Green Sensing

Manufacturing Concept for High precision Spectral CO/CO₂ Sensors

The high-tech driven consumer market for mobile applications (wearables, smart phones, tablets…), still one of the fastest growing markets worldwide, is continuously asking for devices and systems with increased overall performances such as power and functionality. In parallel, systems have to decrease in size and weight and have to be produced in high volumes. These constrains call for innovations like integrated photonic devices with increasing functionalities. Already existing components and devices have to be improved to demonstrate compact, reliable and efficient systems compatible with large-scale production.

The project “Green Sensing” aims to develop and optimize a production process of photonic components with increased integrated functionality utilizing on-chip light sources. In a first step “Green Sensing” aims to demonstrate a production process for a CO/CO₂ sensor. The coordinator of this project, is strongly interested in a scalable approach. The lab demonstrator is meant to demonstrate the feasibility of a large-scale production of a multitude of integrated photonic devices and will foster the demonstration of a large variety of photonic products in the so called “medsumer” domain, but also open doors towards automotive (cabin sensing – air quality monitoring) and medical engineering (human breath analysis – medical health) applications.

To be able to realize this ambitional goal, three major innovations will be pursued:

• An innovative metering principle to record CO/CO₂
• Innovative coherent light sources for ultra-sensitive CO/CO₂ detectors
• An innovative downscaling concept for a highly integrated CO/CO₂ sensing device

Due to the strong absorption features of (CO/CO₂) gases, the innovative measuring principle implements the mid-infrared region to take advantage of the highest possible sensitivity. The silicon platform available being allows a low cost large-scale production of systems, but this approach has issues with light sources for ultra-high sensitivities. We hope to avoid these issues by introducing interband cascade lasers as an innovative light source in the mid-IR region. The consortium will demonstrate the smallest but most sensitive CO/CO₂ detector for low cost large-scale production.