Matteo Rinaldi

Cheap Sensors for Smarter Farmers Two IoT sensors from this year’s ARPA-E Summit can help farmers make better decisions

This sensor, developed by Matteo Rinaldi and his team at Northeastern University, shines infrared light on the leaves of a plant. By reading the reflected light, it can tell if the plant is dehydrated or not.

Understanding the global chip shortage, a big crisis involving tiny components

“I imagine there are more than 100 billion chips in daily use around the world,” says Matteo Rinaldi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University. “So think about how many transistors and semiconductors we use in our lives everyday.”

IEEE Spectrum

Plasmonics enables sensing on demand

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston have developed an infrared sensor based on plasmonics that is capable of turning itself on when it needs to perform its sensing duties and then turns itself off when not needed to decrease energy demands and increase its lifetime.

DARPA’s smart infrared sensor can watch for intruders or monitor for wildfires

Researchers at Northeastern University have developed a next generation smart sensor for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that is capable of identifying infrared (IR) wavelengths — without having to have its own always-present power source. Instead, it is powered by the same infrared wavelengths it’s designed to look for.

TechCrunch

This tiny sensor could sleep for years between detection events

A difficult proposition, but engineers at Northeastern University were up to the task. They call their work a “plasmonically-enhanced micromechanical photoswitch,” which pretty much sums it up. I could end the article right here. But for those of you who slept in class the day we covered that topic, I guess I can explain.

Nanowerk

Graphene electrodes revolutionize the scaling of piezoelectric NEMS resonators

“The key challenges associated with the development of high performance MEMS and NEMS resonators for RF wireless communication and sensing applications are the isolation of energy-dissipating mechanisms and scaling of the device volume in the nanoscale size-range,” Rinaldi, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, tells Nanowerk. “We […]