Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.
Networks of wireless sensors have become a topic of very active research recently. This has been enabled by the convergence of three key technologies: digital circuitry, wireless communications, and Micro ElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS). In each of these three areas, advances in both hardware technology and engineering design have led to reductions in size, power consumption and cost. This has enabled the creation of very compact, autonomous nodes, each containing one or more sensors, computation and communication capabilities, and a power supply. The goal of the Smart Dust project is to explore the limits on size and power consumption in autonomous sensor nodes. Size reduction is paramount; we believe that we can incorporate the requisite sensing, communication, and computing hardware, along with a power supply, in a volume no more than a few cubic millimeters, while still achieving impressive performance. We refer to these millimeter-scale nodes as "Smart Dust". In this talk, we will review the key elements of the emergent technology of Smart Dust, and the research challenges it poses in the areas of low-power circuit design, power management, wireless communications, networking, and data fusion. We will summarize our progress to date, and describe some of the exciting applications of this new technology.
Kristofer S.J. Pister received his B.A. in Applied Physics from UCSD in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1989 and 1992. In 1992 he became an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA, where he developed three graduate level courses in Micro Electro Mechanical Systems: MEMS device physics and fabrication, MEMS system design, and CAD for MEMS. In 1996 he joined the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley as an Associate Professor. During the last five years, his primary research interest has been the development and use of standard fabrication technologies, general purpose design paradigms, and CAD for MEMS. He is the inventor of the polysilicon hinge, now in use by many MEMS groups around the world. Most recently his work has been in wireless sensor networks and micro optics. He is an active consultant in the MEMS industry, and has two patents on MEMS technology and applications.
Joseph M. Kahn is a Professor and Vice Chairman in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at U.C. Berkeley. He received the A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from U.C. Berkeley in 1981, 1983 and 1986, respectively. From 1987-90 he was a Member of Technical Staff in the Lightwave Communications Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he performed research on multi-gigabit-per-second coherent optical fiber transmission systems and related device and subsystem technologies. He joined the faculty of U.C. Berkeley in 1990. His current research addresses several areas of communications, including infrared and radio wireless communications, source and channel coding techniques, and optical fiber communications. Dr. Kahn received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and is a member of the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Information Theory Society and the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society. He is serving currently as a technical editor of IEEE Personal Communications Magazine.
Here is a map to HP.