RAMP: accelerating wireless sensor hardware design with a reconfigurable analog/mixed-signal platform

Abstract

The requirements of many wireless sensing applications approach, or even exceed, the limited hardware capabilities of energy-constrained sensing platforms. To achieve such demanding requirements, some sensing platforms have included low-power application-specific hardware---at the expense of generality---to pre-process the sensor data for reduction to only the relevant information. While this additional hardware can save power by reducing the activity of the microcontroller and radio, a unique hardware solution is required for each application, which presents an unrealistic burden in terms of design time, cost, and ease of integration. To diminish these burdens, we present a reconfigurable analog/mixed-signal sensing platform in this work. At the hardware-level, this platform consists of a reconfigurable integrated circuit containing many commonly used signal-processing blocks and circuit components that can be connected in any configuration. At the software level, this platform provides a framework for abstracting this underlying hardware. We demonstrate how to quickly develop new applications on this platform, ranging from standard sensor interfacing techniques to more complicated intelligent pre-processing and wake-up detection. We also demonstrate how to integrate this platform with commonly used wireless sensor nodes and embedded-system platforms.