Miniature low-power CMOS gas sensors brought to wider global market

Effective immediately, Future Electronics has announced it has signed a worldwide distribution franchise agreement with Cambridge CMOS Sensors (CCS), the UK-based fabless manufacturer of surface-mount MEMS/CMOS gas sensors. The distribution agreement makes CCS's compact, low-power gas sensors available to the mass market of industrial and consumer electronics OEMs served by Future Electronics globally. Under the agreement, Future Electronics will stock available-to-sell inventory of CCS's range of gas sensors, which are used in applications such as air-quality monitoring and breath analysis, in its EMEA (Leipzig, Germany), North America (Memphis) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) distribution centres. Technical assistance from Future Electronics' local field applications engineers is also available to help OEMs' design engineers to integrate CCS's analogue gas sensors into system designs. Future Electronics will also sell CCS's forthcoming digital versions of its devices. CCS provides a growing portfolio of gas sensors measuring carbon monoxide and a wide range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), used in indoor air-quality monitoring, and ethanol, used in breath analysis. They combine an embedded micro-hotplate and a gas-sensing MEMS membrane in a very compact package. Through the use of advanced MEMS technology, CCS has reduced the time taken to detect target gases compared to other gas sensors on the market today. This enables the application to spend longer in lower power pulse modes reducing the average power consumption. At just 2mm x 3mm in a DFN package, a device such as the CCS801 multi-gas sensor is small enough to be embedded into space-constrained devices such as smartphones, and is also suitable for use in many other categories of consumer and industrial products. Designers wishing to evaluate the Cambridge CMOS Sensors range of VOC, CO and ethanol sensors may apply for free development boards from the Future Electronics FTM Board Club at www.my-boardclub.com. The EVK02 is a full-featured main board with a header for daughter boards for each of the CCS sensors. Boards are supplied free to commercial design engineers, subject to qualification, says the company. Steve Carr, vice president of vertical markets, Future Electronics (EMEA), said: 'We are confident that, when we demonstrate to our customers how Cambridge CMOS Sensors' devices combine very small size with very low power consumption, they are going to find many interesting and valuable uses for the technology. This makes us very excited about the opportunity this new franchise arrangement presents to us.' Dr Jess Brown, worldwide sales and marketing director, CCS, added: 'Very large numbers of customers are starting to evaluate and experiment with CCS's technology, and we need a professional and well-resourced infrastructure to provide them with support, boards, samples and logistics services. Future Electronics has an excellent track record of supporting semiconductor companies that offer advanced technology, and we are delighted that it has agreed to work with us as a franchised supplier.'