The Future Development Trend of Sensors

Sensors in scientific and technical areas, industry, agriculture and daily life is playing a more and more important role. Human society put forward higher requirements.

Development of new sensors

The sensor’s working mechanism is based on all kinds of effect and law, which inspire people to further explore the new functional material with the new effect, and thus to develop a new principle of new property type sensor, this is a important way for developing high performance, multi-function, low cost and miniaturization sensor. The structural type of sensor development is early, at present it is more mature. Structural type of sensor, general speaking, and its structure is complex, the volume is too large, price is on the high side. Physical property type sensor, by contrast, has many attractive advantages, together with the past development are insufficient. All countries in the world invest a lot of manpower and material resources in the physical property type sensors to strengthen the research so that it becomes a noteworthy development trends.

Integration, multi-function, intelligence

Sensor integration includes two kinds, one is the multicomponents with same function in paralleling, and integration of another definition is multi-function integration.

Along with the development of the integrated technology, all kinds of hybrid integrated and monolithic integrated type pressure sensor arise, some have become a commodity. Integration pressure sensor has piezoresistive pressure sensor, capacitive type, etc., and the integrated piezoresistive pressure sensor has quick development and wide application.

The sensor multi-function is one of the development directions. Integrating multi-sensors with different function together, can simultaneously measure many parameters, as well as comprehensively treat and evaluate these parameters measurement results, and it can reflect the overall state of the system. Integration brought many new opportunities of solid sensor, it is also the foundation of multi-function.

New material development

The sensor materials are the important basis of the sensor technology and the key support to upgrade sensor technology.

Along with the progress of material science, the sensor technology matured gradually, in addition to an early form of semiconductor materials, ceramic materials, optical fiber, and the development of superconducting materials provides the material basis for the development of the sensor,. For example, according to the silicon substrate for many of the semiconductor material easy to miniaturization, integration, multi-function, intelligent, and semiconductor detector has a high sensitivity, high accuracy, the non-contact characteristics, we developed infrared sensors, laser sensors, optical fiber sensors and other modern sensors; In sensitive materials, ceramic materials, organic materials have a quick development. It can use different formula mixed ingredients, on the basis of precision deployment of chemical composition, to get a new sensitive material to make mew type gas sensor. In addition, organic polymer sensitive materials are drawn much attention of people in recent years. Sensor technology unceasing development promote the new materials development, such as nanometer materials etc.

The new technology adoption

The development of new sensor cannot do without the adoption of the new technology. The meaning of new technology range is very wide; here we mainly mean microfabrication technology. The technology also called micro mechanical processing technology. It is developed in recent years along with integrated circuit technology, it is processing technology for microelectronics of ion beam, electron beam, molecular beam, laser beam and chemical etching, which has more and more widely used in sensor areas.

Intelligent materials

Intelligent material refers to design and control material physical, chemical, mechanical, electrical parameters to develop man-made material which has the characteristics of biological material or better than its performance. Some people think that, intelligent materials have the following functions: materials has the function for the judgment of the environment; it has the diagnosis function, self repairing function and self enhancement function.