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SummaryRihito Kuroda, a researcher at Tohoku University in Japan who develops UV imagers in his lab said“There's important information hidden in the UV,”. However, this information has been difficult to capture; silicon doesn't absorb ultraviolet wavelengths very well, and other semiconductors that play well with ultraviolet light make slow imagers with low frame rates. But that’s about to change. This week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco, two research groups presented ultrathin, flexible UV sensor designs they hope will help make these devices more widespread.  UV images reveal spots that presage rot on mushrooms, dark lines along flower petals that guide insects to nectar, and clouds of acetone in water. And with their relatively short wavelengths, UV sensors could be well suited to more precise navigation for flying swarms of tiny drones. The research aimed at making UV sensors from specially formulated paperA group from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia presented their research aimed at making UV sensors from specially formulated paper. Electrical engineering student Chun-Ho Lin explained that it’s difficult to make flexible UV sensors because they heat up under the high-energy rays. Typical flexible substrates, like plastic and paper, can’t wick away that heat quickly enough. He and other electrical engineers in Jr-Hau He’s lab made thermally conductive, UV-sensitive paper by combining boron nitride nanosheets with cellulose fibers. Flexible sensors made from this formulation can take the heat, withstanding temperatures up to 200 degrees Celsius. What’s more, they are blind to wavelengths above the deep UV band.Other researchers are sticking with silicon, but using graphene to help it along. Yang Xu, an electrical engineer at Zhejiang University in China, says there are good reasons to work with silicon, even though in its native state it is a strong reflector of UV rays. Silicon photodetectors can work quickly, enabling higher frame rates, and they can draw on a vast manufacturing infrastructure. Xu says his philosophy is, “Why not help silicon do better?” With that in mind, his team is pairing the semiconductor with graphene, which absorbs UV light like a champ. To make flexible silicon-graphene UV photodetectors, the Zhejiang University group uses etching and rubber stamps to transfer ultrathin silicon microstructures to a flexible plastic substrate, then coats the silicon with graphene and adds electrodes. This photodetector is blind to visible light, because the silicon layer is just 20 nanometers thick and cannot absorb it. This ultrathin device is flexible and performs as well as state-of-the-art UV photo detectors, says Xu. His lab is currently working on shrinking the size of the photodetectors to improve their resolution. 

SummaryIf you have follow the informations of sensor,you will know that sensors are always in a state of rapid progress.Now I will state a few things to prove it in the following.Sensor,also called Transducer, is a kind of detection device,it can receive the measured information and then output them according to a certain rule or other needed form to meet the transport, handling,storage,recording,displaying and controlling of imformation,etc. Know more about it,you can read the article : Most Comprehensive Sicence Popularizing of Sensor (detection device) Researchers created quantum control technique for quantum sensorsAs we all known,there is a common problem that designers are harder to deal with quantum sensing devices. How,University of Sydney researchers have sloved this trouble associated with this super-sensitive tech. They have created quantum control techniques in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Dartmouth College. This development will allow next-gen ultra-sensitive sensors to identify small signals and reject unwanted background noise.By applying the right quantum controls to a qubit-based sensor,the team adjust its response in a way  that guarantees the best possible exclusion of the background clutter—that is, the other voices in the room. In order to obtain and analyze signals, measurement protocols are set in place. Over the years, these protocols have lagged behind the advancement of electronic devices. The disparity has led to a phenomenon known as “spectral leakage,” which occurs when quantum sensors return unclear results.What's more, the new control protocols have reduced spectral leakage by several orders of magnitude by using improved sensor hardware. All the approach is relevant to nearly any quantum sensing application and can also be applied to quantum computing as it provides a way help identify sources of hardware error.‘quantum control techniques' is a major advance in how to operate quantum sensors.  New sensors uses for effective control of enviroment pollutionEnviromental pollution issue are always paid great attention by human being as the development of all the world. A team from the Faculty of Physics of Lomonosov Moscow State University has suggested using porous silicon nanowire arrays in highly sensitive gas sensors which may be used both for effective control of environment pollution levels and for the monitoring of air composition in closed spaces,from classrooms to space stations.According to researchers, these devices will be able to detect the presence of toxic and non-toxic gas molecules in the air at room temperature.Each sensor consists of an array of 10 micron long organized silicon nanowires with diameters ranging from 100 to 200 nm. Each nanowire has porous crystalline structure. The size of silicon crystals and pores between them in individual nanowire, varies from three to five nanometers.ey can be obtained by means of a cheap method of metal-assisted chemical etching. It is based on selective chemical etching, i.e. partial removal of surface layer from a bulk crystalline silicon with the use of metal nanoparticles as a catalyst. Moreover, the procedure is quick—at least 100 elements can be produced in a lab within just one hour.Such porous nanowires have huge specific surface area due to which their physical and chemical properties are extremely sensitive to molecular environment. It was also found out that the obtained samples exhibited an effective photoluminescence in the red spectrum region at room temperature. What's important,this gas sensors based on porous nanowires both work at home temperatures and also are reusable, because the all observed effects were completely reversible. Military sensor systems collect accurate informationCollecting accurate user and environmental information such as enemy's location,survive shock, vibration, moisture plays an important role in military system. Deployment complaints about the platform aside, Lockheed Martin’s Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS) for the F-35 Lightning II is a high-performance, lightweight, multi-function sensing solution for precision air-to-air and air-to-surface targeting (Figure 4). Integrated into the aircraft fuselage with a rugged sapphire viewport, the device talks to the aircraft via a fiber-optic interface.Presented as the first sensor to combine forward-looking and infrared search along with track functionality, EOTS enables situational awareness and precision delivery of laser and GPS-guided weapons. Advanced EOTS, the next iteration, will incorporate enhancements and upgrades like short-wave infrared, high-definition television, and an infrared marker.Today’s military sensors must operate well on their own, and function as part of a combined-arms approach with an interlaced network of sensing, to detect threats of any nature from any direction. One such way to address this is with a battlefield awareness solution like 3D Advanced Warning System (3DAWS) from BAE Systems, which can provide universal threat detection to an aircrew with a layered countermeasure defense.The modular and expandable system can integrate with fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft and countermeasure systems, with the flexibility to work with existing radar or laser warning systems. The core of the 3DAWS suite is the passively-cued, semi-active radio frequency 3D Tracker element, which serves as an adjunct to current and future passive threat detection systems. 

Summary Energy-efficient sensor nodes are crucial to the development of the industrial internet of things (IIoT).Engineering team are trying to optimise energy efficient IIoT sensor nodes.In many cases, these devices will have to perform for years on a single battery charge. That calls for an implementation that is as energy efficient as possible. Achieving this demands a holistic approach to energy optimisation, one that reaches from the system level down to process and circuit-design choices.     Problem met Engineering team are trying to optimise the energy comsumption of an IIOT sensor node is that many of the design decisions interact with each other. And there are often hidden complexities of designs that lead to energy consumption being much higher than expected. For example, conventional wisdom points to the power consumption of an RF transmitter being a major influence on total energy. But, even though the receiver element may consume far less instantaneous power, system-level decisions that call for the device to listen for intermittent updates from a server can lead to it being left active for long periods of time – tens of seconds per hour versus tens of milliseconds for the transmitter. Because of the long operational life of a typical IoT sensor node, the energy used even when subsystems are sleeping can be responsible for a heavy drain on the battery.   Integration Despite the complex interaction between application design and implementation, there are some high-level choices that are likely to lead toward an optimal solution. One of these is the use of integration. Although it is entirely possible to use 2D-IC and 3D-IC multi chip packaging to assemble a compact IIoT sensor node from off-the-shelf components, integration into a single custom integrated circuit (IC) provides not just significant benefits in terms of cost and size but reductions in power consumption. In order to communicate with off-chip memories and analogue and RF on traditional PCB-based implementations, Input/Output (I/O) drivers with significant current draw are often required. A single system-on-chip (SoC) makes it possible to remove such power-hungry circuits.     The duty cycle and lifetime energy consumption The other fundamental consideration for designing energy-efficient IIoT sensor nodes is an understanding of the duty cycle and its impact on lifetime energy consumption. Simply minimising the power consumption of individual elements is not enough to guarantee that a remote or  inaccessible sensor can operate on a single battery charge for a decade or more. In such a situation, every microjoule the node requires from its battery is important. But that does not mean the system powered by a typical battery can consume no more than a few microwatts at any point in its life. Such a system would not be able to take measurements and communicate them wirelessly in any practical way. The use of duty-cycle planning makes it possible for the system to perform tasks that take significant amounts of power for short periods, trading those bursts against savings that can be made while much of the system is quiescent. For example, the RF subsystem of a wireless sensor node need only be powered when it is active. This is likely to be one of the most power-hungry parts of the overall design because of the need to supply enough transmitter power to ensure packets of data can be delivered reliably. However, the power consumed by the transmitter portion of the RF subsystem is relatively easy to control. Once a packet has been delivered the transmitter can be shut down. But there can still be significant power drawn by subsystems such as the RF receiver that continue to remain active once the transmitter has finished sending.   The RF receiver often needs to remain active because of timing uncertainty and this type of uncertainty has a major influence on overall energy consumption. Whereas the transmitter has predictable requirements – it need only be activated when data is ready to send – the receiver needs to be active for much longer. It needs to wait for acknowledgments from nodes to which it is sending data, and also needs to activate periodically to be able to listen for unsolicited messages. As a result, the overall energy consumption of the RF receiver will often exceed that of the transmitter over the lifetime of the sensor, even though its instantaneous power demand is lower. An efficient design will exploit power-saving techniques such as putting much of the circuitry into a low-activity state until an RF signal is detected. Another optimisation is to reduce the amount of time per minute the receiver is active at the cost of the sensor node’s responsiveness to external commands.     Although they might appear to be essential to all operations, the microprocessor core and its memory subsystem need careful duty-cycle management because they can demand very high levels of power. The problem for many designs is that software running on the processor is often responsible for core tasks such as fetching data from sensors and passing messages to the RF subsystem. This appears to mandate that the processor be fully active whenever sensor inputs need processing.   However, in many cases, the work performed by the software is very simple. It is quickly checking data values to see if they have passed a limit that might signal a problem, or for increased activity that needs closer inspection. Activating the processor to handle all the data is wasteful and can easily be offloaded to custom hardware or a programmable state machine. These circuits consume far less power and can run independently of the processor, so that and the memory array can be powered down.   Current leakage Even when most of the device is powered down, the power drawn during lengthy periods of sleep can be surprising. Energy lost through current leakage in subsystems that need to remain powered can incur a heavy overhead when analysed over the lifetime of the system because the time the system spends sleeping can be orders of magnitude longer than that during which the system is active. The problem of leakage calls for design techniques that limit leakage in subsystems such as real-time clocks and interrupt controllers to the nanoamp level. It might seem reasonable to disable interrupts for external events and only keep the real-time clock running in some applications. However, in that design the system needs to wake at regular intervals to check inputs that may incur unwanted energy consumption if there is no overall change to record. If the long-term energy usage of an interrupt controller is low enough, keeping that active to respond to events as they happen may make more sense.   When the processor and memory subsystem are powered down, a key decision is how to manage temporary data. One option is to use specialised retention register and memory cells, at the cost of some leakage power. Another is to put important data, such as calibration values, into non-volatile memory (NVM). This allows values to be restored quickly on restart but allows the leakage-prone SRAM arrays and registers to be powered down fully until then. But NVM choices are not always straightforward.   Processes that are optimised for low leakage and that support high-density NVM options may not have the performance required to support efficient RF modules on-chip. The energy needed for I/O drivers that transfer data to an off-chip RF transceiver may outweigh the power savings and security advantages obtained from implementing NVM on-chip. Careful analysis of the application’s requirements will indicate which choice is better for the custom SoC solution.   For the portions of the design that will be active for much of the device’s lifetime, careful attention to detail is required. Seemingly small details such as choosing to multiplex inputs into an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) will help determine the architecture of choice for those circuits. A sigma-delta ADC may initially appear to offer a good trade-off between accuracy, energy efficiency and silicon area. But it is not suited to multiplexing. Often a successive approximation (SAR) architecture offers superior performance for industrial sensor signals. Advances in SAR design have pushed the energy per bit per conversion down into the range of tens of femtojoules.   Front-end analogue circuits are just as important as the ADC. Amplifiers and buffers that isolate and condition signals before conversion can consume high levels of power and they will be active for long periods of time. Analysis of the specific requirements for bandwidth and accuracy often allow for optimizations that reduce the energy of front-end circuitry and ADCs.   To tie all the subsystems together into a working custom SoC demands the use of power-aware design methodologies to ensure subsystems and circuits are activated properly when required, and can be powered down without disrupting the operation of other parts of the custom IC that need to stay running. Standards such as the Unified Power Format (UPF) have been designed to support such power-aware methodologies, but their application requires experience and attention to detail at different levels of abstraction.   Take an example For example, there may be a logical connection between two subsystems that demands they be active at the same time. But physical restrictions may call for them to form part of a larger power island – an area of the mixed-signal ASIC with a common set of power and ground rails – that includes other subsystems that are not required during that time. Design verification needs to ensure that the entire island is powered up correctly. If not, the final SoC will fail. Such physical design considerations may call for changes to the power-control architecture if the consumption of the whole island is higher than the budget allows. It may call for subsystems to be assigned to different power islands, for example.   Verification also needs to pay attention to on-chip noise, which may point to further optimization of the power-island strategy. For example, a low-noise LDO may be used to power sensitive mixed-signal sections that operate autonomously. Once measurements have been taken or RF communications have been completed, a higher-efficiency DC/DC converter may then be reactivated to analyse incoming data and make decisions.   Although the core requirements of energy efficiency in IIoT sensor nodes are readily understood, as can be seen, the implementation choices are complex and often subtle. Many factors affect the optimum solution for a given IIoT sensor node application, although a custom SoC will frequently be the best target in terms of energy and overall cost. Therefore, the ability to call on the expertise of design teams with extensive experience in custom mixed-signal IC implementation is key to success.  

SummaryA digital temperature sensor IC which offers accurate measurements in the temperature range -20 to 10°C has been introduced by ams. The performance of the AS6200C makes it easier for designers of refrigerators and data loggers in cold-chain storage equipment to meet demanding targets for system-level accuracy. The AS6200C’s measurements are accurate to ±0.2°C between -20°C and 10°C, the temperature range over which storage equipment for perishable goods operates.  AS6200C Sensor ICAS6200C sensor's accuracy is guaranteed over the device's supply voltage range of 1.8~3.6V. In temperature control and temperature logging applications, the total error budget is made up of multiple components. By minimising the error at the point of measurement, the designer gains extra headroom for other error and noise sources, such as the heat generated by board-mounted com-ponents. The use of the highly accurate AS6200C gives the designer more flexibility to modify other elements of the system design while keeping total error below a specified maximum level. The AS6200C integrates a sensor front end, 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter and digital logic in a small WL-CSP package. It provides a digital output over an I2C interface to any host microcontrol-ler. The device performs on-board digital signal processing, which means that it needs no user calibration, and its linearised output requires no compensation by an external microcontroller. The AS6200C is intended for use in equipment for storing and transporting food, pharmaceuticals, flowers and other perishable goods, as well as in domestic and commercial refrigerators. It is well suited to data loggers that comply with the EN12830:1999 class 1 standard.The new device extends the ams family of small, accurate digital temperature sensor ICs, joining the AS6200 sensor, which achieves peak accuracy between 0 and 65°C. “The AS6200C offers the market a unique combination of small size - its footprint is only 1.5mm2 - very high accuracy over the cold-chain monitoring and storage temperature range, and a convenient digital output requiring no calibration or linearisation. It provides a new example of the value of the low noise, high sensitivity, high linearity semiconductor technology underlying the outstanding performance of ams' sensor solution products,” said Nikolai Haslebner, Marketing Manager at ams. 

SummarySingaporean researchers,led by by professor Hirotaka Sato,describe their work about designing robots--It's possible to use a living insect as a platform to develop a living insect-machine hybrid robot.Such a hybrid retains the complex structure of the insect's rigid exokeleton,complaint joints,and soft actuators, as well as the insect’s locomotion capability, and it does so while enabling high controllability and low power consumption. Such an insect-machine hybrid robot is made of a living insect platform with a miniaturized electronic device attached on it to control it.   By using the insect itself as the robot, researchers bypass the complex processes of designing and fabricating the robot body, using the insect’s muscular system as the soft actuators and flexible joints and its nervous system as part of the control system. About BeetleThis kind of particular beetle is a a darkling beetle. It’s small (2 to 2.5 centimeters), lightweight (about 0.5 gram), and lives for three months or so, which is a long time for a little bug. A backpack of electronics interfaces with the beetle’s antennae, and when the antennae are stimulated with an electric pulse, it activates the beetle’s built-in escape mechanism, fooling it into thinking it’s running into something and causing it to turn. The picture is from Nanyang Technological University AdvantageThe advantage of doing things this way (as opposed to direct nerve or muscle stimulation, something that the researchers also experimented with) is that the beetle’s brain is still in charge of controlling its limbs such that it’ll respond to high-level controls with adaptive gaits and such, making locomotion a much simpler problem to solve. With just two coin cell batteries, the cybeetle can be controlled for 8 hours, which is long enough for it to travel over a kilometer at an average speed of 4 cm/s. The following picture is from  Cyborg Insect: Ultralightweight Living Legged Robot The key to effectively controlling an insect using these methods is that the response to the antenna stimulation can’t be binary, since you’d end up with a level of control that would often be too coarse to be useful. By changing the frequency of the stimulation, the researchers were able to modulate how sharp of a turn the insect took: Increasing the stimulation frequency also increased the insect’s turning rate, with a success rate of over 85 percent. Stimulating both antennae at once causes the insect to back up, and it moves forward by default, giving you just about as much control as you can hope for. Living Robots' DifferencesElectrical stimulation is commonly used for neuromuscular stimulation in cyborg insects such as cockroaches, giant beetles, and moths. There are other groups working on antenna stimulation but they were not able to grade the response of the insect, which is very important for developing a precise closed-loop control system to make the cyborg insect work autonomously. The giant cyborg beetle mainly relies on neuromuscular stimulation of direct flight muscles for flight control and leg muscles of the fore legs for walking control. Ideally, stimulating the muscle would be more precise as we can perfectly control the individual legs, but it costs more in implantation and computing to plan and stimulate all the individual muscles for walking. Antenna stimulation is simpler and easier than stimulating all the individual muscles thus it helps us to simplify the hardware and control system a lot. Hopefully, in the near future, we can control the cyborg beetle as precisely as any other artificial motor. The zophobas beetle were used to develop this cyborg insect because its small size (2-2.5 cm) would help it to access the small rubbles system easily at disaster sites, where the cockroach and giant beetle can not get in. Moreover, a swarming of flying and walking cyborg insects of various sizes would increase the coverage and reduce the searching time, thus enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of search and rescue operations. Control IssueFor walking cyborg insects, researchers are able to integrate external sensors into the backpack as the insect is able to carry loads up to double its weight. We are developing a new backpack with integrated sensors for human detection and navigation. It would help us to detect victims when using cyborg insects at disaster sites, and enable the cyborg insects to work autonomously. On the other hand,research could release hundreds of flying and crawling cyborg insects to the sites as the price for one cyborg insect would be negligible once mass produced for a disaster scenario.The insects can move freely themselves into the collapsed structures and send back maps of their positions and environmental conditions so that the rescue team can plan for their action efficiently on how and where they should access. Once an insect detects a victim, it will send an alarm to the rescue team and switch to autonomous control mode to move around the victim for confirmation and build a clearer map of surrounding environment. At the end of the rescue operation, all the insects will autonomously return to the control base. I know that it sounds like science fiction, but we are in fact working to realize it. Researcher's GoalNow,researchers are working on a feedback control system to precisely control the insect locomotion with high reliability. We are also developing a new backpack with a navigation system and environmental sensors designed to promote fully autonomous and practical cyborg insects. For real applications, we need to maintain the power supply for the cyborg insect (mainly for the electronics backpack), which is currently a huge challenge if we just rely on the battery. So we are developing a biofuel cell, which is able to convert biofuel inside the insect to electric current for running the control backpack. It will help to maintain the backpack power for long-term use. Article resources: journal Soft RoboticsAtticle edited by kynix 

SummaryResearchers at Caltech have developed a prototype miniature medical device that could ultimately be used in “smart pills” to diagnose and treat diseases. This is critical for the function of biosensors and smart pills. A key to the new technology—and what makes it unique among other microscale medical devices—is that its location can be precisely identified within the body, something that proved challenging before. The picture is about an ATOMS microchip localized within the gastrointestinal tract. bodyCalled ATOMS, which is short for addressable transmitters operated as magnetic spins, the new silicon-chip devices borrow from the principles of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), in which the location of atoms in a patient's body is determined using magnetic fields. The microdevices would also be located in the body using magnetic fields—but rather than relying on the body's atoms, the chips contain a set of integrated sensors, resonators, and wireless transmission technology that would allow them to mimic the magnetic resonance properties of atoms. The ATOMS device seen next to a penny. The device has a surface area of 1.4 square millimeters, 250 times smaller than a penny. A key principle of MRI is that a magnetic field gradient causes atoms at two different locations to resonate at two different frequencies, making it easy to tell where they are. The researchers wanted to embody this elegant principle in a compact integrated circuit. ATOMS devices also resonate at different frequencies depending on where they are in a magnetic field. The scientists wanted to make this chip very small with low power consumption, and that comes with a lot of engineering challenges. They had to carefully balance the size of the device with how much power it consumes and how well its location can be pinpointed.The devices are still preliminary but could one day serve as miniature robotic wardens of our bodies, monitoring a patient's gastrointestinal tract, blood, or brain. They could measure factors that indicate the health of a patient—such as pH, temperature, pressure, sugar concentrations—and relay that information to doctors. Or, the devices could even be instructed to release drugs. Microscale and Biosensors You could have dozens of microscale devices and biosensors -traveling around the body taking measurements or intervening in disease. These devices can all be identical, but the ATOMS devices would allow you to know where they all are and talk to all of them at once. The researchers compare it to the 1966 sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a patient to heal him from the inside—but, instead of sending a single submarine, you could send a flotilla. The researchers say the devices are still preliminary but could one day serve as miniature robotic wardens of our bodies, monitoring a patient's gastrointestinal tract, blood, or brain. The devices could measure factors that indicate the health of a patient—such as pH, temperature, pressure, sugar concentrations—and relay that information to doctors. Or, the devices could even be instructed to release drugs. This chip is totally unique: there are no other chips that operate on these principles. Integrating all of the components together in a very small device while keeping the power low was a big task. The final prototype chip, which was tested and proven to work in mice, has a surface area of 1.4 square millimeters, 250 times smaller than a penny. It contains a magnetic field sensor, integrated antennas, a wireless powering device, and a circuit that adjusts its radio frequency signal based on the magnetic field strength to wirelessly relay the chip’s location. In conventional MRI, all of these features are intrinsically found in atoms. Ther researchers still had to create an architecture that functionally mimics them for our chip. Article from CaltechArticle edit by kynix