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，由于电池的尺寸、重量、成本、维护要求和易燃性，限制了物联网设备的潜在社会影响。如果不从物联网系统中消耗电池，高密度、百万设备、“部署后忘记”的部署将永远不会发生，这些部署是由超小型计算设备实现的。尽管用能量收集取代电池的研究已经进行了十年，但能量收集系统还无法在社会上部署。部署的核心挑战是程序员：收集的能量是稀缺和不可预测的，迫使无电池系统间歇性地运行，尽管电力条件急剧变化和常见的电力故障。人类的头脑无法对如此复杂的事物做出准确的推理。要实现高密度、百万设备、“部署即忘”能量收集设备部署的梦想，需要硬件支持，以恢复程序员对持续供电设备的抽象理解，减轻他们如此复杂的推理。这个项目中的工作通过透明的、低级的硬件机制恢复了开发人员所接受的持续的电源范式。恢复持续的电力提取功能可以实现可部署和高性能的无电池系统设计，为变革的工业和社会级无处不在的计算和智能除尘系统打开大门。该项目旨在回答三个问题：我们可以对能量收集和管理硬件进行哪些修改，以为软件提供持续供电的环境？当将硬件操作与与电源相关的软件中断分离时，存在什么机会？如果允许软件告知硬件其能源需求，会有什么好处呢？该项目通过以下方式弥合了恒定功率和无电池系统之间的差距：能量感知收集器架构，动态响应电力供应和需求的变化，有效地为计算提供一致的功率水平；硬件支持跨电源周期维持系统和外围功能，无需软件干预；还有一种混合设计，可以根据软件需求调整硬件，最大限度地提高响应速度，同时最大限度地减少能源浪费。该团队为计算机科学、计算机工程和电气工程专业的本科生和研究生介绍了动手操作的无电池系统开发项目。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.