Digital System Design for the Maryland Smart Dust Project
Project Director :
Associate Investigator :
Maryland DSPCAD Research Group, University of Maryland, College Park
Project Description
The Maryland Smart Dust Project was a
multi-year, interdisciplinary project at the University of Maryland,
College Park. The project was sponsored under the direction of the
Laboratory for Physical Sciences. The Maryland DSPCAD Research Group
("DSPCAD Group") was responsible for the Digital System Design thrust of
the project. The objective in this thrust was to develop efficient
design methods and energy optimization techniques for low power,
application-specific wireless sensor network (WSN) systems.
In
this project, the DSPCAD Group demonstrated that by applying its
dataflow based design methodologies, WSN applications can be optimized
and retargeted with high productivity and confidence to different
embedded platforms, including microcontroller-, FPGA-, and ASIC-based
platforms,. We also
demonstrated a novel application-specific
integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation for a WSN-based security
application. This ASIC solution provided significant power reduction
(approximately a 10X improvement) compared to related COTS (commercial
off-the-shelf) platforms.
WSNs often have limited hardware
resources and are deployed in areas that are difficult or impossible to
access by humans. In such environments, energy efficiency becomes a
major concern. Energy-efficient operation for advanced WSN systems
becomes especially challenging if the system must perform complex
computation and communication tasks. In this project, we also developed
a novel methodology called energy-driven partitioning (EDP). Our EDP
methodology determines strategic configurations for distributing
computational and communication tasks across WSN systems to optimize
energy efficiency. By applying our EDP methods, we have demonstrated
that the energy consumption of WSNs can be reduced by 50% or more
compared to conventional approaches for WSN application deployment.
System Design Flow
MCU-based Platform
FPGA-based Platform
ASIC-based Platform
Contact Information
For comments on the webpage, please contact Chung-Ching Shen