Events Calendar

EE-EP Seminar - Dina El-Damak, Friday, Feb. 26th at 2:00pm in EEB 132

Speaker: Dina El-Damak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Empowering the IoT: Energy Scavenging and Ultra-low Power Processing

Abstract: The internet of things (IoT) is driving a new computing era by enabling the wireless connectivity of nearly everything we use. Vehicles, appliances, civil- engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, livestock and even our own bodies will have embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. The creativity in this new era of the IoT is boundless, with amazing potential to immensely improve human life. Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensing systems that can run for months without battery changes - or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge. Moreover, the flexibility and the miniaturization of such systems are highly desirable to ease their integration with various structures. Thus, the future growth of the IoT will be contingent upon innovations in ultra- low power circuit design techniques, system architecture, as well as novel material technologies.
In the first part of this talk, I will present the design of a power management IC that can operate efficiently with input power in the range of 10 nW to 1uW with 3.2nW quiescent power consumption for energy harvesting applications. The asynchronous architecture, subthreshold operation, power-gating and dynamic pulse-width control enabled a peak efficiency greater than 80%. In the second part of the talk, I will show the results of an integrated power management IC using on-chip ferroelectric capacitors for dynamic voltage scaling. The integration of ferroelectric materials with silicon CMOS technology allowed the design of highly efficient switched capacitor DC- DC converter with a peak efficiency of 93%. In the last part of the talk, I will focus on circuit design using the flexible Molybdenum Disulfide (MoS2 ) - one of the emerging two-dimensional materials. I will touch upon our system design flow - which is validated by the design and testing of various combinational logic and sequential circuits. Measurement results demonstrating fully-functional prototypes will be shown and future application opportunities will be discussed.

Biography: Dina El-Damak received the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engi- neering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012 and 2015 respectively, and the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. She is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group at MIT working under the supervision of Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan. Dr. El-Damak was the recipient of Texas Instruments Graduate Woman's Fellowship for leadership in microelectronics for the academic years 2012-2013 and 2013-2014. Her research interests include energy harvesting, power management circuits and ultra-low power biomedical systems.

Host: EE-Electrophysics

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Marilyn Poplawski