Wireless, RF & Smart Dust

Research that includes:

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

BPN709: Tunable & Switchable Micromechanical RF Filters

Lingqi Wu
2015

This project aims to explore the use of on-chip capacitively transduced micromechanical resonators to realize RF filters with substantial size and performance advantages. With their extremely high quality factor in UHF range and strong coupling coefficient enabled by nanometer electrode-to-resonator gap spacings, capacitive-gap transduced micromechanical resonators should be able to realize reconfigurable RF channel select filters for future cognitive radio applications.

Project end date: 08/25/15

BPN683: OpenWSN: A Standards-Based Low-Power Wireless Development Environment

Nicola Accettura
2015

The OpenWSN project is an open-source implementation of a fully standards-based protocol stack for capillary networks, rooted in the new IEEE802.15.4e Time Synchronized Channel Hopping standard. The novel IETF 6TiSCH protocols make IEEE802.15.4e TSCH perfectly interfaced with well-known Internet-of-Things IETF standards, such as 6LoWPAN, RPL and CoAP, thus enabling ultra-low power and highly reliable mesh networks which are fully integrated into the Internet. The resulting protocol stack will be cornerstone to the upcoming Machine-to-Machine revolution. OpenWSN is ported to numerous...

BPN676: Q-Boosted Optomechanical Oscillators

Turker Beyazoglu
Tristan Rocheleau
2015

This project aims to demonstrate Radiation Pressure driven Optomechanical Oscillators (RP-OMOs) with low phase noise and low power operation suitable for various applications in optical and RF communications. In particular, chip scale atomic clocks with low power consumption can be realized by replacing its power-hungry quartz-based microwave synthesizer with the proposed RP-OMO structure. The Q-boosted RP-OMO design approach of this work makes it possible to optimize both optical and mechanical design to simultaneously reduce the phase noise and threshold power of these oscillators...

BPN789: Reconfigurable, Wearable Sensors to Enable Long-Duration Circadian Biomedical Studies

David C. Burnett
2016

The last 10 years have seen the emergence of wearable personal health tracking devices as a mainstream industry; however, they remain limited by battery lifetime, specific sensor selection, and a market motivated by a focus on short- term fitness metrics (e.g., steps/day). This hampers the development of a potentially much broader application area based on optimization around biomedical theory for long- term diagnostic discovery. As new biometric sensors come online, the ideal platform enabling the gathering of long-term diagnostic data would have the built-in extensibility to allow...

BPN767: MEMS-Based Tunable Channel-Selecting Super-Regenerative RF Transceivers

Tristan Rocheleau
Thura Lin Naing
2015

This project aims to achieve low-power micromechanical-based tunable RF channel-selecting transceivers.

Project end date: 02/01/16

BPN392: Mobile Airborne Particulate Matter Monitor for Cellular Deployment

Troy Cados
Omid Mahdavipour
2016

This project involves optimization of a portable MEMS-based instrument that quantifies and speciates fine airborne particulate matter concentrations of such substances as diesel engine exhaust, environmental tobacco smoke, and wood smoke. The goal of the project is integration with and interfacing of the instrument to a cellular telephone for mobile monitoring.

Project end date: 05/10/16

BPN540: Temperature-Stable Micromechanical Resonators and Filters

Alper Ozgurluk
2017

This project aims to suppress temperature-induced frequency shift in high frequency micromechanical resonators targeted for channel-select filter and oscillator applications. A novel electrical stiffness design technique is utilized to compensate for thermal drift, in which a temperature-dependent electrical stiffness counteracts the resonator’s intrinsic dependence on temperature caused mainly by Young’s modulus temperature dependence.

Project end date: 08/14/17

BPN854: Wearable Ultrasound System for Chronic Neural Recording

Joshua E. Kay
2017

Chronic monitoring of nerve activity with minimally invasive medical devices creates broad opportunities from therapeutic treatments to human augmentation. These closed-looped neural recording and modulation systems require small, low power wearable devices to enable freely moving subjects while still allowing real- time processing of recorded data. An ultrasonic backscatter system called Neural Dust (ND) demonstrated ultrasound's increased power efficiency over electromagnetic (EM) energy for sub-mm scale implantable devices used for wireless electrophysiological neural recording....

BPN701: Bridged Micromechanical Filters

Jalal Naghsh Nilchi
2017

The overall project aims to explore the use of bridging between non-adjacent resonators to generate loss poles in the filter response toward better filter shape factor, sharper passband- to-stopband roll-off and better stopband rejection.

Project end date: 12/15/17

BPN900: Wireless neural sensors: Robust ultrasonic backscatter communication in the brain

David K. Piech
2018

Brain-machine interfaces provide an artificial conduit to send information to and from the brain, and modulate activity in the brain. These systems have shown great promise in clinical, scientific, and human-computer interaction contexts, but the low reward/risk ratio of today’s invasive neural interfaces has limited their use to an extremely niche clinical patient population. It has been shown that ultrasonic backscatter communication can enable the sensing and stimulation of neural activity with extremely small wireless implants, which can both improve performance and reduce risk....