CAREER: Ultra-Low Power Radios for Energy-Autonomous Systems

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It will not be long until vanishingly-small, ubiquitous sensors find their way into the 1000?s of objects that people unconsciously interact with on a daily basis. With half of the global population projected to have over 1000 sensors in their lives by 2020, this translates into over 3 trillion sensors deployed ? a number that easily dwarfs the entire semiconductor market today. Energy-autonomous sensors containing rechargeable local energy storage, energy harvesting, and ultra-low power electronics are therefore essential for enabling devices to be deployed at this scale. This CAREER project addresses critical needs in the area of wireless communication for this growing field of ubiquitous, energy-autonomous sensing devices. There is a growing energy gap between the power consumed by electronics in wireless computing devices, and the amount of energy that can be stored and harvested considering the small form-factor of these devices. This project is exploring new technologies to address the power consumption of wireless communication, which typically dominates the total power consumption of modern sensor nodes. The research addresses the needs for improving the modeling of wireless channels for a wide range of applications and improving the means by which these channels are measured. Additionally, new wireless communication circuits and architectures are being developed, including wakeup and clock harvesting receivers for the purpose of synchronizing sensor networks. Ultra-low power radios are also being developed to address the tradeoffs between power consumption of the radios, and their performance in dense wireless environments.This project is important because it addresses an obstacle in scaling wireless sensor nodes -- drastic reductions in the power consumption of wireless communication and innovations in RF energy harvesting may enable new sensor network applications.