Transient Computing Systems
Project Description
Energy harvesting is generally seen to be the key to power cyber-physical systems in a low-cost, long term, efficient manner. However, harvesting has traditionally been coupled with large energy storage devices to mitigate the effects of the source’s variability. Large energy storage device have many drawbacks: form factor, self discharge rate, limited charge cycles and hazardous materials.
An emerging class of transiently powered systems avoids these issue by performing computation only as a function of the harvested energy, thus minimizing the expensive and obtrusive storage element. The energy buffer elements in these systems are much smaller, efficient and have virtually unlimited charge cycles. However, this new paradigm requires rethinking traditional cyber-physical systems at both the hardware and software levels.
At TEC, we are researching various aspects of transient systems including hardware design, power management, application development, scheduling and communication.
The external pageTransient Computing Systemscall_made project is financed by the external pageSwiss National Science Foundationcall_made.
Publications
A selection of publications related to the Transiet Computing Systems are listed below. For a more extensive list and links to the documents, please check our publication database.
- A. Gomez, L. Sigrist, T. Schalch, L. Benini, and L. Thiele, “Efficient, Long-Term Logging of Rich Data Sensors using Transient Sensor Nodes,” ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 2017.
- L. Sigrist, A. Gomez, R. Lim, S. Lippuner, M. Leubin, and L. Thiele, “Measurement and Validation of Energy Harvesting IoT Devices,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe, 2017.
- M. Thielen, L. Sigrist, M. Magno, C. Hierold, and L. Benini, “Human Body Heat for Powering Wearable Devices: From Thermal Energy to Application,” Energy Conversion and Management, vol. 131, pp. 44–54, 2017.
- A. Gomez, L. Sigrist, T. Schalch, L. Benini, and L. Thiele, “Wearable, Energy-Opportunistic Vision Sensing for Walking Speed Estimation,” in Sensors Applications Symposium, 2017.
- A. Gomez, L. Sigrist, M. Magno, L. Benini, and L. Thiele, “Dynamic Energy Burst Scaling for Transiently Powered Systems,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe, 2016, pp. 349–354.