Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

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.