Hardware Design for Realization of Smart Sensor Network

Advances in micro-electrical-mechanical systems (MEMS), coupled with new optical devices, present enormous possibilities in the areas of sensors and energy harvesting. Marrying the MEMs and optical sensors (such as IR detectors) with smart electronics can also open new doors in novel machine vision technology such as neuromorphic spectrally agile and retinal sensors. Further, nano-retina sensor concepts could benefit significantly by the combination of new electronic interfaces/protocols that are likely to evolve through this effort. In view of the above thoughts, sensor interface ICs (in the form of ASICs, microcontrollers, DSP, FPGA and/or ADC) can play a vital role in making sensors smarter, and to work effectively in a particular application by amplifying, pre-processing, filtering, and correcting the sensor's signal; eliminating non-linearities and compensating for environmental factors (such as temperature or humidity) that can impair the sensor's measurement accuracy (particularly for PZT MEMs sensors), thereby significantly reducing sensor-signal post-processing requirements, and facilitating the sharing of sensor data with the host back-plane processors.