A (6x3)cm Self-Contained Energy-Scavenging Wireless Sensor Network Node

The Quark node combines off-the-shelf components and two custom CMOS chips to implement a PicoRadio wireless sensor-network node that runs solely from energy scavenged from the environment. The node supports a >10m indoor transmission range with automatic multi-hop routing for longer distances. Node functionality includes a 50kbps on-off keyed physical layer, a cycled-receiver MAC algorithm with dynamic ID assignment, a directed flooding network routing algorithm, and a Hop-TERRAIN location computation algorithm. The first custom die is a 0.13μm CMOS digital processor for the baseband, data-link, network, and application layers of the protocol stack. The second custom die is a 1.9GHz two-channel transceiver designed in 0.13μm CMOS for peer-to-peer communication. The 1.9GHz antenna is implemented as a board trace to reduce node cost. Keywords— Wireless sensor networks, Network connectivity chips, Low-power design, VLSI, Energy-scavenging, Networking Algorithms, Locationing