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THE DUST FLIES

by Tom Cantrell

Start ı It's a Small World ı Cosmic COTS Motes ı That's Kode with a "K" ı Dust Buster ı Down and Dirty ı Sources and PDF

ITıS A SMALL WORLD

Enter the Berkeley Smart Dust crew. With the requisite DARPA funding, they are getting down and dirty with embedded. Actually, the Smart Dust project proper is suitably blue sky, but more from a pragmatic than theoretical perspective (see Figure 1).

High-end research is struggling with the best way to churn through mountains of data and miles of networks with huge chips. By contrast, the Smart Dust challenge is to come up with the tiniest gadget that can do something useful. Ultimately, the goal of shrinking everything (processing, sensing, communication, power) onto a single chip calls for fundamental advances that will combine the capabilities of digital, analog, optical, MEMS, and so forth in a single cubic millimeter.

Envisioned applications are no less like science fiction. [1] Take, for example, the possibility of seeding forests with a layer of dust to instantly detect and pinpoint the start of a forest fire. Everything you own will have a tiny ID tag thatıll scream over the radio if itıs stolen. A speck of dust on each fingernail will turn any flat surface into a virtual keyboard. (And, I know just what gesture Iım going to map to Ctrl + Alt + Delete.)

The good news is Iım quite sure the Smart Dust folks will ultimately deliver breakthroughs in beyond-PC silicon enabling all manner of yet unforeseen applications. The bad news, at least until recently, was that there was little an average engineer could do beyond attending a conference or reading a paper while, pardon the pun, waiting for the dust to settle.

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