AVS 66th International Symposium & Exhibition
    MEMS and NEMS Group Tuesday Sessions
       Session MN-TuM

Invited Paper MN-TuM1
Near-Zero Power Integrated Microsystems for the IoT

Tuesday, October 22, 2019, 8:00 am, Room A210

Session: MEMS, BioMEMS, and MEMS for Energy: Processes, Materials, and Devices II
Presenter: Zhenyun Qian,
Authors: M. Rinaldi, Northeastern University
Z. Qian,
Correspondent: Click to Email
The recent advancements in terms of sensor miniaturization, low power consumption and low cost allow envisioning a new era for sensing in which the data collected from multiple individual smart sensor systems are combined to get information about the environment that is more accurate and reliable than the individual sensor data. By leveraging such sensor fusion, it will be possible to acquire complete and accurate information about the context in which human beings live, which has huge potential for the development of the Internet of Things (IoT). To address the growing demand of such large wireless sensor networks, there is a need for wireless sensors with dimensions and power consumption that are orders of magnitude smaller than the state-of-the-art. Energy is the key challenge. Batteries have limited capacity, and existing sensors are not “smart” enough to identify targets of interest. Therefore, they consume power continuously to monitor the environment even when there is no relevant data to be detected. This talk presents a new class of zero-power microsystems that fundamentally brake this paradigm, remaining dormant, with zero-power consumption, until awakened by a specific physical signature associated with an event of interest. In particular, a zero-power infrared (IR) digitizing sensor microsystem consisting of plasmonically-enhanced micromechanical photoswitches is presented. Such a passive IR digitizer is capable of producing a wake-up bit when exposed to a specific IR spectral signature associated to a target of interest (such as the exhaust plume of a car, a forest fire, or a human body) while rejecting background interference. The capability of these zero-power sensors of consuming power only when useful information is present results in a nearly unlimited duration of operation, with a groundbreaking impact on the proliferation of the IoT.