Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Research Advised by Professor Kristofer S.J. Pister

Custom Wireless Sensor Networks and the Tapeout Class

Daniel Lovell
2023
Fall 2023 BSAC Research Review Presentation View Presentation View Slides Project: BPN803 - Kristofer S.J. Pister Group

Titan Yuan

Graduate Student Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2027 (Anticipated)

Titan received his B.S. and M.S. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2019 and 2020, respectively, advised by Prof. Kris Pister. After graduating, he spent two years in industry working on radar embedded software and signal processing for autonomous vehicles. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in EECS, also advised by Prof. Kris Pister, with an interest in wireless sensor networks, RFICs, and RF/wireless sensing.

Yu-Chi Lin

Graduate Student Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2027 (Anticipated)

Yu-Chi Lin is a third-year Ph.D. student, working with Prof. Ali Niknejad and Prof. Kris Pister, at Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (...

Omar Alkendi

Undergraduate Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)
B.S. 2023 (Anticipated)

Alexander Alvara

Graduate Student Researcher
Mechanical Engineering
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Liwei Lin (Advisor)
Professor Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2024 (Anticipated)

Alexander Alvara is a 5th year Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering who earned his 3 BS degrees from UC Irvine '17 concurrently in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and materials science and engineering. Alexander is interested in extreme conditions applications and performance of MEMS devices as well as nanoscale materials engineering that investigates the interplay of materials with electromagnetism and light.

BPN987: Single-chip µV Precision ADC for SCµM-V

Yu-Chi Lin
Daniel Lovell
Ali M. Niknejad
Kristofer S.J. Pister
2023

We are developing a millimeter-square low-power wireless ADC capable of detecting and transmitting microvolt-level signals. This ADC offers potential for high-precision measurements in various domains, including biomedical, automotive, and IoT. The immediate objective of this project is to design a concurrent TMS-EEG-MRI system – a temporal and spatial imaging method that may unveil the intricacies of brain circuits. The high-precision ADC enables acquisition of EEG signals down to 10µV, while the wireless communication remains robust to heating and disturbance issues induced by MRI...

BPN915: Control of Microrobots with Reinforcement Learning

Yichen Liu
Zhongyu Li
Kesava Viswanadha
Rushil Desai
2023

Generating low-level robot controllers often requires manual parameters tuning and significant system knowledge, which can result in long design times for highly specialized controllers. Moreover, experiments for microrobot control in real life can be costly for reliability test, tune, and validate the controller design. To address the problem of rapidly generating low- level general controllers without domain knowledge, we propose using model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) trained in a simulated environment. We have been making progress on MBRL along two thrusts: modeling long-...

BPN956: Time-of-Flight Hardware for the Solar Probe ANalyzer for Ions (SPAN-Ion)

Omar Alkendi
2023

Monitoring and building our understanding of space weather is necessary to protect current and future astronauts and hardware, as well as further our understanding of its effects on atmospheric development and loss. This project has developed two radiation-hardened sensor frontends to measure the ion composition of the solar wind aboard the Solar Probe ANalyzer for Ions (SPAN-Ion). SPAN-Ion uses time-of-flight mass spectrometry to distinguish ions by their mass: charge ratios; the target architecture for future missions decreases mass and increases speed in exchange for several orders of...

BPN735: Walking Silicon Microrobots

Alexander Alvara
Yichen Liu
Daniel Lovell
Dang Le
2023

Our goal is to build a family of autonomous silicon robotic insects.


These robots use electrostatic actuators driving planar silicon linkages, all fabricated in the device layer of a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. By using electrostatic actuation, these legs have the advantage of being low power compared to other microrobot leg designs. This is key to granting the robot autonomy through low-power energy harvesting. The ultimate goal is to join these silicon legs with the Single Chip microMote (SCuM, BPN803) for computation and communication and a Zappy2 chip with solar cell...

BPN803: Single Chip Mote

Daniel Lovell
Titan Yuan
Yu-Chi Lin
2023

The Single-Chip Micro Mote (SCµM) is an integrated wireless sensor node that pushes the boundaries of system-on-chip integration. A single mote is intended to be fully self-contained and functional when supplied only with a power source, and the on-chip crystal-free radio is designed to comply with BLE and IEEE 802.15.4 wireless personal area network standards. In previous work, SCµM-3C was demonstrated to join an 802.15.4 mesh network running OpenWSN, transmit BLE beacon packets to a cell phone, and perform RF temperature compensation via both initial calibration and...