Transient Computing Systems (2015 - 2018)
Energy harvesting is generally seen to be the key to power cyber-physical systems in a low-cost, long term, efficient manner. However, harvesting has traditionally been coupled with large energy storage devices to mitigate the effects of the source’s variability. This design has drawbacks of limited system lifetime due to battery degradation, high leakage power, high maintenance etc.
An emerging class of transiently powered systems avoids these issue by performing computation only as a function of the harvested energy, minimizing the expensive and obtrusive storage element. The energy storage elements in these systems are much smaller, efficient and have large lifetimes. However, this new task execution paradigm requires redesign/reevaluation of the system at several levels.
The Digital Circuits and Systems Group is involved in the design of actual prototypes for transient computing.
Links:
- Project page of our project partner the Computer Engineering Group of TIK