The goal of this project is to address this opportunity by introducing new design methodologies enabling operation at ultra-low supply voltages. This is in particular important for wireless devices operating on batteries or through energy harvesting.
The type of IoT node, whether it’s a biological implant, a minute flying drone or a sensor node for environmental monitoring, often need energy harvesters that due to physical size or other restrictions can only harvest little energy per cubic millimeter.
Using supply voltages below the absolute values of the threshold voltages of the transistors, subthreshold operation, has been regarded the most powerful technique to reduce overall power consumption. Full custom circuit building blocks must be designed to enable such low voltage operation, since it’s challenging to make them maintain functionalities under process-, voltage-, and temperature variations that integrated circuits are exposed to.
Subsystems of relevant functionalities may be modeled, like for example artificial neurons or
The master student will be part of a group of PhD students and Faculty within the NANO group at IFI having long experiences on related topics.