Solid-state
optical and chemical sensors
The
simulation capability of HFIELDS has been extended to the case of
solid-state
sensors after investigating the physics of the interaction of the
semiconductor
with the external environment [10,31]. This has been done, in
particular, for
the optical, elastic, and chemical cases, leading to investigations of
realistic optical sensors [29,86,87,95], piezoresistive pressure
sensors [33,37,89,93,94],
and chemical sensors of the ISFET and LAPS type
[42,45,100,106,108,110]. In 1998,
with Prof. H. Baltes of the ETH Zuerich and Prof. W. Goepel of the University of Tuebingen, M. R. has been
awarded with
the Koerber Foundation Award for the Project “Electronic ``Micronose''
for
Volatile Organic Compounds” (1999-2000). Aim of the Project is the
realization
of an integrated sensor for detecting molecules of different types
present in
the environment. The sensing elements are obtained by depositing
polymeric membranes
over semiconductor devices (e.g., capacitors, vibrating cantilevers)
fabricated
in a CMOS process supplemented with suitable micromachining steps. The
tasks of
M. R. and coworkers within the Project are the modeling of the
elementary sensors
[124], the design of the board performing the digital control of the
sensor
chip and the data analysis, and the implementation of the recognition
algorithms
[123].