Device and technology challenges for integrated sensors

Integrated silicon sensors have emerged over the past few years to extend microelectronics into important new areas, including health care, automotive systems, industrial process control (including semiconductor manufacturing), and environmental monitoring. Increasingly, such devices combine sensors, actuators, and microelectronics on single chips to form integrated microsystems, and the resulting devices are beginning to show the steady improvements in performance that have characterized integrated circuits in the past. The present and future device and technology challenges offered by integrated sensors are highlighted in this paper.