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

用不了多久，无处不在的微小传感器就会进入人们日常无意识地与之互动的1000？S物体中。预计到2020年，全球一半人口的生活中将拥有超过1000个传感器，这意味着部署了超过3万亿个传感器？这个数字很容易让今天的整个半导体市场相形见绌。因此，包含可充电的本地能量存储、能量收集和超低功率电子设备的能源自主传感器对于使设备能够在这种规模上部署至关重要。这一职业项目解决了无线通信领域对无处不在的、能源自主的传感设备这一日益增长的领域的关键需求。无线计算设备中的电子设备所消耗的功率与这些设备的小尺寸所能存储和获取的能量之间的能量差距越来越大。该项目正在探索新的技术来解决无线通信的功耗，这通常主导着现代传感器节点的总功耗。这项研究解决了为广泛的应用改进无线信道的建模以及改进测量这些信道的方法的需求。此外，正在开发新的无线通信电路和体系结构，包括用于同步传感器网络的唤醒和时钟采集接收器。超低功率无线电也正在开发，以解决无线电的功耗和在密集无线环境中的性能之间的权衡。这个项目很重要，因为它解决了无线传感器节点扩展的一个障碍--无线通信功耗的大幅降低和射频能量采集的创新可能使新的传感器网络应用成为可能。

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.