Temperature Modulation for Tin-Oxide Gas Sensors

This paper presents a study of temperature modulation for tin-oxide gas sensor. The main objective of this work is to perform temperature modulation experimental setup for tin oxide gas sensors in order to improve the selectivity of the sensor array and to virtually increase the number of sensors. Typically, tin oxide sensors operate by heating at a relatively high temperature (around 300degC a microhotplate structure). A convex microhotplate is proposed in order to improve the thermal properties of the structure and enable efficient temperature modulation process to be carried-out. Temperature modulation is shown to increase the number of our sensors from 16 physical sensors (integrated on-chip) up to 12 000 virtual sensors. This will enable the emulation of a very large number of sensors typically found in biological systems.