System Integration Technologies for Wireless Sensors

Abstract:
For many years, the development in microelectronics has been following the so called “Moore's law”, which predicts an increase of electronic device density or functions by factor 2 every 24 months, which in turn results in higher complexity of integrated circuits. The extremely high speed of modern semiconductor devices enables wireless communication with highest data rates. This provides a basis for future communication among networked arbitrary items of daily life. Intelligent sensing of the human environment is one of the key future applications of miniaturized sensor nodes, such as “e Grains(R)” that build up a wireless ad-hoc sensor network with access to other global networks. For the development and manufacturing of extremely miniaturized sensor nodes very elaborate specialist knowledge from all scientific and engineering disciplines is necessary. The paper discusses some aspects of wafer level integration technologies to realize high miniaturized sensor nodes.