STMicroelectronics: how much electronics in high-tech agriculture

Filippo Colaianni, Technical Marketing Manager at STMicroelectronics, explains how electronics enters the high-tech agriculture supply chain

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STMicroelectronics Agrifood

of Virna Bottarelli |

Filippo Colaianni is Technical Marketing Manager in STMicroelectronics. The French-Italian multinational has been looking with interest for some years now also at the Smart Agrifood sector, a sector in which solutions already known and used in the Smart City and Industry 4.0 fields are applied. Colaianni explains: "We insert ourselves with our technologies at the origin of the supply chain of solutions for Smart Agriculture: our interlocutors are developers and integrators who in turn create systems or final solutions for the agricultural sector".

STMicroelectronics Solutions  

While these are not industry-specific solutions, several of ST's products contribute to the high-tech content and efficiency of growers' and breeders' operations: from LED drivers and environmental sensors used in greenhouses to optimize plant growth, to SubGHz tags for livestock monitoring or NFC tags for tracking agricultural products. "Our Mems sensors that monitor motion, temperature, pressure and humidity can be deployed in greenhouses, just as our microcontrollers and microprocessors for image processing are implemented in drones used for land monitoring in precision agriculture, and thanks to connectivity products, data can be transferred to the cloud."

Among the most significant application cases, there are those in the field of Live stock monitoring and beekeeping: a farmer who wants to optimize the yield of his farm can adopt a livestock monitoring solution with which, by detecting the positions, thanks to Gnss geo-localization, movements and noises emitted by the animals, he can have precise information about their health status and take the right decisions to manage different situations. In this case, the applications use, in addition to environmental Mems sensors, high precision ST microphones, digital or analog. The same principle and the same solutions can be applied to beekeeping, where the detection of noise inside the beehive allows to monitor the presence and the health status of the queen bee, the real 'engine' of the hive.

NFC tags, dynamic or static, are at the heart of organic food tracking applications, for which it is possible to record, along the path from harvesting to final destination, the parameters to be respected in order to guarantee correct conservation and organic characteristics. "There is a working group in ST dedicated to the development of demos, at a prototype level, that can find application in Intelligent Agriculture, a market that is certainly emerging and will develop as solutions become increasingly user friendly and low cost, but which at the moment is still somewhat limited by the lack of specific professional skills and technical figures capable of managing the most innovative technological solutions."

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