What's shakin'?

CAMBRIDGE -- With a flick of the wrist, a sweep of the arm, or a wave of the hand, people will soon scroll through cellphone menus and navigate thousands of television programs and channels.

Or that's the future a local semiconductor maker, Analog Devices Inc., is banking on as it steps up production of micromachined, motion-sensitive accelerometer chips.

The company's chips already power a new generation of responsive devices, such as the Nintendo Wii controller, a special golf club that rates each swing, and a finger clip that allows guitarists to add waa-waa effects to their strumming, just by waving a finger.

Accelerometers are among the company's fastest-growing division, and growth is expected in the $650 million worldwide market, as people begin to expect intelligent gadgets that respond to fluid movements, rather than a complicated set of key presses and menus.

"Even though accelerometers have been around for a long, long time and are very basic, we're not even at the tip of the iceberg yet," said Marlene Bourne, principal analyst at Bourne Research LLC, who has been tracking the field for a decade.

"It's really been in the last year to 18 months that I've seen probably half a dozen or a dozen companies" introducing or expanding production of accelerometer chips.

The devices were first built in the early 1990s for the automotive industry, which uses them to detect car crashes and deploy air bags. But over the years, they have become cheaper, smaller, and sensitive to movement in three dimensions, and the potential for the consumer electronics market has begun to unfold.

This fall, when the Nintendo Wii hit the market, the concept was thrust into the spotlight, as people learned that it could be fun to play tennis or go bowling by moving their bodies, instead of just their thumbs.

The technology "helps people interact with whatever they're using in a more natural, intuitive way," said William Giudice, vice president and general manager of the micromachined products division of Analog Devices.

Motion awareness chips have already simplified a variety of products. Hillcrest Labs' the Loop, a remote control that allows people to channel-surf by pointing, will soon be available to help people navigate hundreds of channels. A recent partnership between Nike Inc. and Apple Inc. allows runners to track their exercise route with a chip that attaches to the shoe and communicates with a Nano iPod. The SkyScout uses a combination of GPS and accelerometer technology to tell people what part of the sky they are viewing.

Analog Devices is only one of many companies that manufacture the chips, but Analog says it would like to become one of the top players in the market. The company has sold 300 million accelerometers since it first began making them more than a decade ago.

But nearly all that growth has been recent. Between 1992 and 2004, the company sold 100 million chips, but over the past three years it has shipped twice as many.

Vincent Roche, executive vice president of global sales for Analog Devices, said the chips account for about 5 percent of the company's business.

"It's a nascent business in terms of mass," he said, "but it will be significant."

Giudice said that the cellphone market, with a billion handsets sold each year, is the next big business opportunity. So far, the company's chip has showed up inside a Japanese cellphone that doubles as a pedometer and in a demo phone in which a slight tilt of the phone sends a digital ball rolling across the cellphone screen.

A phone sensitive to tilt and rotation could give people new, more natural ways to scroll through complicated cellphone menus, power new video games, and conserve battery power by programming the phone to go into a coma mode when it is idle, Giudice said.

Phone companies have already started to experiment. The Samsung SCH-S310, unveiled in 2005, allowed people to dial numbers by waving the phone in the shape of the number in the air and to end a call by shaking the phone twice. The Nokia 3220, introduced in 2004, came with a cover that included motion-sensitive technology and a panel of LED lights. A user typed in a message, then waved the phone back and forth, and the "wave message" would appear as a glowing banner, hanging in the air.

The company hasn't announced any new products with the application, said Nokia Oyj spokesman Keith Nowak. "But we're always looking for new and better ways to do user interface" and already have expertise in working with the chip, he said.

Bourne said the new technology also has crossover potential in a market that is usually targeted at capturing a younger audience.

"Baby boomers are going to really start having trouble with arthritis," she said. "If you think about how small the buttons on the cellphone are," it makes sense in the future to "scroll through a screen with a simple wrist movement."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.