Researchers have created tiny radios-on-a-chip that serve as sensors, could connect almost any gadget to the Internet. The chip doesn't need to be powered and costs next to nothing to make.
A Stanford engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant, a device so energy efficient that it gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna - no batteries required.
Designed to compute, execute and relay commands, this tiny wireless chip costs pennies to fabricate - making it cheap enough to become the missing link between the Internet as we know it and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the "Internet of Things."
"The next exponential growth in connectivity will be connecting objects together and giving us remote control through the web," said Amin Arbabian, an assistant professor who recently demonstrated this ant-sized radio chip at a symposium in Hawaii.
Much of the infrastructure needed to enable us to control sensors and devices remotely already exists: We have the Internet to carry commands around the globe, and computers and smartphones to issue the commands. What's missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere. "How do you put a bi-directional wireless control system on every lightbulb?" Arbabian said. "By putting all the essential elements of a radio on a single chip that costs pennies to make."
Cost is critical because, as Arbabian observed, "We're ultimately talking about connecting trillions of devices."
A three-year effort
Arbabian began the project in 2011 while he was working with professor Ali Niknejad, director of the Wireless Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Arbabian's principal collaborator was his wife, Maryam Tabesh, then also a student in Niknejad's lab and now a Google engineer.
The work took time because Arbabian wanted to completely rethink the radio technology from scratch.
"In the past when people thought about miniaturising radios, they thought about it in terms of shrinking the size of the components," he said. But Arbabian's approach to dramatically reducing size and cost was different. Everything hinged on squeezing all the electronics found in, say, the typical Bluetooth device down into a single, ant-sized chip.
This approach to miniaturisation would have another benefit - dramatically reducing power consumption, because a single chip draws less power than conventional radios.
In fact, if Arbabian's radio chip needed a battery - which it does not - a single AAA contains enough power to run it for more than a century. But to build this tiny device every function in the radio had to be reengineered.
The antenna
The antenna had to be small, one-tenth the size of a WiFi antenna, and operate at the incredibly fast rate of 24 billion cycles per second. Standard transistors could not easily process signals that oscillate that fast. So his team had to improve basic circuit and electronic design.
Many other such tweaks were needed but in the end they managed to put all the components on one chip: a receiving antenna that also scavenges energy from electromagnetic waves; a transmitting antenna to broadcast replies and relay signals; and a central processor to interpret and execute instructions. No external components or power are needed.
Based on his designs, STMicroelectronics fabricated 100 of these chips. Arbabian has used these prototypes to prove that the devices work; they can receive signals, harvest energy from incoming radio signals and carry out commands and relay instructions. MM
A Stanford engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant, a device so energy efficient that it gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna - no batteries required.
Designed to compute, execute and relay commands, this tiny wireless chip costs pennies to fabricate - making it cheap enough to become the missing link between the Internet as we know it and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the "Internet of Things."
"The next exponential growth in connectivity will be connecting objects together and giving us remote control through the web," said Amin Arbabian, an assistant professor who recently demonstrated this ant-sized radio chip at a symposium in Hawaii.
Much of the infrastructure needed to enable us to control sensors and devices remotely already exists: We have the Internet to carry commands around the globe, and computers and smartphones to issue the commands. What's missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere. "How do you put a bi-directional wireless control system on every lightbulb?" Arbabian said. "By putting all the essential elements of a radio on a single chip that costs pennies to make."
Cost is critical because, as Arbabian observed, "We're ultimately talking about connecting trillions of devices."
A three-year effort
Arbabian began the project in 2011 while he was working with professor Ali Niknejad, director of the Wireless Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Arbabian's principal collaborator was his wife, Maryam Tabesh, then also a student in Niknejad's lab and now a Google engineer.
The work took time because Arbabian wanted to completely rethink the radio technology from scratch.
"In the past when people thought about miniaturising radios, they thought about it in terms of shrinking the size of the components," he said. But Arbabian's approach to dramatically reducing size and cost was different. Everything hinged on squeezing all the electronics found in, say, the typical Bluetooth device down into a single, ant-sized chip.
This approach to miniaturisation would have another benefit - dramatically reducing power consumption, because a single chip draws less power than conventional radios.
In fact, if Arbabian's radio chip needed a battery - which it does not - a single AAA contains enough power to run it for more than a century. But to build this tiny device every function in the radio had to be reengineered.
The antenna
The antenna had to be small, one-tenth the size of a WiFi antenna, and operate at the incredibly fast rate of 24 billion cycles per second. Standard transistors could not easily process signals that oscillate that fast. So his team had to improve basic circuit and electronic design.
Many other such tweaks were needed but in the end they managed to put all the components on one chip: a receiving antenna that also scavenges energy from electromagnetic waves; a transmitting antenna to broadcast replies and relay signals; and a central processor to interpret and execute instructions. No external components or power are needed.
Based on his designs, STMicroelectronics fabricated 100 of these chips. Arbabian has used these prototypes to prove that the devices work; they can receive signals, harvest energy from incoming radio signals and carry out commands and relay instructions. MM
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