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

Award ID: 2041569

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.

NSF Program Director: Ruth Shuman