Sensorsystems for industrial and automotive applications [review]

Whereas in the 1970s microelectronics was one of the dominant strategic research and development goals, in the 1980s materials research and information engineering had priority. Then in the early 1990s, development work was started mainly in the field of miniaturization and integration of extremely small functional units within a system, in order to open up new technologies of the future, ranging from micro- and nanostructures down to molecular and atomic units, by utilizing also phenomena of quantum physics and quantum chemistry. Sensors are of essential importance for most products and systems and for their manufacture. To some extent the development of sensors has not been able to keep pace with the tumultuous developments in microelectronic components. For this reason, sensorics is in a restructuring phase in the direction of achieving increased miniaturization and integration of sensors and signal processing within a total system. This is giving substantially more importance to technologies that permit low-cost manufacture of both the sensors and the related electronics.