TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGES

The Internet of Things (IoT) is predicted to consist of trillions of devices, many of which will be connected together wirelessly. For example, the technology is applicable to industrial process control, infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, smart homes, consumer and medical wearables. IoT holds a lot of promises, but also has many challenges. Power consumption is critical for IoT devices. Many IoT applications need to run for months or years without battery replacement to avoid high maintenance cost. Security is extremely important to protect users' privacy. Variety of wired and wireless connectivity standards are required to enable different application needs. Sensor interface has to be smart enough and low power enough for context awareness applications. We need to find innovative ways to sense and deliver information from the physical world to the cloud.

RESEARCH FOCUS

Our research will focus on ultra-low power (ULP) digital logic and analog circuit implementation. Digital circuit, which is a key component in every ULP system, is primarily used for signal processing, algorithmic computing and network communication, but also increasingly utilized in digitally-assisted analog and radio frequency (RF) design in order to get benefit from Moore’s law. From the analog side, we will pursue research in ULP sensor interface, analog/digital converters, wireless transceivers and energy scavenging MEMS circuit. Furthermore, we will innovate from the architectural and system level and work on problems of data aggregation, sensor fusion, context recognition and networking.