Ultra Low Power Crystal Free Radios

We are entering into an era where computing, sensing and communication are becoming disposable. This paradigm shift in computing is the key to enable the scale that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises i.e. one trillion wireless sensors in the next 10 to 15 years. This staggering scale imposes new design and system challenges. The microsystem serves as a platform that allows us to embed wireless connectivity into everyday objects or serves as a brain for walking and flying microrobots. The lifetime, robustness, profile and cost of these microsystems play a critical role to enable these emerging applications. Therefore, a single chip mote hardware platform is developed to address these unmet needs from the current existing hardware platforms. The system-on-chip (SoC) is architected from the bottom-up to meet the new use case and performance requirements of energy constraint environments with limited energy capacity e.g. batteryless operation from harvested energy or operation from printed batteries. The project seeks to reduce the active radio power by a factor of 10, reduce the overall system cost and profile of a microsystem by eliminating external components (e.g. crystal frequency reference) that are typically needed for a fully functioning wireless sensor node.The proposed microsystem allow us to collect data at high spatial and temporal resolution, create richer physical models and manifest intelligent behavior that is highly dynamic in nature.