MEMS & Sensors Summit: With growth comes climate change responsibility
In the week when the International Panel on Climate Change produced a report that has revised upwards the projected rate of global sea-level rise, Laith Altimime, president of SEMI Europe, spoke of a MEMS and sensors industry on the verge of a new era of tremendous growth.
As he opened the MEMS and Imaging Summit, Altimime said the world is headed towards one trillion Internet-connected devices by 2030. And those connections would be predominantly sensors and actuators that form the edge nodes of smart automotive, smart homes, smart industry, smart health and smart cities.
Altimime also pointed out that this is great opportunity for Europe as these connections will exploit component technologies and application sectors in which the continent has expertise.
First keynote speaker Yanchao Wang, a lead solution architect for Alibaba in Europe, continued the theme of an almost ubiquitous connection between the real world and a digital representation of that world in the cloud. Alibaba is known as China’s equivalent to e-commerce giant Amazon. Wang, was standing in for an absent Sean Ding, chief scientist for Alibaba IoT.
Wang said that Alibaba’s vision is for everything to be connected to the Internet and that IoT will then be able to digitize the physical world and use cloud computing to analyze the world. “We are creating an abstraction layer between the digital world and the physical world,’ Wang said. “IoT is the bridge from physical to digital but that is not enough. IoT has to then re-impact the physical world to create value.”
Next: Alibaba’s smart city
Wang said that in the city of Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered, the company is working with local government to implement that approach to create a smart city. This includes improved traffic management by the control of traffic lights. “Industry is on the verge of a 20-year revolution. Digitizing the physical world will require a new Moore’s Law. IoT must contribute to Industry 4.0 to empower productivity,” he said.
Again, there was much emphasis on the opportunity for expansion and the need for datacenters to store and process the knowledge acquired. But a trillion connections, and the zettabytes and yottabytes of data that they will generate, has implications for energy consumption and the generation of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Although necessary to life at historical concentrations, carbon dioxide is now generally acknowledged to be the most significant of greenhouse gases and key contributor to global warming.
It was left to the MEMS event’s last keynoter Antti Vasara, CEO of Finland’s research organization VTT, to touch upon climate change implications and how technology can address this. His keynote started with a video of a babe-in-arms and the phrase “What a time to be alive.”
Much of Vasara’s talk looked at research themes at VTT and how they address resource sufficiency and security. Biotech is becoming a powerful driver at VTT which is looking at how to synthesize food stuffs, amongst other things. Carbon dioxide is a potential feedstock for many of these processes. “We are making milk without cows. We are making eggs without chickens,” said Vasara.
This is clearly closely related to Finnish company Solar Foods that earlier this year announced the invention of Solein, a protein produced from CO2, water and electricity by fermentation. Not only is this the efficient means for the production of protein but with the side benefit that the use of its feedstock offsets carbon emissions.
Vasara also touched on one of the central planks of VTT’s research, Fabry-Perot optical interferometry, achieved either with MEMS using electrostatics or with larger aperture piezoelectrics. Such devices allow the creation of interferometers that work with ultraviolet, visible and infrared light.
Next: Sense the CO2, use the CO2
Hyperspectral imaging has been deployed in satellites and drones to examine agriculture and reveal otherwise unseen pests or fertilization needs. VTT has help drive the creation of a number of startups around its intellectual property in interferometry including Spectral Engines Oy founded in 2014 to continue the development and application of MEMS-based tunable Fabry-Perot Interferometers. Progress has continued at VTT and Vasara said: “We could integrate that into a mobile phone.”
After walking his audience through other optical, terahertz and radar opportunities Vasara also alighted on the possibility of using interferometry for gas sensing. Gases have strong signatures in the mid-IR he said.
Vasara’s conclusion was that technology, as well as driving growth, is also able to sense greenhouse gases such as CO2 and contribute to the climate change solutions. In fact the lines of research are almost without number providing plenty of work for researchers to come. The final line in the VTT video was “What an amazing time to be alive.”
Related links and articles:
News articles:
Europe’s research bodies should lead on climate, says VTT
IPCEI fails to address European dithering
ST’s CEO speaks of shame at European failure
GSS shows how CO2 in automobiles can exceed health guidelines
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