Toward Zero-Power Smart Sensing in the IoT Era Dr. Michele Magno, ETH Zurich

Minimizing the power consumption of always-on sensing frontends is crucial for devices that are required to monitor continuously events for long periods of time and in inaccessible places where the replacement of batteries is impossible or inconvenient. Moreover combining energy harvesting with low power design allows to achieve zero-power sensing and always on electronics. In this work we present two different devices that exploit this combination. First, we present the architecture, the design and the implementation of a novel zero-power receiver optimized for intra-body and extra-body communication. The receiver includes an energy-harvesting subsystem that extracts energy from the received message to supply the low power circuits. The proposed zero-power receiver is able to receive and to parse data, as well as wake up external logic when a specific address is detected. The receiver can be used both as an always-on touch sensor and as a body communication wake up radio. Experimental results with in-field measurements demonstrate the zero-power of the proposed device and that it is possible to achieve more than 1.70m in intra-body communication without the use of any external battery. The second device is a novel ultra-low power always-on acoustic event-driven sensor able to feature pattern recognition with up to 128 simultaneous time-frequency features exploiting mixed-signal low-power design. We achieve a zero-power smart sensor and the perpetual work with EH providing only 0.4mW of continuous power. We show a full working prototype using a microbial fuel cell or a small size flexible solar panel.


Michele Magno is a senior researcher at ETH Zurich at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering.

This talk was presented at the Arm Research Summit, 17-19 September 2018. Summit 2019 will be taking place in Austin, TX. Visit arm.com/summit for more details!