Industry Consortium Tasked with Developing Silicon on Insulator Sensors for Harsh Environments

March 20, 2012
CISSOID announced its participation in a multi-disciplinary consortium tasked with developing innovative CMOS-compatible, high temperature sensors that help reduce carbon emissions and drive energy consumption savings.

CISSOID announced its participation in a multi-disciplinary consortium tasked with developing innovative CMOS-compatible, high temperature sensors that help reduce carbon emissions and drive energy consumption savings. The European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7ICT) is funding the majority of the SOI-HITS (Silicon on Insulator High Temperature Systems) project, which is due for completion by August 2014.

CISSOID will design a high temperature, highly integrated, intelligent interface circuit for the gas sensor. The goal of the project is to demonstrate an advanced solution for monitoring, controlling and reducing the emission of carbon dioxide in a number of applications such as industrial or domestic boilers and in automotive combustion systems.

Additional consortium members include:

  • Microsemi, a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, will lead the project.
  • Cambridge CMOS Sensors, a spin out SME, will exploit the 'revolutionary' smart technology for gas sensors developed by the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick.
  • Cambridge University, a world renowned body, will provide overall scientific coordination and technical leadership for the nano sensor design and fabrication within harsh environments.
  • Honeywell (Romania) will be responsible for the demonstrator design and testing; will oversee the exploitation activities of the project; will be involved in gas sensors design and fabrication, and in the numerical simulation of the sensors and system developed within the project.
  • IREC will be responsible for scientific research related to gas sensing structures, design, numerical simulations, test structure fabrication and sensing layer selection.
  • Université Catholique de Louvain will design and test a water vapour concentration sensor, a UV photodiode and associated interface electronic circuits, for high temperature operation.
  • Warwick University, a world renowned Sensors Research Lab, will be responsible for the characterization and testing of the gas sensors under harsh environmental conditions.
For this project, SOI-HITS will develop sensors with built-in electronic interface that will be designed to work in harsh high temperature environments, something that is difficult to achieve at the present time due to the limits of conventional sensor and control electronics and packaging. The development of a high temperature SIP (system in a package) will enable real-world technology demonstrators with the capability of on-chip processing electronics, including drive circuitry, filters, amplifiers, processing circuits and analog to digital interfaces, operating at 225° C.

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