Smart cities and smart homes, autonomous vehicles, and industry 4.0 are driving the technology market away from a processing-information-centric past to a sensing-and-actuation-centric future. The technological needs for this transformation are complex, as sensing technologies are very diverse and not driven solely by scaling, performance, and cost as opposed to the case of CMOS electronics. From the view of Europe’s industrial landscape, smart sensors are key technologies in the important automotive and healthcare/medical market segments. With the increasing number of applications scenarios, the demand for flexibility, re-usability, and adaptability on the sensor systems is also increasing.
SENSOTERIC’s global objective is to address these needs by the development of a reconfigurable platform to accommodate both a generic analog front-end sensor interface able to adapt to the change in environmental conditions, reducing power consumption and improving the signal quality, as well as a dedicated reconfigurable sensor transducer element for the detection of cancer biomarkers. Reconfigurable Field Effect Transistors (RFETs) hold the promise to provide the much-needed flexibility for such electronic systems, as they allow for the fine-tuning of their characteristics at run-time, e.g. the dynamic switching from p-type to n-type behavior or a negative differential resistance (NDR) mode, allowing the alteration of the circuit behavior after manufacturing. RFETs are integrable as add-on into classical scaled CMOS processes. Thus, both the developed front-end circuits as well as the sensor transducer have the potential to be co-integrated into conventional CMOS architectures. To sum up, in SENSOTERIC smart sensing solutions for environmental monitoring and healthcare, in specific cancer detection are investigated, where both the reconfigurable sensor transducer and the analog front end utilize the capabilities of emerging RFET and NDR elements as novel key enabling technologies.
