Asynchronous Wireless Sensor Platform for Zero-Power Miniaturized Smart Sensors

《神奇航行》是一部1966年的科幻电影，其中一艘特别设计的核潜艇“普罗透斯”被小型化，并被注射到人类的血液中，以清除大脑中的血块。50多年来，科学家和工程师们一直在寻找制造微型设备的秘密，这些设备可以在人体内移动，并进行诊断和治疗手术。该提案旨在开发一种零功耗（或自供电）无线智能传感器平台，有朝一日可以使Proteus成为现实。***随着CMOS技术的进步，芯片上的晶体管数量在50年内从1个增加到超过10亿个，正如摩尔定律所预测的那样。作为摩尔定律的必然结果，贝尔定律从芯片上的晶体管跳到计算机上，预测大约每10年就会出现一种更小、更便宜的新型计算机。从上世纪60年代的大型机到80年代的个人电脑，再到90年代的笔记本电脑和新千年的智能手机，这一定律都适用。在2011年IEEE固态电路会议上展示的用于医疗应用的毫米级自供电计算机可能标志着物联网（IoT）时代新型微型计算机的到来。物联网是一个愿景，今天正在构建，并承诺在互联网基础设施内连接嵌入式计算设备。据高德纳公司（Gartner）称，到2020年，将有近260亿台物联网设备。******该计划旨在进行电气工程前沿的跨学科研究。其目标是为物联网应用创造微型、毫米级和自我可持续的基于cmos的智能传感器。该计划旨在系统地解决当前无线智能传感器技术的局限性，并研究创建此类设备的几个基本问题，包括节能系统架构、电源管理、低电压和低功耗电路技术、无线通信、三维系统集成和封装。我们提出了一种新的异步系统架构，它消除了使用外部时钟导致功耗显著降低，一个异步模数转换器，根据输入活动调整采样率，高效的信号处理算法来处理非均匀采样数据，以及一个无时钟无线收发器，用于可扩展的数据通信。提出的零功耗无线传感器平台有望在物联网应用中实现小型化传感器的新用途，如远程患者监测、预防性医疗、绿色建筑（如环境传感）、智能电网、健身（如生物动力学传感）、娱乐（如游戏）、石油工业和许多其他消费电子设备

Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 science fiction film in which a specially designed nuclear submarine, the Proteus, is miniaturized and injected into human's bloodstream to remove a clot in his brain. For more than 50 years, scientists and engineers searched for the secret to making miniaturized devices that could travel inside a human body and perform diagnostic and therapeutic operations. This proposal aims to develop a zero-power (or self-powered) wireless smart sensor platform that one day could make the Proteus into a reality.***With the advancement of CMOS technology, the number of transistors on chips has increased from 1 to more than 1 billion in 50 years, as predicted by Moore's Law. A corollary of Moore's Law, Bell's Law leaps from transistors on chips to computers, predicting that a new class of smaller and cheaper computers comes along roughly every 10 years. The law has held from 1960s' mainframes through the 1980s' personal computer, the 1990's notebooks and the new millennium's smart phone. The demonstration of a millimeter-scale self-powered computer for medical applications in the 2011 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Conference may signal the arrival of a new class of tiny computers in the era of Internet-of-Things (IoT). The IoT is a vision, which is being built today, and promises to connect embedded computing devices within the Internet infrastructure. According to Gartner, there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the IoT by 2020.******The proposed program aims to conduct interdisciplinary research at the frontiers of electrical engineering. Its goal is to create miniature, millimeter scale, and self-sustainable CMOS-based smart sensors for applications in the IoT. The program intends to systematically address the limitations of the current state of the art within the context of wireless smart sensors, and study several fundamental issues in creating such devices including power efficient system architecture, power management, low voltage and low power circuit techniques, wireless communications, three-dimensional system integration and packaging. We propose a novel asynchronous system architecture that eliminates the use of an external clock leading to significant reduction in power consumption, an asynchronous analog-to-digital converter that adjusts the sampling rate based on input activities, power efficient signal processing algorithms to handle non-uniformly sampled data, and a clockless wireless transceiver for scalable data communication. The proposed zero-power wireless sensor platform promises novel uses of miniaturized sensors in the IoT applications such as remote patient monitoring, preventive healthcare, green buildings (e.g., environmental sensing), the smart grid, fitness (e.g., biokinetic sensing), entertainment (e.g., gaming), the oil industry, and many other consumer electronic devices.**