About IoT Sensing platforms and their dependency on truthful and meaningful data: the importance of experimental validation.

(source ECS-SRA 2018)

Effective design technologies and (smart) systems integration, supported by efficient and effective architectures, are the ways in which ideas and requirements are predictively transformed into innovative, high-quality and testable products, at whatever level of the value chain.

These aforementioned technologies aim at increasing productivity, reducing development costs and time to market ensuring the level of targeted requirements such as new functionalities, quality, system level performance, cost, energy efficiency, safety, security and reliability.

Design Technologies include methodologies involving hardware and software components, design flows, development processes, tools, libraries, models, specification and design languages, IPs, manufacturing, and process characterisation. Mastering design technologies and extending them to cope with the new requirements imposed by modern and future Electronic Components and Systems (ECS) are highly important capabilities of European industries to ensure their leading position in ECS engineering. To ensure this leading position, the creation of efficient, modular architectures and digital platforms is needed to enable the system’s intended functionality at the required quality, and support efficient, cost-effective validation and test methods.

Physical and Functional Systems Integration (PFSI) is one of the essential capabilities that are required to maintain and to improve the competitiveness of European industry in the application domains of ECS. Although, in practice, PFSI is often geared towards specific applications, the materials, technologies, manufacturing and development processes that form part of this domain are generic. PFSI is hence an enabling technology in the area of ECS that needs to be further addressed by research, development and innovation (R&D&I), filling the value chain, the gap between technology and application, and moving innovations into products, services, and markets.

The objective of the proposed R&D&I activities is to leverage progress in Systems and Components Architecture, Design and Integration Technologies for innovations on the application level. Effective architectures, design methods, development approaches, tools and technologies are essential to transform ideas and concepts into innovative, producible and testable ECS, and products and services based on them. They aim at increasing productivity, reducing development costs and time-to-market, and ensure the level of targeted requirements such as on quality, performance, cost, energy and resource efficiency, safety, security and reliability. Design technologies enable the specification, concept engineering, architecture exploration and design, implementation and verification of ECS. In addition to design flows and related tools, design technologies also embrace libraries, IPs, process characteristics and methodologies including those to describe the system environment and use cases as well as Reference Architectures, Digital Platforms and other (semi-) standardised building blocks.

Design Technologies involve both hardware and software components, including their interaction and the interaction with the system environment, covering also integration into (cloud-based) services and ecosystems.

Moreover, the importance of software in ECS is increasing since the current trend includes the shift of features from the hardware to the software. This trend aims at standardising more the hardware (reducing the costs) and creating more advanced and customisable features in software (allowing also easier updates and improvements). This shift is required to meet the needs of the market that requires not only safety and security but also short time-to-market and development cycles. Systems architectures, design technologies and especially validation and testing processes have to follow this shift to enable European industry to meet the continuous changes of the market.

Future smart systems will feature new applications, higher levels of integration, decreased size, and decreased cost. Miniaturisation, functional integration, and high-volume manufacturing will make it possible to install sensors in even the smallest devices. Given the low cost of sensors and the large demand for process optimisation in manufacturing, very high adoption rates are possible; in fact, perhaps around 80 – 100% of all manufacturing could be using IoT-based applications by 2025.

“Setting your system to the right time through sensor’s characterization”

Efficient modelling, test and analysis for reliable, complex systems taking into account physical effects and constraints is key for success. The area of efficient modelling, test and analysis for reliable, complex systems taking into account physical effects and constraints comprises hierarchical modelling and early assessment of critical physical effects and properties from SoC down to system level, design and development of error-robust circuits and systems including adaptation strategies, intelligent redundancy concepts, adaptive algorithms.

Furthermore, it deals with production-related design techniques, consistent methods and new approaches for (multi-level) modelling, analysis, verification and formalisation of ECS’s operational reliability and service life taking into account the operating conditions and dependencies between hardware and software, detection and evaluation of complex fault failure probabilities. Additionally, the area is about a consistent design system able to model and optimise variability, operational reliability yield and system reliability taking into account dependencies and analysis techniques for new circuit concepts and special operating conditions. Last, but not least, it comprises advanced test methods, intelligent concepts for test termination, automated metrics/ tools for testability and diagnosis, extraction of diagnostic information and methods and tools for monitoring, diagnostics and error prediction for ECS.

Many of the new ECS benefit from the same transversal technologies. Advanced driver assistance systems and minimally invasive surgery devices both require the heterogeneous (3D) integration of different building blocks. Similarly, intraocular measurement devices and environmental sensors for dangerous substances both rely on wireless communication for data exchange. Also, there is the general trend for sensors and actuators to get much closer to the actual scene in order to measure data in-situ. Hence, harsh environments with high temperatures, humidity, vibration, electrical fields must often be endured for 15 to 30 years, with zero defects and error-free.

In all cases, the highest quality raw sensor signals with high reproducibility need to be provided by the next generation of extremely miniaturised innovative sensors, with lowest power consumption and at mass production levels.

In summary, while you may outsource your design to a third party manufacturer, it is unlikely that they will perform characterization and validation of the sensing platform at a hardware level. This, as mentioned above, may lead to your device not being able to provide with the accurate data required for decision making of your system. While this, in that particular moment, might be blamed on calibration and software driver issues, most likely the inaccuracy of your data is due to a badly or inexistent implementation of characterization and modelling activities.

It is a mistake commonly made to believe that sensor always tell the truth. Not the case. While the technology involved into the creation of new sensing devices and transducers able to provide with precise readings, these have to be conditioned and understood within the contextual environment where the sensors are deployed in.

To make a lay man comparison, it’s like having a swiss watch, which might be very accurate but it is rather useless until is set to the right time. It is then and only then that we can say we know what time it is.

Here in Nimbus, we can help you understand what the capabilities and limitations of currently available technologies are and how they can have an impact in solving any particular technical problem you might be trying to address. We can not only offer with Multiphysics simulation profiles to inform about HW design and optimal sensing techniques selection, but also can design and implement the posterior experimental characterization and validation of any sensing platform as well as its reliability over time through stress testing of the device under harsh environmental conditions.