Cambridge CMOS Sensors (CCS) announced today that it is to demonstrate at the Sensor + Test exhibition (Nuremberg, Germany, 19-21 May 2015) how its indoor air-quality and breath-testing sensor ICs may be integrated into smartphones, tablets and connected IoT devices.
The company’s CCS801 (indoor air-quality monitoring) and CCS803 (ethanol breathalyser measurement) sensors are so small, low-cost and power-efficient that they can be accommodated on the densely populated PCBs found in phones, tablets and IoT devices, with negligible effect on the bill-of-materials cost or battery run-time. This means that CCS’s technology will enable a range of gas sensing applications which were previously not possible, and allow consumers to monitor their environment everywhere, whether on a phone, in the home, in the office or on any mobile device.
Visitors to CCS at Sensor + Test (stand 12.566) will be able to evaluate the accuracy and see the small size of the CCS801 and CCS803 circuits for themselves. Both the indoor air-quality monitoring and the breath-testing designs will be operating in the form of pluggable modules with a micro-USB connection to an Android™-based smartphone. The smartphone will be running demonstration air-quality monitoring and breath-testing apps developed by CCS.
In addition, CCS will be demonstrating stand-alone indoor air-quality modules, which use Bluetooth® Smart wireless technology to interface to any Bluetooth® Smart Ready smartphone, tablet or laptop PC.
The technology behind the miniature gas sensors on display at Sensor + Test is the result of proprietary CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) wafer fabrication breakthroughs patented by CCS. This technology has enabled CCS to shrink the board footprint required for a volatile organic compounds (VOCs) sensor, while reducing the power required for gas sensing to a typical 200mW typically consumed by existing metal-oxide sensors.
And because the CCS devices are built in a conventional CMOS process, they may be readily produced in high volume at a low unit cost.
Dr Jess Brown, worldwide sales and marketing director at CCS, said: ‘CCS has crossed a threshold for the cost and power consumption of gas sensors, bringing them to a point at which they can be integrated inside even a low-end smartphone, tablet or connected IoT device.
‘Our demonstration at Sensor + Test will show how remarkably accurate and sensitive our indoor air-quality and ethanol measurement devices are, as well as giving visitors a chance to see how small a circuit is required to realise a design based on either the CCS801 or the CCS803.’
The CCS801 indoor air-quality monitoring IC and the CCS803 breath-analysis IC are available today in production volumes, housed in a 2mm x 3mm DFN package. More information about both devices may be found at www.ccmoss.com/sensors.