Wireless, RF & Smart Dust

Research that includes:

  • Tuneable RF components: capacitors, inductors, transformers
  • RF microrelays
  • High frequency MEMS resonators: devices, structures, and processes

BPN953: Long-Term Drift of MEMS-Based Oscillators

Kevin H. Zheng
Xintian Liu
Qiutong Jin
2025

This project seeks to characterize and de-mystify mechanisms behind long-term drift in MEMS-based oscillators, including ones employing various sustaining amplifiers and referenced to resonators constructed in a variety of materials, including silicon, polysilicon, AlN, diamond, and ruthenium. A measurement apparatus that suppresses unwanted sources of drift, e.g., temperature, to better focus on resonator and oscillator long-term drift will be instrumental to success and will likely entail the use of double or triple ovens, as well as environment resistant circuit design.

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BPN828: Zero Quiescent Power Microelectromechanical Receiver

William Dong
Kevin H. Zheng
Qiutong Jin
2025

This project aims to explore and demonstrate a mostly mechanical receiver capable of listening signals within low-frequency and very-low-frequency range. The receiver is designed to consume zero power at standby and consume very little power (nW) only when receiving valid bits.

Project currently funded by: Member Fees

BPN976: Fully-Integrated MEMS-Based Wireless Receiver

Kevin H. Zheng
Xintian Liu
Qiutong Jin
2025

Recent MEMS process advancements from our group have enabled a class of low-temperature, thin-film ruthenium RF filters that can be processed directly on top of CMOS wafers. This work seeks to demonstrate the first low-IF receiver with fully-integrated MEMS-based RF channel-select filters, which permits low power applications in high-sensitivity, narrow-band software-defined communications and cognitive radio.

Project suspended: 08/21/2025

BPNX1005: Scalable SiPh-based Optical Interconnects for Qubit Control

Wei-Yu Lin
2025

Current quantum processor units (QPUs) have achieved over 1,000 qubits (e.g., IBM's Condor processor). However, scaling quantum platforms toward 1 million qubits demands breakthroughs in quantum hardware, connectivity, error correction, and system architecture. To address the scalability of quantum interconnects, Cryo-CMOS control and readout circuits have demonstrated efficacy in reducing wiring complexity, latency, and thermal loads. However, the CMOS circuits limit the active heat load to 1–2 mW/qubit, imposing a limit of approximately 1,000 qubits in state-of-the-art dilution...

BPNX1047: Single-Chip CMOS+X Piezoelectric Test Vehicle for Wireless IoT

Daniel Lovell
Benjamin Cook
Borivoje Nikolić
Jessica Boles
2025

This project aims to develop a 130 nm mixed-signal CMOS system-on-chip (SoC) Test Vehicle that can subsequently be combined with thin-film piezoelectric materials to create an integrated, single-chip wireless IoT platform. The SoC, which includes a RISC-V microprocessor, a Bluetooth Low-Energy radio, and sensor interface electronics, is designed for minimal power consumption and wide operating voltage range. In addition to these core functions, the CMOS Test Vehicle will feature specialized interface circuits - including a sustaining amplifier for piezoelectric timing oscillators, a...

BPN803: Single Chip Mote

Daniel Lovell
Titan Yuan
Yu-Chi Lin
Amanda Jung
Kelly Tou
2025

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 calibration-free...

BPNX1008: Dual-Path Noise Elimination (DuNE): A Noise-Cancellation Technique for Aptamer-Based Electrochemical Sensors

Wei Foo
2025

We have previously demonstrated electrochemical circuits for measuring the concentration of various biomolecules and drugs using structure-switching aptamers. Structure-switching aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids that can be sequenced to exhibit conformational changes when bound to specific biomolecules. By conjugating aptamers with a redox reporter, voltammetry or amperometry-based measurements can be applied and signals in the nano to pico-amp scale can be captured using transimpedance amplifiers (TIA). Because the signals of interest are very small, noise-cancellation...

BPN990: Anti-Drone Radar-Guided Micromissiles

Titan Yuan
Daniel Lovell
Carson Spoo
Cedric Murphy
Jenna Dickman
Asa Garner
Eric Yang
2025

Since drones can be flown remotely or autonomously and can navigate dangerous environments without any risk to human operators, they are attractive for military applications, including surveillance, reconnaissance, and combat missions. At the same time, enemy drones pose a growing serious threat to civilians and soldiers. Current anti-drone warfare is either inaccurate, expensive, or large in size, so this project aims to build a low-cost, crayon-sized radar-guided microrocket to target drones up to 100 meters away.

To effectively and tractably counter hundreds of threats, we...

Qiutong Jin

Graduate Student Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Clark T.-C. Nguyen (Advisor)
Ph.D. 2025

Qiutong Jin received B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Iowa in 2019. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in MEMS in EECS at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Clark Nguyen and will graduate in May 2025.

Fall 2023 Research Review Presenter


Fully Balanced Differential Micromechanical Resonator Reference Oscillator

Kevin H. Zheng
Xintian Liu
Alper Ozgurluk
Clark T.-C. Nguyen
2025

A 61-MHz MEMS-based low-phase noise reference oscillator comprising a micromechanical capacitive-gap-transduced polysilicon wine-glass disk resonator and a custom fully balanced differential transimpedance amplifier (TIA) integrated circuit in 0.18-µm CMOS achieves a 5-dB phase noise figure of merit (FoM) improvement over a comparable single-ended reference oscillator [1]. Key to this improvement is fully balanced differential operation of both the resonator and the sustaining amplifier, which rejects not only common mode circuit and supply noise, but also resonator DC-bias (VP) noise. As...