart from its Chinese peers and rendering it relatively immune to the global semiconductor shortage. The firm started to develop application-specific integrated circuit chips as early as 2012 and is now on the fourth generation. They feature high precision, high integration and miniature size.

“As our products use self-developed ASIC chips, we have survived a predicament suffered by many other sensor manufacturers which are heavily dependent on imported semiconductors,” Zhou said.

“The comprehensiveness and diversity reflected in Trensor’s design and manufacturing are peerless in the industry,” Zhou said. The company can undertake the entire manufacturing process from sensitive components to final products. It is able to mass produce a variety of sensors from micro to super-high pressure.

“Trensor has been consistently making innovations in fundamental technologies and components. That is exactly how it has now managed to build a complete supply chain and enter the fast track for growth,” Zhou said.

Its domestic competitors tend to be small scale, with weak R&D abilities and low operating efficiency. Many of them simply assemble imported parts, Zhou said. Their sensors are vastly disadvantaged in both performance and cost compared to foreign versions. They offer much lower accuracy and stability and the ASIC chips have to be imported from abroad.

“Trensor’s technology strength, quality management, product performance and laboratory testing are all held in high regard among its clients, most of which are Fortune Global 500 companies,” Zhou said.

Trensor has a team of experts dedicated to the development and design of pressure sensors, production processes, encapsulation and equipment tooling. It has mastered all of the four core technologies in pressure sensing -- Micro Electrical Mechanical Systems, Sputtered Thin-Film, Thick-Film and SOI Micro-Melting -- as well as the necessary techniques to make and run the necessary equipment and automated production lines. It boasts 28 patents for pressures sensors, 11 of which are invention patents.

“I believe more and more Chinese enterprises will join the ranks of Trensor as innovators of basic technologies. The upcoming decade will be a golden era for China’s advancement in scientific technologies,” Zhou said.

Editor: Kim Taylor