From developing automotive MEMS sensors in the 1990s to leading Bosch Sensortec, Dr. Stefan Finkbeiner has witnessed major changes in sensor technology. Today, sensors are smaller, more intelligent, and increasingly capable of processing information directly on the device. In this eeNews Europe Leaders Talk interview, Finkbeiner discusses his journey at Bosch, the importance of giving engineers room to experiment, and the opportunities emerging from edge AI. He also reflects on technologies that arrived before the market was ready and explains why privacy must remain central to sensor development. Glaucileine Vieira: You’ve spent more than 30 years at Bosch, starting as a young physicist and eventually becoming CEO of Bosch Sensortec. Looking back, what has surprised you most about the direction your career has taken? Was leadership something you actively pursued, or did it happen along the way? Stefan Finkbeiner: If you had told me when I joined Bosch as a young physicist in the early 1990s that I would one day lead a consumer electronics business, I probably would have smiled and wondered what kind of experiment had gone wrong. Back then, my world was microstructures, cleanrooms, and automotive MEMS products. When we kicked off our consumer-focused activities, we were essentially venturing into the unknown. Leadership was never something I pursued for the sake of having a title or “being the boss.” It evolved organically out of a deep desire to build something meaningful together with great and committed people. In the early days of Bosch Sensortec, we operated like a small “Gaulish village” within a massive global corporation. My philosophy on leadership has always been about leading at eye level: providing people with real ownership, trusting their expertise, and giving them the freedom to create. In a hyper-dynamic market, true leadership isn’t command-and-control; it’s about aligning a passionate team around a shared vision, making the seemingly impossible possible, and celebrating our successes together as well as managing our failures together. Vieira: Sensor technology has undergone a quiet revolution since the 1990s. Is there a particular capability that seemed like science fiction, or even a physicist’s nightmare, when you started, but has now become so commonplace that we barely give it a second thought? Finkbeiner: What continues to amaze me, even after three decades in MEMS, is the sheer level of performance and intelligence in unbelievably small sensors. Back in the 1990s, there were no industrialized MEMS tools, processes, or products. We started with 4-inch MEMS wafers. Nowadays, we talk about 12-inch MEMS wafers. The first automotive sensors were comparatively bulky, housed in robust metal or heavy plastic casings, and designed for one specific application, such as deploying an airbag or stabilizing a vehicle through ESP. The idea that you could manufacture complex three-dimensional moving mechanical structures with tolerances measured in nanometers, integrate them seamlessly with advanced silicon ASICs, and pack multi-axis acceleration, gyroscopes, barometric pressure, and edge AI processing into a package no larger than a grain of rice at microwatt power levels would have sounded like pure science fiction. In fact, from a classical physicist’s perspective, fighting parasitic capacitances, mechanical stress, thermal drift, and acoustic noise in such tiny geometries was a legitimate engineering nightmare. Today, billions of people carry dozens of these microscopic machines in their pockets, on their wrists, and in their ears without ever thinking about the physics that make them tick. That seamless experience is the greatest quiet triumph of our industry. To give a concrete example, a three-axis accelerometer with even better performance nowadays has a footprint that is more than 100 times smaller than in the 1990s. The BMA580, Bosch Sensortec’s smallest accelerometer. (Source: Bosch Sensortec) Vieira: I came