Energy challenges for ICT

The energy consumption from the expanding use of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable with present drivers, and it will impact heavily on the future climate change. However, ICT devices have the potential to contribute signi - cantly to the reduction of CO2 emission and enhance resource e ciency in other sectors, e.g., transportation (through intelligent transportation and advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles), heating (through smart building control), and manu- facturing (through digital automation based on smart autonomous sensors). To address the energy sustainability of ICT and capture the full potential of ICT in resource e - ciency, a multidisciplinary ICT-energy community needs to be brought together cover- ing devices, microarchitectures, ultra large-scale integration (ULSI), high-performance computing (HPC), energy harvesting, energy storage, system design, embedded sys- tems, e cient electronics, static analysis, and computation. In this chapter, we introduce challenges and opportunities in this emerging eld and a common framework to strive towards energy-sustainable ICT

Design Solutions For Modular Satellite Architectures

The cost-effective access to space envisaged by ESA would open a wide range of new opportunities and markets, but is still many years ahead. There is still a lack of devices, circuits, systems which make possible to develop satellites, ground stations and related services at costs compatible with the budget of academic institutions and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). As soon as the development time and cost of small satellites will fall below a certain threshold (e.g. 100,000 to 500,000 €), appropriate business models will likely develop to ensure a cost-effective and pervasive access to space, and related infrastructures and services. These considerations spurred the activity described in this paper, which is aimed at: - proving the feasibility of low-cost satellites using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) devices. This is a new trend in the space industry, which is not yet fully exploited due to the belief that COTS devices are not reliable enough for this kind of applications; - developing a flight model of a flexible and reliable nano-satellite with less than 25,000€; - training students in the field of avionics space systems: the design here described is developed by a team including undergraduate students working towards their graduation work. The educational aspects include the development of specific new university courses; - developing expertise in the field of low-cost avionic systems, both internally (university staff) and externally (graduated students will bring their expertise in their future work activity); - gather and cluster expertise and resources available inside the university around a common high-tech project; - creating a working group composed of both University and SMEs devoted to the application of commercially available technology to space environment. The first step in this direction was the development of a small low cost nano-satellite, started in the year 2004: the name of this project was PiCPoT (Piccolo Cubo del Politecnico di Torino, Small Cube of Politecnico di Torino). The project was carried out by some departments of the Politecnico, in particular Electronics and Aerospace. The main goal of the project was to evaluate the feasibility of using COTS components in a space project in order to greatly reduce costs; the design exploited internal subsystems modularity to allow reuse and further cost reduction for future missions. Starting from the PiCPoT experience, in 2006 we began a new project called ARaMiS (Speretta et al., 2007) which is the Italian acronym for Modular Architecture for Satellites. This work describes how the architecture of the ARaMiS satellite has been obtained from the lesson learned from our former experience. Moreover we describe satellite operations, giving some details of the major subsystems. This work is composed of two parts. The first one describes the design methodology, solutions and techniques that we used to develop the PiCPoT satellite; it gives an overview of its operations, with some details of the major subsystems. Details on the specifications can also be found in (Del Corso et al., 2007; Passerone et al, 2008). The second part, indeed exploits the experience achieved during the PiCPoT development and describes a proposal for a low-cost modular architecture for satellite

Energy autonomous systems : future trends in devices, technology, and systems

The rapid evolution of electronic devices since the beginning of the nanoelectronics era has brought about exceptional computational power in an ever shrinking system footprint. This has enabled among others the wealth of nomadic battery powered wireless systems (smart phones, mp3 players, GPS, …) that society currently enjoys. Emerging integration technologies enabling even smaller volumes and the associated increased functional density may bring about a new revolution in systems targeting wearable healthcare, wellness, lifestyle and industrial monitoring applications

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationMicroelectromechanical systems (MEMS) resonators on Si have the potential to replace the discrete passive components in a power converter. The main intention of this dissertation is to present a ring-shaped aluminum nitride (AlN) piezoelectric microreson

Wearable flexible lightweight modular RFID tag with integrated energy harvester

A novel wearable radio frequency identification (RFID) tag with sensing, processing, and decision-taking capability is presented for operation in the 2.45-GHz RFID superhigh frequency (SHF) band. The tag is powered by an integrated light harvester, with a flexible battery serving as an energy buffer. The proposed active tag features excellent wearability, very high read range, enhanced functionality, flexible interfacing with diverse low-power sensors, and extended system autonomy through an innovative holistic microwave system design paradigm that takes antenna design into consideration from the very early stages. Specifically, a dedicated textile shorted circular patch antenna with monopolar radiation pattern is designed and optimized for highly efficient and stable operation within the frequency band of operation. In this process, the textile antenna's functionality is augmented by reusing its surface as an integration platform for light-energy-harvesting, sensing, processing, and transceiver hardware, without sacrificing antenna performance or the wearer's comfort. The RFID tag is validated by measuring its stand-alone and on-body characteristics in free-space conditions. Moreover, measurements in a real-world scenario demonstrate an indoor read range up to 23 m in nonline-of-sight indoor propagation conditions, enabling interrogation by a reader situated in another room. In addition, the RFID platform only consumes 168.3 mu W, when sensing and processing are performed every 60 s

Analysis and optimal design of micro-energy harvesting systems for wireless sensor nodes

Presently, wireless sensor nodes are widely used and the lifetime of the system is becoming the biggest problem with using this technology. As more and more low power products have been used in WSN, energy harvesting technologies, based on their own characteristics, attract more and more attention in this area. But in order to design high energy efficiency, low cost and nearly perpetual lifetime micro energy harvesting system is still challenging. This thesis proposes a new way, by applying three factors of the system, which are the energy generation, the energy consumption and the power management strategy, into a theoretical model, to optimally design a highly efficient micro energy harvesting system in a real environment. In order to achieve this goal, three aspects of contributions, which are theoretically analysis an energy harvesting system, practically enhancing the system efficiency, and real system implementation, have been made. For the theoretically analysis, the generic architecture and the system design procedure have been proposed to guide system design. Based on the proposed system architecture, the theoretical analytical models of solar and thermal energy harvesting systems have been developed to evaluate the performance of the system before it being designed and implemented. Based on the model’s findings, two approaches (MPPT based power conversion circuit and the power management subsystem) have been considered to practically increase the system efficiency. As this research has been funded by the two public projects, two energy harvesting systems (solar and thermal) powered wireless sensor nodes have been developed and implemented in the real environments based on the proposed work, although other energy sources are given passing treatment. The experimental results show that the two systems have been efficiently designed with the optimization of the system parameters by using the simulation model. The further experimental results, tested in the real environments, show that both systems can have nearly perpetual lifetime with high energy efficiency

A Remote Power Management Strategy for the Solar Energy Powered Bicycle

In this paper, a solar energy powered bicycle by a wireless sensor network (WSN) far-end network monitoring solar energy to transfer the electrical energy storage and the effectiveness analysis is proposed. In order to achieve this goal, an embarked ZigBee by a solar-powered bicycle the far-end wireless network supervisory system is setup. Experimental results prove that our prototype, the solar energy powered bicycle, can manage the solar energy for charging two Lead-Acid batteries pack. As a result, the user by the wireless network in parking period knows the data on the amount of immediate solar radiation, the degree of illumination, the ambient temperature, and electrical energy storage capacity information by the internet interface

MEMS-based Micro-scale Wind Turbines as Energy Harvesters of the Convective Airflows in Microelectronic Circuits

As an alternative to conventional batteries and other energy scavenging techniques, this paper introduces the idea of using micro-turbines to extract energy from wind forces at the microscale level and to supply power to battery-less microsystems. Fundamental research efforts on the design, fabrication, and test of micro-turbines with blade lengths of just 160 μm are presented in this paper along with analytical models and preliminary experimental results. The proof-of-concept prototypes presented herein were fabricated using a standard polysilicon surface micro-machining silicon technology (PolyMUMPs) and could effectively transform the kinetic energy of the available wind into a torque that might drive an electric generator or directly power supply a micro-mechanical system. Since conventional batteries do not scale-down well to the microscale, wind micro-turbines have the potential for becoming a practical alternative power source for microsystems, as well as for extending the operating range of devices running on batteries