Asynchronous Design for Ubiquitous Computing

Computing on the 21 st century is rapidly moving from the personal computer model, into a ubiquitous configuration, where technology will weave into the fabric of everyday life. These ubiquitous or pervasive computing is enabled by Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Engineers deploy WSNs in a myriad applications ranging from implanted medical monitoring devices to industrial control systems. Node lifetime and throughput are crucial metrics in the design space. Previously , energy reduction at the cost of performance is a common engineering trade-off for mote microcontrollers. However, the increased application complexity requires greater computational power, while retaining a low-power envelope. In this thesis, we study the use of Quasi Delay-Insensitive (QDI) circuits to design a microcontroller that fits the WSN application space. All our architectural and circuit decisions keep the focal point on maximizing the sensor node lifetime and performance of a WSN node system. The reduced energy consumption and increased processing power enables more complex operations on collected data to be performed locally. However, even with the reduction of the use of energy-hungry communication systems, any data or computed results must be eventually transmitted wirelessly for remote collation. We study two of the main processing challenges a design engineering faces while transmitting data: serial interfaces to peripherals, and encryption of the data over an insecure link. Carlos Tadeo Ortega Otero was born in México City, México where he grew up. Carlos is the son of Rodolfo Ortega Mendoza, and Myrna Otero Berdon. His dad is a retired Electrical Engineer that worked for more than 35 years at the Mexican state-owned petroleum company: PEMEX. Carlos' mom is a homemaker. Carlos completed his primary and high school education at the Instituto Juventud del Estado de México. He received his first computer as a gift in the summer of 1992. Since then, he became passionate about the software and hardware of computer systems. The summer after the end of elementary school, he enrolled in a program to learn Basic, Visual Basic, databases and basic command line scripting using MS-DOS batch files. In the year 2000, he bought and installed Corel Linux. He graduated high school with honors in 2001. He began his undergraduate studies in Computer Engineering in 2006. Carlos' first contact with research was an invitation from Prof. Marcos de Alba Rosano to augment a cycle-accurate architectural simulator to give detailed power estimations of each pipeline stage of a superscalar Alpha microprocessor.sult …