Designing Reliable Transient Applications

State-of-the-art wireless sensor systems are typically performanceconstrained, battery-based devices which can, at most, reach selfsustainability using energy harvesting and aggressive duty-cycling. In certain scenarios, however, the energy availability is such that no large scale storage device is necessary to fulfill application requirements. Transient systems, which operate in an energy proportional way, are good candidates for such applications because they can reduce both the transducer area and storage device required for functional correctness, thus minimizing the systems cost and form factor. Designing transient systems which guarantee optimal program progress and electrical efficiency requires novel hardwaresoftware design technique to address specific challenges. By using an Energy Management Unit (EMU), designers can abstract away transducer specifics and still guarantee maximum power transfer between the source/EMU and EMU/load.