The first six months of the GAIA project have laid the foundations for the next generation of sustainable and biodegradable IoT technologies.
During this initial phase, the consortium has made significant progress across several key research areas:
- Characterisation of bio-based substrates and RF components, providing the scientific basis for the development of transient wireless systems.
- Deployment of fabrication infrastructures and manufacturing processes, enabling the production and validation of biodegradable electronic devices and printed RF components.
- Advances in the design of the ultra-low-power System-on-Chip (SoC), establishing the architecture that will support transient sensing, wake-on mechanisms and cellular-powered backscatter communications.
These achievements represent important milestones towards our vision of battery-free, sustainable and biodegradable IoT systems.
Strong scientific momentum
The consortium has already contributed to the scientific community through its first publications:
- Concurrent Acknowledgment Protocol for Low-Latency RFID Tag Recognition, proposing a novel multi-tag acknowledgement mechanism capable of reducing passive backskatter identification latency by up to 95%, with applications in high-speed logistics, manufacturing and retail.
- Record Performance in Vertically Stacked, Solution-Processed ZTO Schottky Diodes, demonstrating Schottky diodes based on solution-processed zinc–tin–oxide (ZTO) thin films with rectification ratios exceeding nine orders of magnitude and cut-off frequencies above 40 GHz, paving the way for high-performance sustainable electronics.
- Beyond scientific publications, GAIA was also presented at the CDTI Conference, providing an excellent opportunity to introduce the project to the Spanish R&I ecosystem, engage with stakeholders and strengthen links with the broader European innovation community.
We look forward to sharing many more developments as GAIA continues advancing towards sustainable, biodegradable and battery-free IoT technologies.
