A Fully-Integrated Multi-Sensor System for Food Tracing and Quality Certification Providing Temperature, Light Intensity, and Humidity Exposure History of Samples

Abstract

This chapter is about the design and experimental characterization of an integrated prototype for tracing food preservation quality along the distribution chain by monitoring its environmental preservation conditions. The system includes humidity, temperature, and light intensity sensors with the respective interface circuits and an A/D converter. The target application of the microsystem is a smart tag including an RFID transponder for collecting energy and transmitting data, as well as a micro-battery for energy storage. The developed microsystem has been fabricated in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology and achieves better than 0.5 °C and 6 W/m 2 accuracy for temperature and light intensity respectively, while nominally consuming less than 1 μA at 1.8 V supply. Chemical on-chip capacitor dielectric composition, based on Sylgarl 184 polymer, is being optimized for maximum sensitivity response in terms of permittivity with respect to air relative humidity, while further investigation about correlation between real food samples preservation and measured environmental parameters exposure history is being carried out.

Radiofrequency Identification and Surface Acoustic Wave Technologies for Developing the Food Intelligent Packaging Concept

“…In general, RFID sensor tags are the integration of various sensors designed to collect environmental information, including temperature, pressure, humidity, and gaseous composition, into ordinary RFID tags, which are originally used only to identify products, with a film battery supplying power for internal information processing [71,124]. The use of RFID sensor tags in cold chain systems [72] enables the monitoring not only of time and location information but also of environmental information about the food and its quality [31,32,124].…”