The Road to Smart Transducer Technology
The past decade has seen three distinct trends emerge in sensor technologies. The first is biosensing wherein measurements as diverse as detecting aromas in food processing to highly sophisticated detection of DNA and proteins have become staples of contemporary engineering efforts. The second important trend is the continuing decrease in the physical size of sensing elements embodied by the replacement of “micro” by “nano” in fabrication and technology. These two efforts in biosensing and the decreasing size of electronic and sensing components have transformed not only virtually every area of research, development and engineering, they are powerfully influencing many aspects of everyday life. The third trend, and the one that will be examined in this paper, involves efforts to fuse information technology with sensing technologies. The rubric “smart transducer technologies” has been given to these activities to connote this fusion.