PROTEUS project
PROTEUS investigates the smart integration of chemical and physical sensors based on carbon nanotubes and MEMS with CMOS based electronics and with a cognitive engine providing on-the-fly reconfigurability, applied in the context of water monitoring. Indeed, water management requires massive, low-cost monitoring means coping with differentiated and evolving requirements. However, the majority of multifunctional water sensors only supports predefined goals hindering interoperability, with a high cost, impeding large scale deployments.
Addressing this, PROTEUS aims at offering x10 reduction in size and unit costs compared to state of the art. To this end, an increased number of functions are integrated into a single sensor node. PROTEUS delivers a reconfigurable MEMS and nano-enabled sensor platform for cognitive water quality monitoring with predictive capabilities and in-built redundancy for increased lifespan. Energy autonomy is achieved by harvesting water flow energy.
The main challenge relates to the heterogeneous integration into a monolithic sensing chip of carbon nanotubes-based resistive chemical sensors, of MEMS physical and rheological resistive sensors and of a multifunctional adaptive deep-submicron CMOS system on chip. Upstream, high level system design addressing industrial use cases, manufacturability and cost-effectiveness, packaging, energy budget and interfaces between building blocks, enables consistency and efficiency of the whole approach. Downstream, system validation is carried out at different levels: benchmarking, reliability assessment, model deployments and field testing.
The consortium brings together renowned actors along the whole value chain, including system integration and end users. This will contribute to post-project exploitation prepared by ensuring appropriate inclusion of business requirements within the system design.
