SHF: Small: Circuit Support for Maintaining the Continuous-power Abstraction in Energy Harvesting Systems

小型、低功耗计算硬件设计的技术进步以及快速扩展的网络容量正在推动无处不在的互联物联网(IoT)设备的爆炸式增长。物联网系统有可能改变环境、交通和医疗保健行业。不幸的是，电池限制了物联网设备的潜在社会影响，因为它们的尺寸、重量、成本、维护要求和易燃性。如果不从物联网系统、高密度、百万设备中剥离电池，超小型计算设备使部署和忘记成为可能的情况将永远不会发生。尽管用能量收集取代电池的研究已经进行了十年，但能量收集系统还没有能力在社会上部署。核心部署挑战是程序员：收集的能源稀缺且不可预测，迫使无电池系统在电源可用时断断续续地运行，尽管电力条件发生了巨大变化，并出现了常见的电力故障。人类的大脑无法对这种复杂性进行准确的推理。要实现高密度、百万设备的梦想，“部署并忘记”能量收集设备部署需要硬件支持，将持续供电设备的抽象恢复到程序员，减轻他们如此复杂的推理。该项目的工作恢复了开发人员通过透明的低级硬件机制接受培训的持续电力范例。恢复持续的功率抽象化实现了可部署和高性能的无电池系统设计，为变革性的工业和社会级普适计算和智能除尘系统打开了大门。该项目旨在回答三个问题：人们可以对能源收集和管理硬件进行哪些修改，以为软件提供持续的动力环境？当人们将硬件操作与与电源相关的软件中断分离时，存在哪些机会？如果允许软件通知硬件其能源需求，会有什么好处？该项目通过以下方式弥合恒功率和无电池系统之间的差距：能源型收割机架构可动态响应电源和需求的变化，有效地为计算提供一致的功率水平；硬件支持跨电源循环维持系统和外围设备功能，无需软件干预；以及混合设计，可根据软件需求调整硬件，最大限度地提高响应速度，同时将浪费的能量降至最低。该团队为计算机科学、计算机工程和电气工程的本科生和研究生介绍了动手的、无电池的系统开发项目。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Technical advances in the design of small, low-power computing hardware alongside rapidly expanding network capacity are driving an explosion of ubiquitous, connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. IoT systems have the potential to transform environmental, transportation, and healthcare industries. Unfortunately, batteries limit the potential societal impact of IoT devices due to their size, weight, cost, maintenance requirement, and flammability. Without shedding batteries from IoT systems, high-density, million device, “deploy-and-forget” deployments made possible by ultra-small computing devices will never happen. Despite a decade of research on replacing batteries with energy harvesting, energy harvesting systems are not capable of being deployed in society. The core deployment challenge is the programmer: harvested energy is scarce and unpredictable, forcing batteryless systems to operate intermittently as power is available despite dramatically changing power conditions and common-case power failures. The human mind cannot reason accurately about such complexity. Making the dream of high-density, million device, “deploy-and-forget” energy harvesting device deployments possible requires hardware support that restores the abstraction of a continuously powered device to programmers, alleviating them of such complex reasoning.The work in this project restores the continuous power paradigm developers are trained for through transparent, low-level hardware mechanisms. Restoring the continuous power abstraction enables deployable and performant batteryless system design, opening the door for transformative industrial- and society-level ubiquitous computing and smart dust systems. The project aims to answer three questions: What modifications can one make to the energy harvesting and management hardware to provide a continuous-power environment for software? What opportunities exist when one decouples hardware operation from power-related software interruptions? What benefits exist when one allows software to inform hardware of its energy needs? The project bridges the gap between constant-power and batteryless systems through: an energy-aware harvester architecture that dynamically responds to changes in power supply and demand to efficiently supply a consistent power level for computation; hardware support for sustaining system and peripheral functionality across power cycles without software intervention; and a hybrid design that tunes the hardware to software’s needs, maximizing responsiveness while minimizing wasted energy. The team introduces hands-on, batteryless system development projects for both undergraduate and graduate students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.