Today we have Professor Yogesh Gianchandani from our own University of Michigan. Professor Gianchandani is a professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. He's also the Director of our Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSensing and Systems. He's been leading that center for many years now. Yogesh, thank you very much for taking time from your busy schedule. I really appreciated joining us in this course. It's my pleasure. Yogesh, you've been working in the sensor technology for multiple decades, and you certainly are one of the leading experts in this field. First, can you tell us about the center that you're leading at the University of Michigan. Sure. The center, as you said, is for Wireless Integrated MicroSensing and Systems. Our charter is to pursue research, development, and application of sensor-enabled microsystems through basic research, through education, and also through interactions with industry. It was created in the year 2000 with support from the National Science Foundation, but we have been operating independently since 2010. We bring together specialists in a lot of different areas that are relevant to creating the system. We have a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment with a lot of industrial interaction. Great, Thank you. Yogesh, this rich experience over the last two decades or more, working with industry and working in the research and development of this technology, can you tell us some of the trends that you've seen over the last two years in the sensor technology and especially how it's now being used in the industrial context. Sure. First I want to remind everybody that even though fundamental research that's done in universities frequently ends up in industry, the birth is not always straightforward, and it's not preordained. Funding of academic research is driven by federal priorities, priorities established by the peer community through a review process such as at the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health. Solicitations are sometimes driven by professional organizations such as the National Academy of Engineering that sets out grand challenges, and then we try to address some of these grand challenges through solicitations that come up for supporting research. There is also some amount of research that has sponsored by industrial consortia, and typically they will target two or three technology nodes out. The federal agencies will try to address more fundamental problems or problems that may be a decade or even two decades out. As far as MEMS research and MicroSystems research is concerned, from an academic point of view, the number of applications is really vast. What we do is we connect the physical, chemical, and biological world to the digital world. Yogesh, maybe can you explain for our learners what do you mean by MEMS? What exactly is MEMS? I should explain that. MEMS is micro-electromechanical systems. It's a terminology that's used for chip-scale sensors and actuators. That would incorporate things like acceleration sensors that are used to deploy airbags, or rate-of-turn sensors that are used for skid control in automobiles. Your cellphone has probably three dozen different kinds of MEMS sensors in it. Can you use an example of how is MEMS used in one application in my cellphone, for example? In your cell phone, and I'm using the term MEMS more broadly, there might be sensors, microsensors that are not necessarily electromechanical. They could be using a different transduction method, but just the microphone into which we're speaking right now. Yeah. It's a sensor. It's a sensor. The facial recognition that allows you to access your phone. Well, that actually involves multiple sensors and our multiple micro transducers as we would say, and just the inertial sensors that tell the cell phone which orientation you're holding it. Of course the camera itself is another sensor. Those are the microsensors. Those are some of the microsensors. There's a lot of other things. We can get into that later. But basically these technologies in a fundamental sense can apply in a lot of different contexts, weather forecasting, environmental monitoring, wearable and implantable technologies, for biomedical devices, health and fitness devices. Then there's homeland security and defense applications. Things like chemical sensors, communication systems, micro antennas and the like. Transportation systems obviously use them. Smart homes would use them. There's potentially a lot of applications in aircraft and space probes and of course in adaptive manufacturing. Any place where you would need to digitize a physical, chemical, or biological signal. The analog world around us does not behave digitally. You have to be able to convert those parameters into digital form and also go the other way to effectuate a change. Great. Can you give us a manufacturing example especially the uses of MEMS in manufacturing? A lot of manufacturing uses robotics and robots would use sensors to interface with the environment. Got it. Temperature, pressure, flow rate, even certain chemical parameters, there maybe a lot of other parameters that would be useful depending on the context. Semiconductor manufacturing in particular uses closed loop control for a lot of processes and their sensing is essential. When I say close loop control I mean server control where you set a manufacturing parameter and you maintain that by sensing the various conditions and the mass flow rates and so on of the reactant species and adapt to those. Got it. Thank you. Going back to the older point, well, there's a lot of different areas where MEMS and microsensors can be applied, but not all of them translate to immediate industrial priorities. Which are those that do? Let me pull up some notes here, give me a second. Currently, let's say going out about 2025, the top sectors for industrial use would be consumer, automotive, industrial, medical, defense and aerospace, and Telecom. The consumer sector is the largest. It's projected numbers for 2025 are around $11 billion. I think driven a lot by the cell phone market, with a CAGR of around 8 percent, so $11 billion on the consumer side. But it's not the fastest growing, probably the fastest growing is Telecom. But that's a small base right now. It's only a few $100 million at the moment and maybe it'll get up to a quarter of a billion dollars, but it's growing quickly. Automotive has always been one of the mainstays. That's maybe a couple billion dollars, but with a slow growth rate, around three percent. Great. That's very useful. Thanks Yogesh. Also, I want to actually ask you, with your deep expertise in the technology, can you give us an idea in the next three to five years, the future trends in this technology? I remember a conversation that you and I had a couple of years back. I remember you're explaining to me that the emergence of the ideas of sensors being put in liquids and in oil, for example, you can track them, movement. You talked about a couple of those. So for our learners, can you tell us some of the new trends that are coming, what we can expect in the next three to five years? Well, the industrial sector has maybe a growth rate of around nine percent and maybe about a two billion dollar market. We have been working for number of years on sensors for harsh environments. These have potential use in space applications. That's very exciting and very fundamental in a sense, but it doesn't drive a large market. But there are similar harsh environments encountered in manufacturing and in mining and oil and gas extraction, where these sensors can be used to diminish the environmental impact to do things and do exploration and production more smartly. We've been working on some of these sensors. There are some major challenges in going into a harsh environment and we've been trying to address those. I think maybe that's one of the things you may recall from our earlier conversations. [inaudible]. Yeah. Another aspect of that is also monitoring water and air quality. There's a lot of interest in doing that and we have a big program in that, in air quality monitoring and we have previously done some work in water quality monitoring. The air quality is in a sense even more important. Because you can control what you drink, but you can't always control what you breathe. The importance of this has been of course even further underscored by this recent pandemic and easy transmissibility of viruses. But even if you just look at the non-biological pollutants, particulate matter, you've heard of PM2.5, PM10, particulate matter has a tremendous impact on health and all the developing countries with growing economies have significant problems and reduced life expectancy and tremendous amount of lung disease associated with this, and then there's also the invisible volatile organic compounds that you have to worry about. In the west and in a lot of the more developed countries, the attention has turned to this, although it hasn't quite hit the headlines yet in some of the developing nations, but there are carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene that are associated with gasoline production and refinement and usage that can be and should be monitored. We've been working on technologies for those and some of those have been spun out into startup companies. Great. Thank you Yogesh. Those are fascinating applications. If I ask you to see and tell us where the business impact the most right now in terms of the size of the market and also potential business applications for companies, it looks like, would I be right if I say that monitoring ad quality may be a very attractive market opportunity? Yes, I believe so. I believe that it could be very attractive. The numbers are not that big yet because the technologies have not matured, but it's coming. This could be democratized. You can envision VOC monitor in as many places as you would have a carbon monoxide monitor, which is in every home. It could be embedded on a thermostat. You can go a step beyond if you look at, say a subsequent-technology node where these can be personal safety monitors. It would be on your cell phone or you would be able to wear one. Somebody with compromised health, maybe with asthma or high sensitivity to chemicals, could simply carry one around if the price and performance were appropriate. That's great, That's fascinating. I mean, I can imagine, so that becomes a personalized application for everybody. They can decide the level of protection that they want. Right. Well, that whole category is called personal exposure monitoring. Yeah. As an individual goes from home to office or to a field site, then they can monitor their cumulative exposure over the day. Okay. Great. Thank you so much. This is very, very useful. Thank you very much, Yogesh. Sure. I do want to come back to your question about where do you think the impact will be most? As I mentioned, the biggest market is really in consumer applications right now driven by cell phones. There I feel that one of the biggest opportunities is in health care and wellness monitoring. Having sensors that can provide medically relevant information, perhaps not quite as precise as you'd be able to get in a hospital with an expensive dedicated instrument. That can serve as a screening tool. I also feel that there is a lot of potential in other biomedical devices because this comes from miniaturization. This technology is associated with miniaturization. One of the benefits is the volume, the smaller volume and the lower power it takes. Another benefit is the cost. The automotive industry is using these sensors not because they need the size advantage, in most cases, it's because the cost of ownership is lower as a consequence of having these sensors. The consumer industry, cell phones, and so on, are using it, maybe in some combination of size and cost, and they certainly wouldn't be using it if the cost wasn't low enough. That's right. Okay. But one of the places where the size is really the prime driver is implantable biomedical applications. Implantable biomedical, correct. Okay. If you had to put a pressure sensor in a blood vessel, you simply wouldn't go there. You simply wouldn't do it if it wasn't small enough, and the cost is only a secondary consideration because the cost of implanting the sensor is much higher than whatever the cost of the sensor. Yogesh, do you think in the future trends of 3-5 years that we may actually go there in terms of where miniaturization will lead us to, putting sensors in blood vessels to monitor the pressure and things like that? Absolutely, this is not just pressure, it's also other parameters. One of the things that our Center has been pursuing for the past decade and a half are pressure sensors and other types of sensors that could go inside a stent or inside a blood vessel. What we've been pursuing, for twice as long, going back to the '80s, is sensors that can go into the neural cortex. At the moment, they're still research tools, but you can imagine the diagnostic and therapeutic applications of brain problems. There's been some commercial activity there as well. That's amazing. I can see business applications of that too, in terms of understanding consumers, how they think and all the stuff is there. Because there is a lot of work in cognitive marketing they call where you try to instead of asking questions they actually try to see what the brain changes in terms of consumers react to that. But I don't think we'll get to the point that somebody is going to accept an invasive probe for business. It's a tool of last [inaudible] They may accept it for saving their life but not for business. Exactly. Fair enough. But this conversation has been fascinating. Thank you very much. It has been so helpful. My pleasure. I'm sure it was very informative.
