SHF: Small: Rapid Development of Adaptable RF Transceivers for IoT Applications via Built-in Self-Test and Calibration

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The fast-paced IoT domain requires rapid development of hardware, firmware, and software, usually all by a small number of developers. Unfortunately, current integrated circuit hardware design practices are not conducive to the fast-pace development cycle of the IoT domain. Communications hardware requires a large group of designers who spend the majority of their time tweaking their designs such that the systems work under worst case scenarios of manufacturing variations. A small IoT team may not have the resources necessary to build the communications hardware with respect to the application needs. This project aims to remove the hardware development roadblock by creating an innovation platform that provides a library of hardware building blocks. Realizing that there is a shortage of workforce in engineering, and interest in STEM related careers begins early in the educational experience, the K-12 outreach objective for this project is to inspire and engage the middle and high school student population in engineering. In order to achieve this goal, the PIs will support middle and high school students to engage in research via a virtual hardware design platform. The students will team up to develop an IoT application and use conceptual design tools to develop their hardware. These projects will also be demonstrated in local middle schools and high schools. As an outcome of this project designers will be enabled to plug-and-play the crucial hardware components from a library without requiring deep design expertise. These library blocks will include self-adaptation capabilities for critical communications subsystems, which will automatically fine-tune hardware performance after the manufacturing step, thereby removing the detailed design tweaks that are otherwise common. In order to enable such plug-and-play hardware design for the crucial communications circuits, adaptation components must be minimally invasive, present with a small footprint, must be robust with respect to manufacturing variations, and must accurately hit the performance target of the specified IoT application. While these requirements are seemingly in conflict, these goals will be achieved by co-design of the library blocks together with their self-tuning components, using relative signal analysis to achieve high accuracy, and using built-in analytical models to optimize the hardware performance with respect to the IoT specification.