The doctoral student of Tecnun, Fátima Villa, has been the winner of the fourth edition of the Bizintek Awards for the best project End of Degree, Master or Postgraduate. A competition in which students from different engineering universities, both Basque and from other provinces, have participated. The project winner of this fourth edition of the Bizintek Awards is the one carried out by Fátima Villa, and analyzes the enormous possibilities in the development of passive chipless RFID sensors.

This promising work, carried out in collaboration with Tecnun and the prestigious MIT of Massachusetts, explores the possibilities of development of multi-parametric sensors with RFID technology, without battery and without chips. In this project, Fatima has managed to evaluate the possibilities of development of sensors for the measurement of humidity, CO2 and temperature, a proposal with multiple applications in the food and food safety sector.          

What has it meant for you to get this award?

It makes me very excited that all the effort I have made during my studies and the Master's Degree, which is reflected in this Master's Thesis, is valued.  

What exactly did your PFM consist of?

The topic of my project is chipless RFID Sensors for the food industry. I did this from May to December 2019, at the Auto ID Labs at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I designed, fabricated and measured multi-parameter sensors with RFID technology, without battery and without chip. These humidity, CO2 and temperature sensors have multiple applications in the food and food safety industry. 

How did the opportunity to do so arise?

In 2018, I traveled to Boston with two friends to participate in the finals of the "2018 IEEE AP-S Design Contest", a competition for which we designed a 5.8GHz receiver to detect a hidden transmitter. There, I had the opportunity to meet Rahul Bhattacharyya, the researcher from MIT with whom I stayed at contact, brainstorming, and who later directed my Master's Thesis.

Bizintek Awards: a technological commitment to the future

It should be noted that several winning projects in previous years in these awards have been able to be developed effectively, and their creators took advantage of this competition to establish the links that allowed them to continue their professional career in technological engineering.

This award is a way to open doors to students who will design the digital and industrial environments of the future. Conceived by and for the new generations of engineers and organized for several years by Bizintek, these awards are a competition open to all students of any branch of Engineering taught, and who have submitted their End of project Degree , postgraduate or master's degree in 2019.