Microsemi Participates in New Research Project to Reduce CO Emissions

Microsemi will lead and manage the SOI-HITS project, and be responsible for high-temperature packaging and system integration activities. Additional consortium members include:



• 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;



• Cissoid, a leader in high-temperature semiconductor solutions, will design a high-temperature, highly integrated, intelligent interface circuit for the gas sensor;



• 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 sensing 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 Microsensors & Bioelectronics Laboratory (formerly Sensors Research Laboratory), will be responsible for the characterization and testing of the gas sensors under harsh environmental conditions.





About the Project

For this project, SOI-HITS will develop sensors with a built-in electronic interface 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 225o centigrade.



The extension of the platform to optical detectors, such as ultra-violet (UV) photodiode flame detectors and infrared (IR) combined sources/detectors, will also be explored.