Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Wireless sensor networks provide an opportunity to improve performance in areas ranging from energy efficiency to industrial processes to scientific research. Many applications require awareness of sensor location, but autonomously determining device location has proven to be challenging. This localization problem can be divided into two parts: measuring relationships between nodes, and then using these relationships to estimate location. Most work on the first part has measured the RF received signal strength as a surrogate for range resulting in poor location accuracy. Several other...

Brain-controlled prostheses have the potential to improve the quality of life of a large num- ber of paralyzed persons by allowing them to control prosthetic limbs simply by thought. An essential requirement for natural use of such neural prostheses is that the user should be provided with somatosensory feedback from the artificial limb. This can be achieved by electrically stimulating small populations of neurons in the cortex; a process known as cor- tical microstimulation. This dissertation describes the development of novel technologies for experimental neuroscience and their use...

Radios available today are designed to be high performance devices. These radios require careful design by experienced and skilled RF IC designers, more expensive RF processes, and large chip areas for RF passives. The resulting cost of these devices is at the dollar level without the off chip components, and the careful design required makes integration of these radios with other circuits (microprocessors, sensors, etc) an expensive proposition. We believe that radios that require limited design skills while still having good performance will enable widespread use of wireless...