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e-Seminar

A Platform for Self-Powered Microsensor Systems Development and Research

December 8, 2011
4:00 PM EST (1:00 PM PST)

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Abstract

Microsensor networks have applications ranging from environmental and industrial monitoring to wearable and implantable medical devices. This talk will describe a platform for such sensor systems which integrates multiple low-power optimized components developed by the IFC/C2S2 tasks, including sensor interfaces, digital signal processors, radios and protocol processors, and energy harvesting and storage. After presenting the overall system architecture, the energy harvesting and custom ultra-low power radio components will be covered in particular depth.

The onboard energy harvesting module powers the custom low-power ICs in the platform from solar energy. The energy harvester component can also utilize thermal and vibration energy. A multi-path architecture is utilized with direct converters between the energy source, load, and storage cell, to provide higher end-to-end efficiency compared to the traditional energy harvesting architectures. A single inductor is shared between all of the converters to minimize the number of off-chip components.

For wireless communication, the platform includes custom ultra low power 2.4 GHz transmitter and receiver chips that utilize FBAR resonators to define channel center frequencies. The transmitter and receiver are implemented in 65nm CMOS. The OOK receiver features an LNA and mixer architecture that combines signal pathways without degrading the high resonance Q, and uses a single wideband-IF chain and ultra-low power ring oscillator LO. The receiver achieves an efficiency of 180 pJ/b from a 0.7 V supply with a sensitivity of -67 dBm. In the transmitter, the FBAR oscillators are multiplexed onto low-capacitance buffers that isolate the oscillators from the PA. The PA is optimized for output powers near -10 dBm. The transmitter supports OOK, BPSK and MSK modulation and consumes 436 pJ/bit (0.7 V) for 1 Mbps OOK data at -10dBm.

Speakers

Nathan Ickes
MIT

Nathan Ickes received his S.B., M. Eng. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, 2002 and 2008 respectively. He is currently a postdoc at MIT and his research interests include micropower digital circuits and system architectures, software support for power management, and biomedical applications of micropower systems.

Saurav Bandyopadhyay
MIT

Saurav Bandyopadhyay received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2008 and the S.M. degree from MIT in 2010. He is currently a PhD student at MIT.

Arun Paidimarri
MIT

Arun Paidimarri is a Ph.D. student in EECS at MIT. His research interests include low power system design, including RF circuits. He completed his B.Tech in EE from IIT Bombay and S.M. in EECS from MIT.

Phillip Nadeau
MIT

Phillip M. Nadeau received the B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Waterloo in 2009 and the S.M. degree from MIT in 2011, both in electrical engineering. He is currently pursuing the doctoral degree in electrical engineering at MIT where his interests lie in ultra-low-power IC design for biomedical applications.