Ultra-Low-Power E-Nose System Based on Multi-Micro-LED-Integrated, Nanostructured Gas Sensors and Deep Learning

As interests in air quality monitoring related to environmental pollution and industrial safety increase, demands for gas sensors are rapidly increasing. Among various gas sensor types, the semiconductor metal oxide (SMO)-type sensor has advantages of high sensitivity, low cost, mass production, and small size but suffers from poor selectivity. To solve this problem, electronic nose (e-nose) systems using a gas sensor array and pattern recognition are widely used. However, as the number of sensors in the e-nose system increases, total power consumption also increases. In this study, an ultra-low-power e-nose system was developed using ultraviolet (UV) micro-LED (μLED) gas sensors and a convolutional neural network (CNN). A monolithic photoactivated gas sensor was developed by depositing a nanocolumnar In₂O₃ film coated with plasmonic metal nanoparticles (NPs) directly on the μLED. The e-nose system consists of two different μLED sensors with silver and gold NP coating, and the total power consumption was measured as 0.38 mW, which is one-hundredth of the conventional heater-based e-nose system. Responses to various target gases measured by multi-μLED gas sensors were analyzed by pattern recognition and used as the training data for the CNN algorithm. As a result, a real-time, highly selective e-nose system with a gas classification accuracy of 99.32% and a gas concentration regression error (mean absolute) of 13.82% for five different gases (air, ethanol, NO₂, acetone, methanol) was developed. The μLED-based e-nose system can be stably battery-driven for a long period and is expected to be widely used in environmental internet of things (IoT) applications.