Committee:

Dr. Jennifer Hasler, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Omer Inan, ECE

Dr. Fatih Sarioglu, ECE

Dr. Asif Khan, ECE

Dr. Bradley Minch, Olin College

Abstract:

The objective of this research is to investigate low-power mixed-signal computation techniques for real time applications. The need for real time processing, with rise of wearable devices, creates a strong drive for researching and developing methods and system architectures which reduces the power consumption. By performing the computation locally near the sensor node one can increase the energy efficiency of such devices by reducing the need for communication to the cloud. Analog computation has shown promising results in the space by significantly reducing the power consumption by processing the signal in analog without having to convert it into digital domain. Further, by adding programmability and configurability to analog, the effects of process, voltage and temperature variations could be reduced significantly.