Ultra-low Power Chip Research Articles

Simple real-time QRS detector with the MaMeMi filter

Detection of QRS complexes in ECG signals is required to determine heart rate, and it is an important step in the study of cardiac disorders. ECG signals are usually affected by noise of low and high frequency. To improve the accuracy of QRS detectors several methods have been proposed to filter out the noise and detect the characteristic pattern of QRS complex. Most of the existing methods are at a disadvantage from relatively high computational complexity or high resource needs making them less optimized for its implementation on portable embedded systems, wearable devices or ultra-low power chips. We present a new method to detect the QRS signal in a simple way with minimal computational cost and resource needs using a novel non-linear filter.

Design of Voice Control System for Smart Home Based on STM32

The application of embedded speech recognition technology in the smart home is researched, combining of the Internet of Things, the voice control system for smart home has been designed. The core processor chooses the high-performance Cortex-M4 MCU STM32F407VGT6 produced by STMicroelectronics. The system contains a hardware unit based on LD3320 for speaker-independent speech recognition. RF wireless communication uses ultra-low power chip CC1101 and GSM employ SIM900A. Real-time operating system FreeRTOS is used for multitask scheduling and the operation of household devices. The practical application verifies that this voice control system practicably can identify voice commands quickly and accurately, complete the control actions primely, has a wide application prospect.

System-On-Mud: Ultra-Low Power Oceanic Sensing Platform Powered by Small-Scale Benthic Microbial Fuel Cells

A self-sustainable sensing platform powered entirely by small-scale benthic microbial fuel cells (MFCs) for oceanic sensing applications is presented. An ultra-low power chip featuring an ARM Cortex-M0 processor, 3 kB of SRAM, and power management unit (PMU) is designed to consume 11 nW in sleep mode for perpetual sensing operation. The PMU includes a switched-capacitor DC/DC converter designed for efficient energy harvesting and step-down conversion for a wide range of input and output power. A small-scale MFC with 21.3 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> anode surface area was connected to the PMU to charge a thin-film battery of 1 mAh capacity. A 49.3-hour long-term experiment with 8-min sleep interval and 1-s wake-up time demonstrated the sustainability of system-on-mud concept. During sleep mode operation, the system charges the 4 V battery at 380 nA from the micro-MFC generating 5.4 μW of power, which allows up to 20 mA of active mode current with net energy neutrality.

A Portable and High-Resolution System for Sleep Apnea Monitoring

As a major indicator of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome (OSAS) in clinical diagnosis, the monitoring of sleep apnea plays an important role in medical treatments of modern society. This paper proposes a portable sleep apnea monitoring system, which is of high-precision and low-power consumption, and capable of performing the long-term monitoring of OSAS patients multiple physiological parameters in clinical treatments. In the system, the AC modulated detection is adopted, and low amplification ratios are utilized in forestage and a high-resolution AD converter is designed in post-stages. Thus, it is able to acquire, analyze, and process physiological signals in real-time. In addition, ultralow-power chips are used in control system to save the power consumption. The experimental results show that our monitoring system has the strengths of high stability, low-power consumption (peak current90mA), and strong anti-interference ability, which demonstrates the potential in practical applications.

Spin-based computing may herald new era of ultra low power chips

An exotic processor that handles information in the form of waves rather than current could lead to ultra-low power chips