Chip-Based Spectrometer to Reduce Chemical Sensor Cost

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Spectrometers are chemical sensors that have high potential for industries that work with organic materials, such as the oil and gas or the food and agriculture industries. Making spectrometers more affordable for industrial uses has been on the rise. MIT has previously made attempts to develop hand-held spectrometers. However, these models were still subject to the constraints of traditional spectrometers. The French research institution CEA Tech is also making an attempt at spectrometers-on-a-chip , but only for the infrared range, with the goal of developing a detector for gas leaks.

So how does the spectrometer-on-a-chip work? Spectrometers are essentially light sensors that can measure the amount of light that is being emitted or absorbed at each wavelength. The result is a type of graph known as a “spectrum,” where the y-axis is light intensity and the x-axis is the wavelength of the light. These spectra can be used to identify the chemical makeup of any object that is emitting or absorbing the light. As each atom and molecule in nature has its own unique fingerprint, reading a spectrum to identify a chemical component is similar to reading a barcode.

The difficulty with building a spectrometer-on-a-chip mainly has to do with breaking the light up so that its intensity can be measured by wavelength. Typically, this is done with mirrors, but adapting this traditional method to silicon is of course not directly possible.

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