Smart cities and smart homes, autonomous vehicles, and industry 4.0 are driving the technology market away from a processing-information-centric past to a sensing-and-actuation-centric future. The technological needs for this transformation are complex, as sensing technologies are very diverse and not driven solely by scaling, performance and cost, as opposed to the case of CMOS electronics. From the view of Europe’s industrial landscape, smart sensors are key technologies in the important automotive and healthcare/medical market segments.

Our global objective is the development of a reconfigurable platform to accommodate both for a generic analog front-end (AFE) sensor interface able to adapt to the change in environmental conditions, thus reducing power consumption and improving the signal quality, as well as a dedicated reconfigurable sensor transducer (RST) element for the detection of cancer biomarkers. Reconfigurable Field Effect Transistors (RFETs) hold the promise to provide the much-needed flexibility for this AFE/RST concepts, and are integrable as add-on into classical scaled CMOS processes like the 22 nm FDSOI, fully European available platform offered by GlobalFoundries. These devices provide adjustable device characteristics at runtime, e.g. the dynamic switching from p-type to n-type behavior or a negative differential resistance (NDR) mode, allowing the alteration of circuit behavior after manufacturing. Circuit characteristics become fine-tunable at run-time when deploying RFETs into conventional CMOS architectures.