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December 2015 • SMT Magazine 51 going forward with that. Also, discussions with politician, with members, and with the press are going very well right now. Las Marias: dr. maiser, why should a company join your association? Maiser: Because we have the network. We bring the machine makers together along the process chain. We can help with discovering the next trend. We can help with all these business-re- lated things like foreign trade or legal things or taxation. There is a whole buffet. You pay an entrance fee and you are free, really, to pick what you need. Las Marias: how much does membership cost? Maiser: That is related to the turnover of a com- pany. That's a rule. The rule is 0.08% of the machine-related turnover. The machine related turnover is usually the hard part because it's not the total turnover of the company, usually. This is something we always have to figure out. The nice thing about our membership fee is you have the one time entrance fee and then you can access the whole VDMA, not only our Produc - tronics group. And the money we earn with the membership fees is breathing with the economy. If the economy is bad for the machine makers, we earn less money, which is okay. If it would be at the same level all the time, people would say, 'The economy is bad. Why do we have to pay so much?' Other than, for example, American associations where you basically have one basic membership fee and then you pay additional fees on top for every service you take, we really have this one entrance fee to cover it all. Las Marias: is it different for individual members or companies? Maiser: We only have company members, not individual members. This is exactly the differ- entiation we have from the engineering societ- ies. In the engineering society, you become a personal member and pay a small fee for a sin- gle person. If from the same company another person wants to join, he has to pay, too. For us, you pay just one fee per company. There is no government money involved so this is totally private non-profit. Las Marias: dr. maiser, thank you very much for your time. Maiser: It was a great opportunity. Thank you very much. SmT VDmA ProDUcTronIcS imec and Holst Centre have demonstrated a prototype of a single-chip electrochemical sen- sor for simultaneous detection of multiple ions in fluids—paving the way to small-sized and low-cost detection systems for agriculture, healthcare and lifestyle applications, food quality monitoring and water management. The ion sensor solution is a generic platform that can be tailored towards spe- cific applications. it enables efficient and low-cost monitoring, such as monitoring of nutrient concentrations in surface and waste water, both for agricultural applica- tions and water quality. Depending on the applica- tion and the form factor, it can be mass produced through microfabrication or through screen-print- ing on inexpensive substrates such as glass or foil. as compared to commercial ion sensors, this brings a unique advantage in terms of low cost manufacturability, and size of the solution. More- over, by changing the selective membranes on the electrodes, the sensor can be adopted to detect other ions. The presented prototype is a handheld device that integrates a single-chip sensor with different electrodes that detect pH lev- els in a range from 2 to 10 at a 0.1pH accu- racy. Benchmarked against other available single-ion sensors, imec's prototype dem- onstrated comparable sensitivity and accu- racy for a versatile multiple-ion solution. Versatile Single-Chip Sensor for Ion Detection in Fluids FeATure inTerview