Project

Low-Power RF Chipsets for Wireless, Embedded Sensing

Groups

This project explores the application of new commercial RF chipsets and research devices being developed at the MIT Microelectronics Laboratory to short-range, moderate-to-high bit-rate, ultra-low-power, minimally complex, channel-shared wireless communication for ubiquitously embedded smart sensor modules and lightweight, reconfigurable communication networks. A software radio base station is now being built to coordinate these sensor modules. This base station will subsample and digitize the received signals at the first IF. Such an early digitization allows the base station to have a flexible, reconfigurable architecture. Since most of the signal processing will be done in the digital domain, the same base station will work for different modulation schemes. Another part of this project is to capture currently evolving commercial technology (e.g., Bluetooth, minimal 802.11, and miscellaneous chip-based or hybrid RF transcievers), introducing them into our sensor packages as appropriate.