CURRENT RESEARCH

Precision Agriculture Sensing Systems

Agriculture is one of the main greenhouse emission sources since farm fields emit carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide from fertilizers, cultivation of soils, animal waste and rotting crops. Thus, it is critical to accurately monitor gases to reduce emissions and increase crop productivity. To accomplish greenhouse gas emission sensing system, a low-power embedded readout system with long-range wireless data transmission and machine learning data processing will be developed. The sensing system will enable cost-effective precision agriculture.

Electrochemical Sensor Systems for bio and chemical detection

As sensor technology has been developed, electrochemical sensors lead a trend of smart sensing systems, which allows Point-of-Care-Testing. This evolution in the health care area has set a task for researchers to develop new architectures with low power consumption and compactness for the measurement system, as well as achieving accuracy, sensitivity, range, and stability. In order to achieve these requirements, ISCS Lab has developed electrochemical sensor readout circuit systems for chemical detection and bio application such as glucose monitoring and gas sensing.

Hearing Aid Device

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders – part of the National Institutes of Health – reports that one in eight people in the United States aged 12 years or older have hearing loss in both ears, based on standard hearing examinations. Despite this, the World Health Organization states that the current production of hearing aids meets less than 10 percent of global need and that about 5 percent of the world’s population – 360 million people – have disabling hearing loss. Thus, it has been important to develop acoustic medical devices regardless of countries. The purpose of this research is to develop a low power hearing aid integrated circuit (IC) containing a pre-amplifier, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a modulator, and an audio amplifier.

Environmental Sensing Systems and Circuits

To measure the water quality in the natural source, a submerged array of sensors are created to provide real-time, large area identification. The sensors monitor for months with a battery, communicating with the base station via the wireless transceiver, eliminating the need to retrieve the sensor frequently and saving a lot of money and human resource.

The purpose of the readout circuit is to amplifier the current signal from PIN photo-detector, then get the information of chemical species on the sensor. Thus, a sensor readout circuit including a trans-impedance amplifier(TIA) and ADC are required to design. To obtain a precise result, we aim to develop the readout circuit with low noise and low power consumption.