SBIR Phase I: Batteryless Single Chip Mote

Monolets, Inc., Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project spans various segments i.e. consumer, environment monitoring, healthcare, infrastructure monitoring, automotive, smart cities, agriculture, power generation, oil and gas, industrial automation/manufacturing, retail, and robotics to name a few. Over the past several decades, wireless connectivity has played a significant role in reshaping our social lives and generating huge economic value for businesses all around the globe. The wireless connectivity has been focused around human-to-human communication but in the next decade machine-to-machine communication will play a significant role in the fourth industrial revolution. The proposed R&D will enable the vision of ubiquitous connectivity at scale, which the Internet of Things promises. The Internet of Things (IoT) economic impact is projected to be anywhere between $7-15 trillion globally in the next decade and the impact of it will be felt by virtually every industry. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will address the two key problems with the current state-of-the-art wireless sensor nodes. First is the limited battery-life and second is the cost of the sensor nodes. Low power standard compliant wireless communication plays a key role in extending the battery-life of a wireless sensor node. Experience with semiconductors dictates that complete system integration on a single piece of silicon (zero external components) not only reduces the cost of the system (in high volume) but also improves the systems? overall energy efficiency. This enables operation on harvested energy requiring no external battery. No external components imply that the microsystem needs to operate from energy sources with limited capacity. No external components also imply no quartz crystal frequency reference, which almost every microsystem uses as of today for frequency and timing reference. Off-chip crystal is a bulky component that poses a severe size limitation for low-profile millimeter scale microsystems. Eliminating off-chip crystal is a significant step forward towards energy autonomous millimetre-scale microsystems that have widespread commercial applications.