At IMMS, we are developing two wireless sensor ASICs for Industry 4.0 applications in the StorAIge project. In close cooperation with the consortium partners microsensys and endiio, we will develop a UHF RFID sensor transponder IC for monitoring plants in greenhouses and a wake-up receiver IC for monitoring wind turbines. These new and innovative ICs will use X-FAB's benchmark ULP memory to ensure that the chips require very little power to operate.

In highly automated and modern greenhouses, plants are continuously moving on a conveyor belt to provide same climatic conditions to all the plants that are being produced. It is also very important to continuously monitor temperature and soil moisture of the individual plants to ensure that all plants have even growing conditions. Monitoring with battery-based wireless sensors is usually very expensive for such applications. Passive UHF RFID-based sensor transponders, in contrast, are not powered by batteries but by the energy from the readers and are therefore considered an excellent alternative.

The challenge here is to measure the soil moisture sensors without batteries at a range of two metres and to read them passively while the plants are moving continuously on the conveyor belt. With our know-how from the BMBF project RoMulus, we are currently developing an extremely low-power UHF RFID sensor with intelligent energy management for such demanding applications in the StorAIge project at IMMS.

Among all components, the gearbox in wind turbines causes the largest share of those failures that have a direct impact on operating and maintenance costs. To prevent cost-intensive bearing damage in the event of a failure, extensive data, such as vibrations and the temperature, must be recorded locally via sensors and evaluated with local intelligence for diagnosis. Event-controlled wake-up receivers are a key component for the low-energy operation of sensors in such applications.

In StorAIge we will develop an ultra-low power wake-up receiver IC for wireless sensor applications at IMMS. The challenge is to ensure that the sensor nodes can operate under strict power consumption limits in the nanowatt range, among others, and are able to remain in a “sleeping but aware” state and immediately switch operating mode upon receiving a wireless wake-up signal. Our wake-up receiver aims to ensure that in demanding applications such as wind turbines, where extreme and difficult conditions prevail, faults can be detected quickly, and maintenance-intensive consequential damage can be avoided.