Integrated Circuits and Systems Group

Dr. Thomas Schmid
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, August 17, 5:00pm, ACES 2.402

Hijacking Power and Bandwidth from the Mobile Phone’s Audio Interface

This talk will present our recent work on enabling pervasive personal sensing, focusing on HiJack, a system for stealing power and bandwidth from the mobile phone’s audio jack. HiJack enables a new tier of small and cheap phone-centric sensor peripherals that support plug-and-play operation. More broadly, we envision the mobile phone will become a portal for perpetually-powered and physically-embedded sensors. Our harvester delivers 7.4~mW to a load with 47% efficiency using components that cost $2.34 in 10K volume. Integrating the pieces, this talk will present a combined system for delivering data and power over audio, and demonstrate its use by turning an iPhone into an inexpensive oscilloscope.

Prof. Azadeh Davoodi
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Wednesday, August 18, 5:00pm, ACES 2.402

Automation Techniques for Post-silicon Debug of Timing Failures

The complexity of modern day electronic systems combined with nano-scale non-idealities have made “post-silicon” validation significantly cumbersome. At this stage few fabricated chips are verified for correct functionality in order to detect and fix the bugs which have escaped the design stage. The process has become time-consuming and expensive due to the costs of equipments and of (improved) silicon re-spins, the use of manual techniques, and the complicated nature of bugs in nano-scale technologies. Consequently, time-to-market and profit are directly at stake in many design domains.

One of the most challenging tasks in post-silicon validation is debugging for timing failures. Timing failures may be caused by factors such as (static) process variations and (transient) power droop. In this talk I will give an overview of our ongoing research towards automation of the debug process for timing failures. I will discuss our procedures for the following two cases (and mostly on the first case): 1) when the cause of timing failure is static process variations, and 2) when on-chip logic analyzers are used for capturing transient behavior and are intended to increase the “timing observability” inside the chip.

Prof. Byunghoo Jung
Purdue University
Tuesday, June 22, 11:00am, ACES 3.408

Ultra Wideband Transceiver for Indoor Location-aware Applications

Motivated by the enormous success of outdoor location tracking systems, significant attention has focused on wireless indoor positioning systems for many promising location-aware applications such as emergency management, asset tracking, inventory management, home automation, health monitoring, and sensor networks. Various types of wireless indoor positioning systems have been developed mostly based on WLAN, Bluetooth or ZigBee networks.

Unfortunately the typical ranging accuracy of the WLAN and WPAN based systems (about 2-3m in optimal conditions) is not enough for many projected indoor location-aware applications. To mitigate the limited ranging accuracy issue, a few proprietary ranging systems based on IR-UWB have been investigated. Although the IR-UWB based ranging systems have demonstrated better accuracy than WLAN and WPAN based systems, the universal compatibility issue, which is important for wide deployment and robust operation, has not been properly addressed. To overcome the problems of non-standardized approaches, a new low-rate WPAN standard, 802.15.4a, aiming <30cm indoor ranging accuracy has been launched. We will present an implementation example of an integrated transceiver (RF front-end + baseband) that is fully compatible with the standard. The implemented transceiver achieves <18cm ranging accuracy and -79dBm sensitivity, the best ever reported, demonstrating the feasibility of reliable and standardized indoor location tracking. The issues in the transceiver architecture design and the approaches for improving the ranging distance and accuracy will be discussed.