Matteo Rinaldi, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, director of the Kostas Nanotechnology Laboratory, and director of Northeastern SMART, gave the June 2022 MIT.nano Seminar on near-zero power integrated microsystems for the IoT.
ABSTRACT
As a consequence of the internet-of-things revolution, the number of connected devices worldwide is expected to increase to 50-200 billion. To maintain such a large network, there is a need for wireless sensors with dimensions and power consumption that are orders of magnitude smaller than the state-of-the-art. Energy is the key challenge. Batteries have limited capacity, and existing sensors are not “smart” enough to identify targets of interest. Therefore, they consume power continuously to monitor the environment, even when there is no relevant data to be detected.
This talk presents a new class of zero-power microsystems that fundamentally break this paradigm, remaining dormant, with zero-power consumption, until awakened by a specific physical signature associated with an event of interest.
In particular, Rinaldi demonstrates infrared digitizing sensors that consist of plasmonically-enhanced micromechanical photoswitches (PMPs) that selectively harvest the impinging electromagnetic energy in design-defined spectral bands of interest and use it to create, mechanically, a conducting channel between two electrical contacts, without the need for any additional power source. Such a passive IR digitizer is capable of producing a wake-up bit when exposed to a specific IR spectral signature associated to a target of interest (such as the exhaust plume of a car, a forest fire, or a human body) while rejecting background interference. The capability of these zero-power sensors of consuming power only when useful information is present results in a nearly unlimited duration of operation, with a groundbreaking impact on the proliferation of the IoT.
BIOGRAPHY
Matteo Rinaldi is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University, director of the Kostas Nanotechnology Laboratory, and director of Northeastern SMART a university research center that, by fostering partnership between university, industry, and government stakeholders, focuses on the discovery, pilot manufacturing, and rapid transition of new micro and nano systems technologies that are foundational for emerging paradigms like zero-power sensing, 5G/6G communications, artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and nanomedicine.
Dr. Rinaldi received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in December 2010. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, and he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University as an assistant professor in January 2012. Dr. Rinaldi’s group has been actively working on experimental research topics and practical applications to ultra-low power MEMS/NEMS sensors (infrared, magnetic, chemical, and biological), plasmonic micro and nano electromechanical devices, medical micro systems and implantable micro devices for intra-body networks, reconfigurable radio frequency devices and systems, phase change material switches, and 2D material-enabled micro and nano mechanical devices.
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The MIT.nano Seminar Series takes place monthly during the academic year. It is organized by Farnaz Niroui, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) at MIT.
See upcoming talks at mitnano.mit.edu/mitnano-seminar-series.