The Kynix Blog - Sensor

In the future, a new sensor cable could be used to protect airports, industrial complexes and people’s yards without a great deal of expense. It registers even the tiniest changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.Plenty of things go unnoticed by our senses. One of them is the Earth’s magnetic field. Unlike migratory birds and sea turtles, we need technical aids to make use of it. Like the good old compass. It has been helping seamen navigate the seven seas since the 12th century. Sort of a primitive precursor of today’s magnetic field sensors. Then in 1832, mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss laid the cornerstone for modern magnetic sensor technology when he developed a method for measuring both the direction and intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field.Since then, magnetic-field sensors have become quite important because they make entirely new solutions for difficult measuring tasks possible. And not just for research and industry—also for our private lives. For example, they help determine location and position in our smartphones. And with Apps such as Telemeter 11th, they even turn a digital Swiss knife into a metal detector.Magnetic burglar alarmSaarland University’s “All-round Warning Alarm” is based on a similar principle. When attached to fencing, a thin magnetic field sensor cable can tell whether the wind, a bird or wire cutters are “interacting” with the wire mesh. Buried in the ground of future traffic-guidance systems, it can tell which direction automobiles are driving. Not even smartphones or zippers can go undetected. That is because everything within a few meters that influences the Earth’s magnetic field is registered by highly sensible magnetic field sensors and transmitted to a smartphone via Bluetooth.The sensor cable is flexible and can be adapted to a wide variety of requirements, and it consumes very little electricity. It is also practically wear free, and measurements do not dependent on weather conditions. In addition, no data is stored and the sensor system has proved a hard nut for hackers to crack.The technology is based on the fact that the Earth’s weak magnetic field (approx. 50 microtesla) is always everywhere. And that every ferromagnetic object measurably disturbs this field for magnetic field sensors with sensitivities in the nanotesla range. Corresponding electronics and algorithms then determine metallic properties, size and direction of motion. Every type of “disturbance” has its own magnetic fingerprint.Magnetic field sensors for every purposeResearchers have been working a “magnetic” recognition systems for a good 15 years. As part of the development process, experiments were conducted with so-called AMR (anisotropic magnetoresistance) and GMR (giant magnetoresistance) sensors. The latter can be found in billions of read heads in hard disk drives, and the physicists who discovered them, Peter Gruenberg from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Albert Fert from Université Paris-Sud, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007. Both work sensors are based on the so-called magnetoresistance effect, which says that ferromagnetic materials change their resistance in a magnetic field.Burglars in a “tunnel”The first trials with the third member of the magnetoresistance team, i.e. GMI (giant magnetoimpedence) sensors, are now underway in Saarland. In this case, impedance (alternating current resistance) depends on the intensity of an applied, relatively weak external magnetic field.But that’s not all: The prototype recently introduced by Saarland University researchers uses a fourth variant, i.e. TMR (tunnel magnetoresistance) sensors, which have only been commercially available for a short time. As the word “tunnel” suggests, these magnetic field sensors make use of quantum mechanics effects. Due to their high change in resistance of 20%, TMRs are extremely interesting for a number of applications. They are provided by Sensitec(Germany), one of the partners in this project, which is sponsored by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research.With the exception of the AMR effect, all magnetoresistance effects were discovered after 1988. In other words, this is still a relatively new, rapidly growing research sector with the prospect of extraordinary sensor solutions for various electronics sectors in the years to come. It will be interesting to see what happens! Ref:KY45-HMR3400KY45-HMC6343KY45-HMC2003

The BHA250 low-power sensor hub and BHI160 ultra-low power sensor hub from Bosch Sensortec is now in stock at distributor Mouser Electronics . Designed specifically for always-on sensor applications in smartphones running the Android operating system, the BHA250 and BHI160 enable designers to offload sensor processing from the main processor, which can reduce power consumption and extend battery life.  The sensor hubs integrate a best-in-class 3-axis MEMS accelerometer (BH250) or 6-axis gyroscope/accelerometer inertial measurement unit (BH160) with the new Bosch Sensortec digital signal processor, Fuser Core.The Fuser Core is a 32-bit floating-point microcontroller optimised to execute Bosch Sensortec's sensor fusion and activity-recognition algorithms with ultra-low power consumption — up to 95 percent less than that of other microcontrollers.The BHA250 and BHI160 are specifically designed for applications in Android smartphones — implementing a full Android sensor stack inside the devices to provide a flexible, low-power solution for always-on motion sensing and sensor data processing. In both devices, the 32-bit Fuser Core microcontroller features 96 kBytes of ROM, including the BSX sensor fusion library, and 48 kBytes of RAM for additional drivers, local data buffering, or feature updates.The devices provide up to three general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs) and a high-speed I2C interface with data rates up to 3.4 MBit/s for power-efficient data transfer.They meet the requirements of smartphones, wearables, and other applications that demand highly accurate, real-time motion data at very low power consumption.Mouser also offers corresponding shuttle boards for the sensor hubs. Both the BHA250 shuttle board and BHI160 shuttle board, available to order from Mouser, include four external magnetometers that can be connected to the sensor hubs using the available jumpers on the PCB.The shuttle board allows easy access to the sensor‘s pins via a simple socket and can be plugged into the Bosch Sensortec Application Board. Ref:KY45-AD22293ZKY45-SS16-3KY45-TLE4998P3 

Chip scale high precision measurements of physical quantities such as temperature, pressure and refractive index have become common with nanophotonics and nanoplasmonics resonance cavities. As excellent transducers to convert small variations in the local refractive index into measurable spectral shifts, resonance cavities are being used extensively in a variety of disciplines ranging from bio-sensing and pressure gauges to atomic and molecular spectroscopy. Chip-scale microring and microdisk resonators (MRRs) are widely used for these purposes owing to their miniaturized size, relative ease of design and fabrication, high quality factor, and versatility in the optimization of their transfer function.The principle of operation of such resonative sensors is based on monitoring the spectrum dependence of the resonator subject to minute variation in its surrounding (e.g., different types of atoms and molecules, gases, pressure, temperature).  Yet despite several important accomplishments, such optical sensors are still limited in their performances, and their miniaturization is highly challenging.Now, a team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has demonstrated an on-chip sensor capable of detecting unprecedentedly small frequency changes. The approach consists of two cascaded microring resonators, with one serving as the sensing device and the other playing the role of a reference—thus eliminating environmental and system fluctuations such as temperature and laser frequency."Here we demonstrate a record-high sensing precision on a device with a small footprint that can be integrated with standard CMOS technology, paving the way for even more exciting measurements such as single particle detection and high precision chip scale thermometry," said Prof. Uriel Levy, Director of the Harvey M. Krueger Family Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a faculty member at the Department of Applied Physics in the Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering.Among the innovations that made this development possible are chip scale integration of reference measurement, and a servo-loop locking scheme that translates the measured effects from the optical domain to the radio frequency domain. These enabled the researchers to quantify their system capabilities using well-established RF technologies, such as frequency counters, spectrum analyzers, and atomic standards.Reference:TCRT1000GP2S60ITR8307/L24/TR8  

Researchers from the Graphene Flagship, working at the AMBER centre in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in collaboration with researchers from University of Siegen, Germany, and University of Vienna, Austria, have demonstrated ultrafast and highly sensitive gas sensors using platinum selenide (PtSe2). This material – a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) – has promising potential in different areas of nanoelectronics, including optoelectonics as well as sensing. This research, published in ACS Nano, demonstrates the potential of PtSe2 in a range of applications, and presents this little-studied material as an excellent candidate for further investigation.The new TMD was created using a metal conversion method, in which thin platinum film is converted into PtSe2 by thermally assisted conversion in selenium vapour at 400 °C. PtSe2 now joins the growing class of stable TMDs. Georg Duesberg, from Trinity College Dublin, is the principal investigator of the study. He said "We performed a screening study of materials, to check a few different material combinations. The conversion of metals is helpful in the quest for new materials, because it is simple to do. Of the other combinations that worked, many immediately oxidised, so they were not stable. We were very lucky to find a sweet spot with this material, and to be able to synthesise it on a large scale."One of the benefits of PtSe2 is the method of fabrication, which is compatible with silicon chip fabrication. "We grow PtSe2 at 400 °C which makes it potentially suitable for so-called back end of line (BEOL) processing. This means that it can be combined with existing device architectures to add new functionality," said Niall McEvoy, a researcher at Trinity College Dublin who performed the growth experiments. BEOL processing comes after the actual fabrication of integrated circuits of a silicon chip, It is crucial that the temperature is less than 450 °C, to preserve the functionality of the integrated circuit. "This is very interesting for the Flagship's push towards industrial applications," added Duesberg. "This potentially can be grown on top of a chip. You can imagine using this material for the Internet of Things, sensors and so on."To demonstrate possible applications for the new material, the researchers tested its performance in sensing NO2. "All of our homegrown materials are tested as gas sensors. PtSe2 showed excellent results, high sensitivity, excellent response time and nearly complete recovery," said Kangho Lee, a researcher at Trinity College Dublin who performed the gas sensing experiments. Gas molecules adsorbed onto the surface of the PtSe2 change its conductivity, lowering the resistance. The researchers found that the PtSe2 had extremely high sensitivity, measuring 100 ppb NO2 at room temperature. The sensor was also extremely fast to respond to the gas – detecting low quantities of gas in only seconds – and recovering completely within a minute when the inert atmosphere was restored.For commercial sensing applications, the sensor must be responsive only to specific gases, so that changes in environmental conditions can be monitored. McEvoy is optimistic that the PtSe2 can be treated to have the selective sensing properties needed. "With some added processing steps, to engender selectivity, PtSe2 could potentially be used in a wide array of industrial chemical sensing applications," he said. A potential route to selective sensing could be the addition of chemical groups that are responsive to the chosen gas.Reference:2790427929314100009 

Wearable sensors that monitor heart rate, activity, skin temperature, and other variables can reveal a lot about what is going on inside a person, including the onset of infection, inflammation, and even insulin resistance, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.An important component of the ongoing study is to establish a range of normal, or baseline, values for each person in the study and when they are ill. “We want to study people at an individual level,” said Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor, and chair of genetics. Snyder is the senior author of the study, which was published online in PLOS Biology.  Altogether, the team collected nearly 2 billion measurements from 60 people, including continuous data from each participant’s wearable biosensor devices and periodic data from laboratory tests of their blood chemistry, gene expression, and other measures. Participants wore between one and seven commercially available activity monitors and other monitors that collected more than 250,000 measurements a day.  The team collected data on weight; heart rate; oxygen in the blood; skin temperature; activity, including sleep, steps, walking, biking, and running; calories expended; acceleration; and even exposure to gamma rays and X-rays. “I was very impressed with all the data that was collected,” said Eric Topol, MD, professor of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. “There’s a lot here — a lot of sensors and a lot of different data on each person.” The study demonstrated that, given a baseline range of values for each person, it is possible to monitor deviations from normal and associate those deviations with environmental conditions, illness, or other factors that affect health. Distinctive patterns of deviation from normal seem to correlate with particular health problems. Algorithms designed to pick up on these patterns of change could potentially contribute to clinical diagnostics and research. The work is an example of Stanford Medicine’s focus on precision health, whose goal is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and to precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill. On a long flight to Norway for a family vacation last year, Snyder noticed changes in his heart rate and blood oxygen levels. As one of the 60 participants in the digital health study, he was wearing seven biosensors.  From previous trips, Snyder knew that his oxygen levels normally dropped during airplane flights and that his heart rate increased at the beginning of a flight — as occurred in other participants. But the values typically returned to normal over the course of a long flight and after landing. This time, his numbers didn’t return to baseline. Something was up, and Snyder wasn’t completely surprised when he went on to develop a fever and other signs of illness.  The fact that you can pick up infections by monitoring before they happen is very provocative. Two weeks earlier, he’d been helping his brother build a fence in rural Massachusetts, so his biggest concern was that he might have been bitten by a tick and infected with Lyme disease. In Norway, Snyder persuaded a doctor to give him a prescription for doxycycline, an antibiotic known to combat Lyme disease. Subsequent tests confirmed that Snyder had indeed been infected with the Lyme microorganism. Snyder was impressed that the wearable biosensors picked up the infection before he even knew he was sick. “Wearables helped make the initial diagnosis,” he said.  Subsequent data analysis confirmed his suspicion that the deviations from normal heart rate and oxygen levels on the flight to Norway had indeed been quite abnormal. “The fact that you can pick up infections by monitoring before they happen is very provocative,” said Topol. For Snyder, the Lyme diagnosis is just the tip of the iceberg — part of very early work to begin querying massive data sets of health information. The results of the current study raise the possibility of identifying inflammatory disease in individuals who may not even know they are getting sick. For example, in several participants, higher-than-normal readings for heart rate and skin temperature correlated with increased levels of C reactive protein in blood tests. C reactive protein is an immune system marker for inflammation and often indicative of infection, autoimmune diseases, developing cardiovascular disease, or even cancer. Snyder’s own data revealed four separate bouts of illness and inflammation, including the Lyme disease infection and another that he was unaware of until he saw his sensor data and an increased level of C reactive protein. The wearable devices could also help distinguish participants with insulin resistance, a precursor for Type 2 diabetes. Of 20 participants who received glucose tests, 12 were insulin-resistant. The team designed and tested an algorithm combining participants’ daily steps, daytime heart rate, and the difference between daytime and nighttime heart rate. The algorithm was able to process the data from just these few simple measures to predict which individuals in the study were likely to be insulin-resistant. The study also revealed that declines in blood-oxygen levels during airplane flights were correlated with fatigue. Fortunately, the study showed that people tend to adapt on long flights; oxygen levels in their blood go back up, and they generally feel less fatigued as the hours go by. “The desaturation of oxygen in flight was not something I anticipated,” said Topol. “Whenever you walk up and down the aisle of a plane, everyone is sleeping, and I guess there may be another reason for that besides that they partied too hard the night before. That was really interesting, and I thought it was great that the authors did that.” Topol noted that one of the biosensors used in the study doesn’t work very well and that another has been recalled. “A few are not going to hold up,” he said. “Either they are not going to be available or they are going to be proven to not be very accurate." "But what is good about what the authors did here is that they weren’t just relying on one device. They did everything they could with the kind of sensors that are available today to get data that was meaningful.” During a visit to the doctor, patients normally have their blood pressure and body temperature measured, but such data is typically collected only every year or two and often ignored unless the results are outside of the normal range for entire populations. But biomedical researchers envisage a future in which human health is monitored continuously. “We have more sensors on our cars than we have on human beings,” said Snyder. In the future, he said, he expects the situation will be reversed and people will have more sensors than cars do. Already, consumers have purchased millions of wearable devices, including more than 50 million smartwatches and 20 million other fitness monitors. Most monitors are used to track activity, but they could easily be adjusted to more directly track health measures, Snyder said. We have more sensors on our cars than we have on human beings. With a precision health approach, every person could know his or her normal baseline for dozens of measures. Automatic data analysis could spot patterns of outlier data points and flag the onset of ill health, providing an opportunity for intervention, prevention, or cure. FAQ 1. What is wearable sensor?Wearable sensors, just as the name implies, are integrated into wearable objects or directly with the body in order to help monitor health and/or provide clinically relevant data for care. ... However, recent focus has shifted to wearable sensing platforms, exploiting stretchable and flexible electronics. 2. What can wearable sensors measure?The use of wearable sensors for sports is at its infancy, with the majority of devices currently used to measure movement-based parameters such as distance, velocity, and acceleration. 3. What are wearable sensors made of?At present, wearable temperature sensors also use a variety of nanomaterials, including conductive polymers,96, 97 graphene,89, 98 CNTs,46, 99 nickel,100 silver,101, 102 and copper metal nanoparticles and nanowires103 as thermal-sensing elements. 4. What are examples of wearable technology?Common examples of wearable technology include:Smart jewelry, such as rings, wristbands, watches and pins. ...Body-mounted sensors that monitor and transmit biological data for healthcare purposes.Fitness trackers, often in the form of wristbands or straps, that monitor things like physical activity and vital signs. 5. What are the wearable sensors used for?Wearable sensors are used to gather physiological and movement data thus enabling patient's status monitoring. Sensors are deployed according to the clinical application of interest. 6. What can wearable devices be used for?Wearables are electronic technology or devices incorporated into items that can be comfortably worn on a body. These wearable devices are used for tracking information on real time basis. They have motion sensors that take the snapshot of your day to day activity and sync them with mobile devices or laptop computers. 7. How we can monitor activity in wearable devices?Present wearable technologies include accelerometers, gyroscopes, sole sensors, and barometric pressure sensors mounted over the body. According to the purpose of the use, different body sensors have been developed with a capacity to monitor physiological and biochemical properties, posture and motion. 8. What is the value of the use of wearable microsensors?Using on-board sensors, wearable devices can provide critical information about athlete's performance and well-being. Athlete tracking is an important functionality of wearable devices that relies on positioning data which also influences the accuracy of numerous other attributes. 9. What health conditions require a wearable device?These devices will be especially important for improving the health and control of chronically ill patients and for those with conditions like asthma, COPD, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The focus of this paper revolves around wearable devices for asthma, but can be applied for any chronic condition. 10. What are the pros and cons of wearable technology?Pros and Cons of Wearable Tech:Pro: Wearable Tech is Convenient.Con: Wearable Tech is Limited.Pro: Most Wearable Tech is Discreet.Con: Some Wearable Tech is Not Discreet.Pro: Wearable Tech is Useful.Con: Wearable Tech is Expensive. Reference:EE-TP109IS471FSEIS489E

TT Electronics has announced that its sensors will be used in the NASA mission to the planet Mars in 2020. The robustness of the company’s Hall-effect sensors enables them to withstand the harsh environments found on Mars. The Hall-effect sensors from TT Electronics are key components in NASA’s new Mars 2020 Rover that will be landing on the surface of the red planet in 2021. These sensors detect magnetic fields in motors that control the speed and movement of the robotic arm of the Mars Rover.The Mars 2020 Rover will carry an entirely new subsystem to collect and prepare Martian rocks and soil samples. This subsystem will include a coring drill on its arm, controlled partially by TT Electronics’ Hall-effect sensors. About 30 samples will be deposited at select locations for return to Earth on a potential future sample-retrieval mission.David Kertes, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Industrial Sensing and Control, TT Electronics, said, “We are delighted that our Hall-effect sensors will fly on NASA’s 2020 mission to Mars – this further underpins the high quality and integrity of our components for use in mission critical, aerospace and space applications. It is particularly exciting that the devices will be deployed as part of the system that controls the robotic arm of the Rover, the very ‘core’ of the mission, to collect Martian rock and soil samples.”TT Electronics designs and manufactures semiconductors for use in a variety of space, satellite and payload applications, in many different package options. In its Class 100,000 clean room, complete satellite harness sets and electromagnetics components are manufactured, as well as the test equipment needed for use in a clean room environment.Reference:01B1001JF01B5001JF01C1002JF