4 research outputs found
Slocalization: Sub-{\mu}W Ultra Wideband Backscatter Localization
Ultra wideband technology has shown great promise for providing high-quality
location estimation, even in complex indoor multipath environments, but
existing ultra wideband systems require tens to hundreds of milliwatts during
operation. Backscatter communication has demonstrated the viability of
astonishingly low-power tags, but has thus far been restricted to narrowband
systems with low localization resolution. The challenge to combining these
complimentary technologies is that they share a compounding limitation,
constrained transmit power. Regulations limit ultra wideband transmissions to
just -41.3 dBm/MHz, and a backscatter device can only reflect the power it
receives. The solution is long-term integration of this limited power, lifting
the initially imperceptible signal out of the noise. This integration only
works while the target is stationary. However, stationary describes the vast
majority of objects, especially lost ones. With this insight, we design
Slocalization, a sub-microwatt, decimeter-accurate localization system that
opens a new tradeoff space in localization systems and realizes an energy,
size, and cost point that invites the localization of every thing. To evaluate
this concept, we implement an energy-harvesting Slocalization tag and find that
Slocalization can recover ultra wideband backscatter in under fifteen minutes
across thirty meters of space and localize tags with a mean 3D Euclidean error
of only 30 cm.Comment: Published at the 17th ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing
in Sensor Networks (IPSN'18
Millimeter-scale RF Integrated Circuits and Antennas for Energy-efficient Wireless Sensor Nodes
Recently there has been increased demand for a millimeter-scale wireless sensor node for applications such as biomedical devices, defense, and surveillance. This form-factor is driven by a desire to be vanishingly small, injectable through a needle, or implantable through a minimally-invasive surgical procedure. Wireless communication is a necessity, but there are several challenges at the millimeter-scale wireless sensor node. One of the main challenges is external components like crystal reference and antenna become the bottleneck of realizing the mm-scale wireless sensor node device. A second challenge is power consumption of the electronics. At mm-scale, the micro-battery has limited capacity and small peak current. Moreover, the RF front-end circuits that operates at the highest frequency in the system will consume most of the power from the battery. Finally, as node volume reduces, there is a challenge of integrating the entire system together, in particular for the RF performance, because all components, including the battery and ICs, need to be placed in close proximity of the antenna.
This research explores ways to implement low-power integrated circuits in an energy-constrained and volume constrained application. Three different prototypes are mainly conducted in the proposal. The first is a fully-encapsulated, autonomous, complete wireless sensor node with UWB transmitter in 10.6mm3 volume. It is the first time to demonstrate a full and stand-alone wireless sensing functionality with such a tiny integrated system. The second prototype is a low power GPS front-end receiver that supports burst-mode. A double super-heterodyne topology enables the reception of the three public GPS bands, L1, L2 and L5 simultaneously. The third prototype is an integrated rectangular slot loop antenna in a standard 0.13-μm BiCMOS technology. The antenna is efficiently designed to cover the bandwidth at 60 GHz band and easily satisfy the metal density rules and can be integrated with other circuitry in a standard process.PHDElectrical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143972/1/hskims_1.pd