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Challenges When Designing with Sensors While integrating sensors into devices is essential in today's world, designing with these sensors is perhaps more difficult than ever before. One of the biggest challenges of designing with sensors is balancing many tradeoffs to choose the right sensor for a given application. By nature, sensors tend to be extremely multidisciplinary devices—integrating mechanical, electrical, thermal, and sometimes optical characteristics into a single module. In a perfect world, engineers would have sensors that are high performance (i.e., high output power and high signal-to-noise ratio), low power, and offer a small footprint. However, in reality these demands are often conflicting: it may become very difficult to have a device that is both high performance and low power, or a device that is both small and high performance. At the same time, there are certain non-negotiables for sensor selection, such as the fact that the sensor needs to fit mechanically into the product's enclosure. When trying to balance the tradeoffs among electrical, mechanical, and optical parameters, it becomes exceedingly difficult to select the correct sensor for the job. On top of performance considerations, cost is a non-trivial factor in decision- making. Although a sensor may be a perfect fit from a mechanical and performance perspective, it cannot be used if it is too expensive. Chapter One 6 | Challenges When Designing with Sensors "In our information age, everything is getting connected. Sensors are key to bridging the physical world and the cloud, where information and data are enabling unprecedented experiences in all aspects of our lives." Ray Yu Sr. Engineering Manager