Smart Sensor Analog Front-End powered by Emerging Reconfigurable Devices

Our main objective is the development of a reconfigurable platform to accommodate both for a generic sensor interface as well as a dedicated sensor transducer element.

The tunable analog front-end (AFE) interface should be enabled at the fine-grain level by emerging reconfigurable field effect transistor (RFET) and negative differential resistance (NDR) transistor technologies that provide co-integration capabilities with European 22nm CMOS processing technologies allowing for a More-than-Moore sensor technology approach.

Being doping-free these two key enabling technologies provide a high potential gain for a large variety of sensor system requiring a low 1/f noise behavior ranging from solid-state sensors, such as photodiodes, to environmental monitoring for the automotive market, and physiological signal monitoring, such as cancer detection.

Having naturally un-gated channel areas, reconfigurable field effect transistors are the perfect target vehicle for functionalized surfaces, e.g. for the detection of colorectal cancer (CRC) biomarkers, serving as a Reconfigurable Sensor Transducer (RST) for the healthcare sector.

Together with the AFE, these transducers can be integrated into a CMOS as a use-case demonstration of the flexible platform.

To sum up, in SENSOTERIC we will investigate smart sensing solutions in environmental monitoring and healthcare, where both the RST and the AFE utilize the capabilities of emerging RFET and NDR key enabling technologies.