Sunday, April 27, 2014

40 years since Tuomo Suntola designed and demonstrated a humidity sensor at VTT for Vaisala

As reported by Vaisala : "In the early 1970s, humidity was measured using organic materials, such as human or animal hair, in hygrometers. At the time there were few alternatives available and the accuracy and reliability issues of such measurement methods were well known. In an effort to find a solution, Vaisala contracted the semiconductor laboratory of the Technical Research Center of Finland to cooperate on the development of sensors. As a result of this work, Vaisala introduced HUMICAP®, the world’s first thin-film capacitive humidity sensor in 1973." [Idea for this blog post from Riikka Puurunen, via LinkedIn - thank you very much]
 

Dr. Suntola [ALD Inventer] first industrial work was “Humicap®” thin film humidity sensor for Vaisala Oy (1973) which still, almost 40 years later holds the world market leader’s position in humidity sensing (http://www.sci.fi/~suntola/biography.html) [screen dump from video below]
Below you can  watch a video clip about the birth of HUMICAP®. More information on the Vaisala HUMICAP® for downloead here.


 
This celebration was really last year (2013). More information and other stories from Finland will be presented at the exhibition "40 Years of ALD in Finland". General celebration the Baltic ALD conference 2014, May 12-13, Helsinki, Finland (Twitter tag #FinALD40).

"The conference is a continuation of a series of meetings that started in 1991 in Espoo as a Helsinki University of Technology – Tartu University ALE symposium, followed by a symposium in Tartu in 1993. In 1995 the meeting was organized by University of Helsinki and at that time the name was broadened to Baltic ALE symposium. In 1997 in Tartu it adopted its present name and has subsequently circled around the Baltic Sea in Uppsala, Oslo, Warsaw and Hamburg besides Finland and Estonia.
 
The present conference also celebrates 40 years of ALD technology as it was in 1974 when Dr. Tuomo Suntola and collaborators began their seminal work that made ALD a valuable industrial technology, first for electroluminescent display production and later for microelectronics and ever increasing other application areas."

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