I-Corps: Extremely compact, low-power sensing nodes that may fulfill the promise of smart dust

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to explore applications of new wirelessly connected sensors. The proposed technology advances a an ultra-low-power sensor device for the Internet of Things (IoT), smart dust, or edge intelligence (EI) devices. Relative to current sensors, the proposed technology may create 100-fold improvements in the cost of thorough coverage and battery life, virtually eliminating the cost of battery replacement and sensor maintenance. Example applications in agriculture include preventive, cost-effective, and continuous monitoring of temperature, rainfall, wind direction, soil moisture, pests, and illness for informed decision-making. Other applications may include preventive/therapeutic healthcare, animal welfare, environmental monitoring, transportation, and industrial monitoring. This I-Corps project investigates translation of a novel system-on-chip (SoC) with end-to-end computing on asynchronous streams data-path that is composed of Asynchronous Sigma-Delta Modulators (ASDM) for acquiring sensor data, a computing-core for streams, a clock-less wireless interface and an analog memory. The key for the SoC power efficiency is the unique data representation - the ASDM maps analog data to asynchronous streams of 1s and 0s instead of digital numbers. The streams are sent to the computing-core composed of processing elements, such as multipliers and adders. A multiplier for streams may be implemented with a single AND gate and an adder with a 2:1 multiplexer, achieving savings in power and area of up to 90% compared with typical approaches. 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.