The Path Towards Ambient IoT

Driven by technology scaling and architecture advances, power consumption for sensing, data processing, and wireless communication in an IoT node has dropped drastically over the last two decades. This has enabled tremendous growth in the number of deployed sensors throughout a wide range of applications. Today, the vast majority of these nodes are battery powered, which limits the market growth. To obtain the full benefit of remote sensing, battery-free IoT nodes must become commercially viable in more applications. The presentation will first cover the power reduction trends in sensing, processing, and communication. Benefits have been obtained from technology scaling, new circuit architectures, moving data processing to the edge, and wireless system advances. Next, the state-of-the-art in energy harvesting will be shown, comparing power density and cost. Finally, the presentation will cover further power reduction techniques which are active research topics. On the communication side, this includes wake-up radios and backscattering. For data analysis, ML accelerators are used to process data locally to make accurate autonomous decisions. Together, these innovations will enable next-generation sensing systems that can operate autonomously without the limitations of traditional power sources.