Showing posts with label IoT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IoT. Show all posts

Monday, September 15, 2014

Stanford engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant

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.

Press release: A Stanford engineering team, in collaboration with researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, 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 of electrical engineering who recently demonstrated this ant-sized radio chip at the VLSI Technology and Circuits Symposium in Hawaii.
 

The tiny radio-on-a-chip gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna.

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."
 
More information:
A Power-Harvesting Pad-Less mm-Sized 24/60GHz Passive Radio with On-Chip Antennas, VLSI Technology and Circuits Symposium in Hawaii 2014.

 
Movie from Youtube.com (Stanford)

... and then just think what you could do with this radio chip on a MEMS mad bug like in the video below...


 
Researchers at Harvard and the Wyss Institute are developing a robotic bee that could be used to pollinate plants in the future. (Youtube.com)