Electronic Olfaction System on a Chip

Olfaction today has many applications not only for an individual’s life but also for the industries. Applications include food product quality control, safety and security, environmental monitoring, indoor air quality, health care, medical diagnosis, pharmaceutical purposes, and military applications. In these applications human olfaction is still the primary instrument. This is a costly process since trained experts are required who can only work for relatively short periods of time, not mentioning fatigue, mental state, subjectivity, and the danger being exposed to hazardous chemicals. Therefore using machine olfaction to perform the task would be a significant advance. Many researchers have investigated electronic noses, but currently only relatively large ”instrument” electronic noses have been built. We have designed, simulated, fabricated and tested an integrated electronic nose on a single silicon chip. This electronic nose chip is able to learn and distinguish eight different odors. We suggest that the chip performance can be improved by adding more different sensors and processing more odor data.