Ultra-low Power Sensor Systems – the Fuel for Artificial Intelligence

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Contents of the Talk

There is an increasingly stronger interaction between microelectronics, applications, and new megatrends in our society: demographic changes (urbanization, health care), sustainability (resource and energy management) and digitalization (from miniaturization over the IoT towards ‘big data’). This talk will discuss the role of microelectronic sensor circuits and systems in solving critical issues related to those megatrends. After an introduction into those problems, I will show both examples for sensor and for circuit technologies enabling these applications, discuss critical system aspects and how they can be solved by circuit design. To have further impact such electronic systems will need to evolve to a new class of sensor systems: sensor system data need evaluation in the application context to be useful to the society. Also, energy constraints, often given by the application, force us to process and transmit only the useful information. Artificial intelligence can and most likely will support such usefulness in future. Its capability for learning is an additional benefit here. Therefore in the last part I will discuss simple artificial intelligence algorithms, as well as how to make use of them not only in the application context, but also to enhance the performance of sensor systems.