CCF: Small: Smart Continually-aware High-Fidelity Sensor Interfaces

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This research addresses the challenges of continually-aware high-fidelity sensing. The key challenges include the energy consumption of the sensor interface and the amount of data that needs to be communicated by the sensor by considering two sensing scenarios in which a sensor must be constantly operate with high fidelity. In the first case, the sensor continuously processes a signal and delivers an output, e.g., a hearing aid operating continuously, and performing sophisticated high-fidelity audio signal processing and yet running from a small battery for a long period of time. In the second scenario, the device detects and acts on a particular sensory stimulus, e.g., the detection and recognition of a speaker (person) or words or sentences. The broader impacts of this research will be enhanced with substantial efforts in outreach and education. These include outreach to K-12 students, research experience for undergraduates from underrepresented minorities, and updated graduate and undergraduate curriculum.More specifically, this research investigates a new type of sensor interface circuit that efficiently implements both of these high fidelity sensing scenarios. It does this by embedding sophisticated processing and intelligence within the sensor interface architecture. This approach is different from the conventional approach which relies on separate signal processing devices or alternatively sends data to the cloud for processing. The new approach is implemented with little extra cost and energy consumption, beyond that of the original interface circuit. The expected benefit is that the overall energy consumption is greatly reduced and the amount of data generated by the sensor is to be reduced by orders of magnitude.