ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some challenges for the design of integrated circuits for the “smart society”, where an increasing number of applications provide intelligent services that will make our daily lives more comfortable and with unprecedented functionality. Sensing is used in all applications where the physical world interacts with the electronic world. An interesting evolution of the past years is that sensing devices are networked and connected to the internet or the “cloud”, often in a wireless way. In many analog circuits in practice, the mismatch is the actual limiting factor to the power consumption. A similar time-based architecture can be derived for a resistive sensor. An important constraint for many sensing applications are the strong requirements in terms of reliability and robustness.
