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One-Cubic-Millimeter Circuit Can Power Itself

Tackling the challenge of power consumption on miniaturized computer systems, researchers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering have designed a one-cubic-millimeter circuit that can power itself. This particular device is aimed at inter-ocular pressure monitoring for glaucoma diagnosis and management, and can be implanted in the eye with a simple outpatient technique. U-M scientists, including Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professors Dennis Sylvester and David Blaauw, hope to make the sensors in volume at the U-M and disseminate them to other researchers in an effort to open up new areas of application.

Topics:
Diagnostics Electronic Components Electronics & Computers Implants & Prosthetics Measuring Instruments Medical Patient Monitoring Semiconductors & ICs Sensors Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 in the past uh people have looked at miniaturizing Computing systems uh but the main challenge in putting everything into that small of a form factor 1 cubic millimeter or so is power consumption so we have spent the last seven or so years working on uh ultra low power uh integrated circuit design techniques we fairly quickly figured out how low the power needs to be so we can shrink our

    00:00:23 battery down to millimeter size now all the components that we started looking at that we need in this Computing system consume uh way more than that and so it wasn't just an issue of taking one component like the memory or the processor and bringing it down in power all of them had to be redesigned uh to be much lower power it started out more as a

    00:00:45 fundamental study I think and it became really really compelling and that's when we decided hey this is where the future of computing in many ways is going to go and so we wanted to be the first to sort of make the next big leap uh and in addition I think it became clear to us that there's some very interesting applic this particular device is about 1.5b mm

    00:01:04 in volume it's aimed at interocular pressure monitoring for glaucoma diagnosis and management so this device can be implanted in the eye with a really simple outpatient technique whenever the user brings a sort of a receiver wand toward their eye they're able to actually read out the contents of that data our vision actually in this work

    00:01:26 which I think is a little bit unique is is not just to make the components and to prove that we can do this but we also really want to actually disseminate these sensors we want to actually start making these in moderate volumes at the University and give these to other researchers so they can start to actually really do new kinds of work with these sensors uh open up new areas

    00:01:48 of applications it's a pretty interdisciplinary project and uh having people at Michigan that you could you know walk down to the Medical Campus or to another building engineering and and basically um be able to work close with them has been a real real asset for this project it's something that has really made this thing move faster than it would have

    00:02:16 otherwise