Low Power Electronics Design and Energy Harvesting

From nanowatt to self-generating electronics, tomorrow's designs will minimize the amount of energy required to make them work. Professor Chandrakasan, a leading researcher in low-power electronic design will share his insights into the world of energy-efficient circuits!

Next-generation portable multimedia devices and wireless sensors will require a dramatic reduction in energy consumption.  Next generation wireless sensors will need to consume nanowatts to microwatts and operate using energy-harvesting techniques such as vibration-to-electric conversion, body heat or even biological energy sources.   Advances in circuit design together with new device technology in storage, sensors, and energy-harvesting are making nano-power systems possible.

Scaling to nano-power systems requires major advances to achieve high-efficiency.   This presentation will cover low-power techniques including ultra-low-voltage digital circuit operation, application-specific architectures, data-driven processing, extreme parallelism, computation vs. communication trade-off, and integrated energy-processing circuits.  Special attention must be placed on design for variability.  On-chip energy monitors will allow fine-grained measurements and optimization.   A system-level approach exploiting application attributes such as low-duty cycles or signal statistics must be used to optimize such devices.  Efficient energy-processing circuits for generation, buffering, and conversion are critical in many applications.   Professor Chandrakasan will show several system examples, covering self-powered wireless biomedical devices and portable multimedia devices.

Speaker; Anantha Chandrakasan received his B.S, M.S. & Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, 1990, and 1994 respectively. Since September 1994, he has been a professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, until his promotion to EE/CS Department Head in 2012.