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Inexpensive, Ant-Sized Radio Chip to Control the 'Internet of Things'

A Stanford University engineering team has built a radio the size of an ant that gathers all the power it needs from the same electromagnetic waves that carry signals to its receiving antenna. Designed to compute, execute, and relay commands, the tiny wireless chip costs pennies to manufacture – making it cheap enough to become the missing link between the Internet and the linked-together smart gadgets envisioned in the 'Internet of Things.' Much of the infrastructure needed to enable people to control sensors and devices remotely already exists - there is the Internet to carry commands around the globe, and computers and smartphones to issue the commands. What's missing is a wireless controller cheap enough to so that it can be installed on any gadget anywhere. To build this tiny device, every function in the radio had to be reengineered. The antenna had to be small, one-tenth the size of a Wi-Fi antenna, and operate at the incredibly fast rate of 24 billion cycles per second. Standard transistors could not easily process signals that oscillate that fast, so the Stanford team had to improve basic circuit and electronic design. Many other such tweaks were needed but in the end the team managed to put all the necessary components on one chip.

Topics:
Antennas Board-Level Electronics Computers Electronic Components Electronics & Computers Manufacturing & Prototyping Power RF & Microwave Electronics Semiconductors & ICs

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [MUSIC] >> Stanford University. >> What we've done here is figured out how to design a radio in which everything, all the functionality of radio is integrated on a single silicon chip, which is a few millimeters on the side. That includes the antennae devices, the synchronization, computation, communication, everything on a single chip. And we've done power harvesting, where the device actually recovers and harvests power from the incoming signal, computes, and communicates back using very narrow pulses at 60 Gigahertz frequency.

    00:00:36 Now the advantage of moving to this architecture is that we can have the scalability that we want. We can scale the number of radios to thousands in a very dense environment. We can also have, because there is no battery connected, there's essentially no life time associated with these devices. As long as the signal is coming in they can recover the power, communicate and communicate back. And the cost is extremely low because we're talking about a few millimetres of silicone chip. Which is a few cents to manufacture on the large scale.

    00:01:06 So, we've basically rethought designing radio technology from grounds up, and, we've kind of designed the technology scale in numbers and size. This is the next wave of wireless devices. And that's what people call internet of things, or some people call internet of everything. And this is where internet moves from your mobile devices, from your tablets and, and your cell phones into everyday objects, and these objects will start making decisions based on minimal supervision because they have wireless connectivity, they have some kind of sensing, they have computational power. You'll have these on your coffeemaker, you'll have it on your fridge.

    00:01:45 And, and decisions, and, and, and communication between these objects will enable a whole new wave of functionality and a whole new wave of how we interact with the objects around us. >> For more, please visit us at stanford.edu.