Prior to the start of this project, the investigators developed a novel RF-powered sensing and computing platform called the WISP that harvests the entirety of its operating power from RF signals emitted by RFID readers. They also developed a companion SDR (Software-Defined Radio) reader platform that sends RF signals to power and communicate with the WISPs using a power efficient communication technique known as backscatter. The hardware and software for both the WISPs and readers was open-sourced and made available to the research community. This proposal enhances that previously developed infrastructure, and makes it more widely available to the research community, by donating next generation, enhanced versions of the WISPs, readers, and software to qualified researchers. Compared to the first generation infrastructure, the enhanced infrastructure has improved read range, program memory, computing power, and programming abstractions.
This project facilitates a long-term transformation in which computing becomes more and more deeply connected to the physical world. This transformation can enable smarter living and working environments, better medical care, improved manufacturing and logistics, reduced energy usage and pollution, and other benefits. A fundamental difficulty has been how to power these physically-embedded microelectronic systems. Batteries limit devices lifetimes, size, weight, and form factor. However, improvements in the energy efficiency of microelectronics have recently made it possible to run embedded computers using only power harvested from RF signals. This proposal provides infrastructure to the research community to enable RF-powered computing research, and thus deeper embedding of computation in the physical world.
