Search

We are presenting an analysis of the obstacles and levers for the development of organic cropping systems in Camargue, documented with a multicriteria analysis of scenarios of organic farming (OF) development. This communication is built using results from on-farm agronomic monitoring, stakeholders and farmers’ interviews and the use of models for integrated assessment of scenarios. At the farm level, the obstacles are related to identification of profitable cropping systems and rotations that include enough rice, conversion being therefore risky as impacting financial management and requiring a labour reorganisation. At the regional level, the constraints are related to the absence of advisory services for technical issues, and to the lack of coordination among the different stakeholders, to the low incentive of the public policies to convert, and to a relatively opaque organization of the supply chains. At the regional level, we analysed the consequences of two scenarios related to OF development on criteria such as the rice surface area, the quantity and quality of water, energy consumption or the employment generated. These results are expected to contribute to the definition of an action plan about OF development by the local stakeholders.

The research in the area of microelectronic fluidic devices for biomedical applications is rapidly growing. As faults in these devices can have serious personal implications, a system is presented which includes fault tolerance with respect to the synthesized biomaterials (peptides). It can employ presence and purity detection of peptide droplets via current (charge) tests of control electrodes or impedance (phase) measurements using direct sensing electrodes near the peptide collector area. The commercial multielectrode array performs better in pure and impure detection of peptides in impedance and phase. Our two-electrode X-MEF case shows slightly poorer results. In both cases the phase is the best choice for contents detection. If there are presence or purity problems, the location is marked, and repeated peptide synthesis at another collector site is initiated.

Test and calibration cost is a bottleneck to reduce the overall production cost of MEMS sensors. One main reason is the cost of generating non electrical test stimuli. Hence, replacing the functional multi-domain test equipments with electrical ones arouses interest The focus of this paper is on sensitivity testing and calibration through fully electrical measurements. A new method based art analytical expressions of the sensitivity with respect to both physical parameters of the structure and electrical test parameters is proposed The accuracy of the method is evaluated by mean of a high level model including global and intra-die mismatch variations. It is shown that an accurate estimation of the sensitivity can be achieved using only electrical measurements and that the dispersions on the sensitivity can be divided by about 7 after the calibration procedure. These results are promising enough for high volume production of low-cost sensors.

The research in the area of microelectronic fluidic (MEF) devices for biomedical applications is rapidly growing. As faults in these devices can have severe personal implications, a system is presented which includes fault-tolerance with respect to the systhesized biomaterials (peptides). It can employ purity detection of peptides via current tests of control electrodes of impedance measurements using direct sensing electrodes near the peptide collector area. In the case of purity problems, the location is marked, and repeated synthesis at another collector side is initiated.