Pioneering technology by a Limerick company means microchips now have the potential to revolutionise industry, writes Karlin Lillington

It is early afternoon in Paris, and a shipment of live lobsters caught that morning in Donegal has just arrived, destined for dinner plates across the city that evening.

But how fresh are they? The Parisian distributor can tell in a second, simply by reading data from a small chip attached to the shipping crate, which has recorded the temperature and humidity in the box throughout the entire journey.

Microchips are often referred to as the "brains" of electronic devices, but now they promise increasingly also to be the "senses" - thanks to breakthrough technology being pioneered by a Limerick company.

The result is smart chips capable of sensing humidity, temperature and, soon, pathogens and gases. Unlike standalone sensors, the chip adds intelligence - so that what is sensed can be recorded, stored, managed and transmitted.

Start-up ChipSensors - which couples sensors with chips - has already attracted international attention and awards. It recently received the sensor-sector award in US business and technology consultants Frost & Sullivan's 2007 European awards for technology innovation. The award notes: ". . . with potential applications in a variety of industries, including automotive, environment control, food and pharmaceutical monitoring, and applications across domains in services such as logistics management, the company . . . has a number of features that will not be easy to duplicate or surpass by competitors".

"We're absolutely in a hot area, and it could go anywhere," says co-founder and chief executive Tim Cummins, who developed 11 patents in chip design while working for Analog Devices.

The main journal of the electronics industry, the EE Times, apparently thinks so too, having placed ChipSensors on its list of emerging start-ups to watch.

Yet sensors have been around for ages, as have chips - so why the excitement? Because, explains Cummins, chips are now cheap to produce - a few euro - while sensors can cost €10-€20 apiece. New manufacturing techniques which create faster and cheaper chips are similar to the basics needed for sensor manufacture, so sensors can be built directly into chips, making the chip's surface itself a sensing device.

Given that the chip provides a small brain, information detected by the sensor can be utilised in more useful and accessible ways, so the cost of a chip with a sensor can begin to come down well below the cost of a sensor alone.

"We started by looking at the building industry; the sensor chips could monitor energy use, temperature and humidity. But that got a yawn. Then we stumbled on the idea of the tracking of food, of fish shipments, of pharmaceutical shipments that need humidity monitored," says Cummins. "These chips can monitor those things, provide a report, then be thrown away after a single use."

ChipSensors is also talking to a car manufacturer in the US very interested in how such chips could be used to monitor humidity and moisture on a windscreen, to automatically turn on windscreen defoggers.

"The nice thing about these sensors is that they can be used in so many ways," says Cummins.

With strict production control regulations coming into effect in the pharmaceutical industry and increasing concern about monitoring the food production and distribution process, he sees the potential for chips that can also sense gases and pathogens and that could monitor production processes, workplace safety and product quality during transport.

The company, with its focus of putting sensors on chips, was formally established in 2006, although it emerged out of a more broadly-based chip technologies company called Cratlon, established in 2004.

Cratlon was involved in a range of wireless chip technologies, including developing sensors on chips. It did consultancy and chip design services in order to keep finances ticking over to bootstrap the young company.

A number of investors backed the company and the founders put in a six-figure sum themselves and received a range of matching grants and supports from Clare Enterprise Board, Shannon Development and Enterprise Ireland. They received an R&D grant from the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and research support from the University of Limerick, Tyndall Institute and Letterkenny IT.

Most importantly, says Cummins, they got seed venture capital investment from Kernel Capital.

Eventually they took the hard decision that they were doing too many things and decided to focus on chip sensors, which dovetailed with Cummins's expertise and interests. They renamed the company to reflect the new focus.

They have not looked back since, and have been talking to Silicon Valley investors and industrial clients. The radio frequency identification industry is quite interested in what they are doing, Cummins says.

"Our core expertise is sensor chips. We know how to design, make and sell them," he says. And, since not many other companies do, ChipSensors looks to be an Irish company to watch.