Reconfigurable 3D Edge Sensing System of Carbon Nanotube Sensing and Silicon CMOS from a Commercial Manufacturing Facilities

In this work, we present a reconfigurable edge sensing system leveraging monolithic three-dimensional (3D) integration to integrate tens of thousands of sensors directly over conventional silicon CMOS circuitry, fabricated entirely within major commercial semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Owing to the dense and fine-grained 3D integration, our demonstrated IC can rapidly adapt its architecture to trade-off spatial sampling resolution, temporal sampling resolution, and bit resolution optimized to the current environment sensed by the chip. Within milliseconds, the chip can modulate the amount of data captured per sensing operation by >2,000X, corresponding with a >16,000 range in power consumption. While this demonstration integrates carbon nanotube (CNT)-based FETs (CNFETs) as gas sensing elements on the upper-layer of the chip, this reconfigurable edge sensing IC can be implemented with a wide variety of emerging sensing technologies and thus is a platform for future intelligent sensing at the edge.