These tiny chips, smaller than a grain of rice, operate on low power and can improve communication range for IoT devices. (Image Credit: David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering)
A new ultra-low-power Wi-Fi radio placed inside a tiny chip could pave the way for more portable, fully wireless smart home setups, lower power wearables, and battery-less smart devices. The chips enable Internet of Things devices to communicate with Wi-Fi networks using 5,000 times less power than traditional Wi-Fi radios. Developed by a team of electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego, the chips will be showcased at the ISSCC 2020 conference on February 16 to 20th in San Francisco.
The device uses up just 28 microwatts of power while transmitting data at 2 megabits per second over a range of 21 meters.
“You can connect your phone, your smart devices, even small cameras or various sensors to this chip, and it can directly send data from these devices to a Wi-Fi access point near you. You don’t need to buy anything else. And it could last for years on a single coin cell battery,” said Dinesh Bharadia, Professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Standard Wi-Fi radios generally use up hundreds of milliwatts of power just to connect IoT devices with Wi-Fi transceivers. This usually requires Wi-Fi compatible devices to run on large batteries or other external power sources and will need to be recharged often.
“This Wi-Fi radio is low enough power that we can now start thinking about new application spaces where you no longer need to plug IoT devices into the wall. This could unleash smaller, fully wireless IoT setups,” said UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Patrick Mercier.
By transmitting data using a technique known as backscattering, the Wi-Fi radio has a very low power consumption. It’s capable of doing this by taking WiFi signals from a nearby device or Wi-Fi access point, modifying the signals and encoding its own data on them. Afterward, it sends the newly encoded signals onto a separate Wi-Fi channel to another access point or device.
The team accomplished this by building in a wake-up receiver, which uses up only 3 microwatts of power while in low-power sleep mode. This receiver activates the Wi-Fi radio when it needs to communicate with Wi-Fi signals even when it’s in sleep mode.
The team’s improvements to the technology also use a custom integrated circuit that allows a more efficient and smaller system. This also allows their WiFi radio to run over a longer range, making it suitable for use in a smart home. Mercier stated, “Here, we demonstrate the first pragmatic chip design that can actually be deployed in a small, low-power device.”
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