Freshness PointBAN639175448260Sugar Potassium Calories3.812 g 358 mg 89implantable medical devices, scientific instruments,
aircraft, spacecraft – things Alissa Fitzgerald says
you can’t find just anywhere.
But she told me on the phone from her office
south of San Francisco that she’s recently seen a
change. “About five or six years ago I started to see
this trend where more of the university research
was in developing sensors on flexible – or even just
cheaper – substrates like paper or fabric.”
Today, thanks to the work done in labs and
universities, a lot of the theory and many aspects
of the practice are in place. The only bottleneck
remaining is the manufacturing infrastructure.
“Companies that make printing presses,
and textile manufacturers which already have
equipment, will probably be best positioned to take
this on,” says Fitzgerald. “If you want to buy a shirt
that already has sensors embedded in it, where’s
that going to be done? It’s going to be at a textile
company.”
Such businesses have the large-scale means to
merge electronics manufacturing with that of making
paper, fabric or other flexible materials by producing
it on huge rolls – a merger that hasn’t occurred at the
industrial level yet.
Notable by its absence in Fitzgerald’s imagined
future is the semiconductor industry.
Household names in the industry – such as Intel
and AMD – have designed and built almost every
other electronic sensor in your home and workplace
today thanks to their command of the computer and
smartphone markets.
“A semiconductor factory is essentially a giant
clean room,” Fitzgerald says, referring to the high
threshold for process fidelity and the purity of the
parts and processes needed. These are markers not
required at a factory making exercise books or $5
shirts.
Then there’s the precedent of “fabless” (as in,
fabrication-free) chip-making. Small semiconductor
companies in the 1980s drove an explosion of
innovation by designing inhouse but outsourcing
actual fabrication to established third-party foundries
and manufacturers, thus avoiding the huge capital
outlays and risk that come with equipment, plants
and staffing.
Today it’s the natural home of some of the biggest
names in the information and communications
technology (ICT) industry. Among the top five
companies by sales, using fabless manufacturing
in 2017 were superconductor giant Qualcomm,
graphics and gaming specialists nVidia and, of course,
Apple.
In fact, some work in hybridising manufacture has
already been done – and from a surprising quarter.
University of Illinois chemical and biomolecularEat a banana too early and it can affect your ability to digest complex carbs,
too late and it contains fewer nutrients and more sugar. Work at New York’s
Clarkson University has created a paper sensor that can detect food spoilage
from the supermarket packaging or even the skin of the fruit itself. Embedded
nanostructures change colour (like litmus paper or a home pregnancy test) in
response to the gases released by decomposition, so a visual sensor could read
the colours and report the result digitally. A lab at Harvard University is also
adapting a paper-based diagnostic test strip sensor to transmit data by radio.Today, thanks to the work
done in labs and universities,
a lot of the theory and many
aspects of the practice are
in place. The only bottleneck
remaining is the manufacturing
infrastructure.
05 FOREVER FRESH
Vitamin sensorTransmitterSugarPotassiumLevelsTime62 – COSMOS Issue 86
TECHNOLOGY