Experts from research and industrial settings have explored new technologies and design methods which will support production of systems combining multiple sensors and offering robustness and energy-efficiency. Without such systems, status monitoring and quality assurance are unthinkable for digitised production processes. With them, the trail is blazed for Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution. A further aim of the current work was to achieve systematic design and economical manufacture for these systems.

UHF RFID chip for battery-free operation of commercial sensors in I4.0 applications

IMMS has developed an energy-efficient UHF RFID transponder chip which enables different types of commercially available digital I²C sensors requiring varied power levels to be operated on a passive basis. In this case, the chip is equipped with a flexible on-chip I²C master and a power management unit which can be individually configured. The developed chip requires no maintenance or power supply and can therefore be easily integrated into various products, machines and objects in a wide variety of application scenarios for sensor data acquisition. Such an RFID transponder IC was previously not available. More detail can be found in this annual report article on RFID.

Tool for efficient design of 3D MEMS acceleration sensors

Furthermore, IMMS has developed further the design tool from the MEMS2015 project for 1-dimensional acceleration sensors to achieve for multi-dimensional acceleration sensors a tool for automated sensor design and largely automated layout design. First, the original tool was laid out for use in house to design 3-dimensional acceleration sensors which would extend the functionality of TPMS (tyre-pressure-monitoring systems). More detail can be found in this annual report article on MEMS.