Design considerations for ultra-low energy wireless microsensor nodes

By Benton H. Calhoun, Denis C. Daly, Naveen Verma, D. Finchelstein, D. Wentzloff, Alice Wang, Seong-Hwan Cho, Anantha P. Chandrakasan. IEEE transactions on computers, 2005

320 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This tutorial paper examines architectural and circuit design techniques for a microsensor node operating at power levels low enough to enable the use of an energy harvesting source. These requirements place demands on all levels of the design. We propose architecture for achieving the required ultra-low energy operation and discuss the circuit techniques necessary to implement the system. Dedicated hardware implementations improve the efficiency for specific functionality, and modular partitioning permits fine-grained optimization and power-gating. We describe modeling and operating at the minimum energy point in the subthreshold region for digital circuits. We also examine approaches for improving the energy efficiency of analog components like the transmitter and the ADC. A microsensor node using the techniques we describe can function in an energy-harvesting scenario.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9553d57f9810334160e7f463919e1acaeef56f1

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Development of an impedance-based wireless sensor node for structural health monitoring (2007, background): “The energy harvesting device must supply more than the power-down power consumption in order to ensure a positive energy flow into the energy storage device (Calhoun et al 2005).”
An Efficient Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Interface Circuit Using a Bias-Flip Rectifier and Shared Inductor (2009, unknown): “Emerging applications like wireless micro-sensor networks [1], implantable medical electronics and tire-pressure sensor systems [2] are examples of such a class.”
Cross-layer optimization for energy-efficient wireless communications: a survey (2009, background): “Rather than improvement of existing systems, there are also work at designing new system architectures to comprehensively enhance network energy efficiency, such as the PicoRadio project at Berkeley [65], [71] and the „AMPs project at MIT [ 72 ].”
Nanometer MOSFET Variation in Minimum Energy Subthreshold Circuits (2008, background): “In the case shown, global variation strengthens the NMOS relative to the PMOS and causes the VTC to shift left.”