Subject: Dust Inc. http://www.dust-inc.com/ http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2003/0901/107.html E-Gang Sensing Opportunity Quentin Hardy, 09.01.03 Kris Pister, CEO, Dust Inc. Wireless has always had size problems: Phones were the size of bricks; base station antennas still cause zoning problems. To Kris Pister, a cubic inch is outsize. "I could put a cell phone in an earring or a tongue stud," says the 39-year-old professor-turned- entrepreneur. Fortunately, he instead builds vast wireless networks of self- organizing, millimeter-size sensors. Within a few years his little chips may help change everything from the cost of construction to how we fight forest fires--even the way we communicate. Pister is founder and chief executive of Dust Inc., a Berkeley, Calif. firm he formed in January while on leave from the town's university. One clients is the Department of Defense, which is eyeing the work for its potential in surveillance and security. He has worked in this field for 14 years. The son of a Berkeley civil engineering professor, Pister first built tiny self-propelled robots, such as a mechanical fly that could take wing and transmit data. While looking for research funding, he realized the mobility was better handled by creating networks. "I did better if I just tore the wings off the bugs," he says. In his new scheme, each Smart Dust sensor (which Pister calls a "mote") is about the size of a character in this sentence. It contains a device that measures such things as temperature, motion and light intensity, and it sports a miniature antenna and a radio with a range of 10 to 50 meters. Another mote inside that range picks up the first one's signal and grabs its data, adding readings of its own and passing the package along to a third mote. The data eventually move to a base station 5 inches tall, from where the info is sent to a PC or onto a wireless network. In his lab Pister has scaled his network to some 800 motes sending error-free data every two seconds. He figures one network could easily include 10,000 motes, covering 9 square miles. Honeywell is testing an early version of Smart Dust in grocery stores, where a dozen sensors monitor refrigeration units to anticipate breakdowns. Other possible uses include scattering motes across a forest floor so firefighters can spot a fire when it has burned just a few trees. You could leave your friends personal notes or restaurant reviews by dropping message chips that come alive when your friends' sensors come into range. In a test for the military, Pister dropped eight sensors (with clocks, motion detectors and electronic compasses) from an airplane. They self-organized and successfully determined the direction, speed and size of a series of armored vehicles. "One year from now I'll have 100,000 of these," he says, nudging his electronic dot. "In three years there will be millions." Pister's current sensors are the size of matchbooks and cost $50 to $100 apiece, sold in groups of up to 255. He is working with a Taiwanese chip foundry on commercial versions that he figures will start at $5 to $10 apiece, then come down. It isn't yet clear whether 10,000 motes can handle a lot of traffic without big power consumption and backlog problems. And Pister toils in a crowd. Intel Corp. has funded a company called Crossbow Technology, and companies such as Millennial Net and Ember also are pursuing wireless sensor networks. "But they all suffer from 'mote creep,'" says Pister. "They want to build them just a little bigger, with just a few more features. I'm taking the risk that we can keep this really small, really simple--and it will work." ******************************* http://tinyurl.com/3a2xy Smart Dust Mighty motes for medicine, manufacturing, the military and more. Future Watch by Thomas Hoffman MARCH 24, 2003 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - Picture being able to scatter hundreds of tiny sensors around a building to monitor temperature or humidity. Or deploying, like pixie dust, a network of minuscule, remote sensor chips to track enemy movements in a military operation. "Smart dust" devices are tiny wireless microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) that can detect everything from light to vibrations. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in silicon and fabrication techniques, these "motes" could eventually be the size of a grain of sand, though each would contain sensors, computing circuits, bidirectional wireless communications technology and a power supply. Motes would gather scads of data, run computations and communicate that information using two-way band radio between motes at distances approaching 1,000 feet. Potential commercial applications are varied, ranging from catching manufacturing defects by sensing out-of-range vibrations in industrial equipment to tracking patient movements in a hospital room. Design Impasse Still, for all the promise, there are a number of technical obstacles to widespread commercial adoption. For instance, researchers are wrestling with design challenges in fusing MEMS and electronics onto a single chip, says Gary Fedder, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Fedder, a co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's MEMS Laboratory, has been trying to tackle these development issues through new fabrication and design techniques, but he acknowledges that the lab has quite a bit of work ahead of it. "The paradigm has been to have a single engineer be the champion of these systems and fuse it all together to make a [single] chip. That requires a superhuman effort," says Fedder. The lab has been developing design tool technology to aid the engineers who may ultimately design these kinds of systems, he says. What makes all this effort worthwhile is a growing feeling among researchers that these technologies may eventually have a huge impact on society. That also helps explain why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began funding aspects of this work at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. The goal for researchers is to get these chips down to 1mm on a side. Current motes are about 5mm, says Kristofer Pister, professor of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, who's been working with smart dust since 1997. Pister is on sabbatical from the university until early 2004 at Dust Inc., a Berkeley-based developer of peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks. Dust's charter is to give developers hardware and software interfaces "that are stable, reliable and low cost," he says. The cost of motes has been dropping steadily. Prices range from $50 to $100 each today, and Pister anticipates that they will fall to $1 within five years. He sees a plethora of potential commercial applications for smart dust, including serving as traffic sensors in congested urban areas and monitoring the power consumption of household appliances to determine whether they're operating at peak efficiency. Pister and others are quick to point out that the size of these micromachines presents thorny power supply challenges. Ideally, researchers and commercial contractors want to be able to deploy wireless motes that aren't tethered to power sources, and many of the systems being tested or in use today rely on miniature battery power. "You've got this limited pile of energy in your battery, and you need to distribute that out and make it last," says Mike Horton, CEO of Crossbow Technology Inc., a San Jose-based maker of MEMS technologies whose customers include a cosmetics company that uses wireless sensors to gauge humidity levels in its warehouses for moisture-sensitive products. "You can plug it into the wall, but that kind of defeats the purpose of these autonomous sensors." Breakthroughs Expected Researchers are attacking the problem in part by focusing on so- called low-power ad hoc routing protocols, which figure out how to get a message from one mote to another using the least amount of energy. Research on this kind of power has been emerging over the past two years at UC Berkeley, MIT and the University of California, Los Angeles. "We haven't found a one-size-fits-all approach yet," Horton says. Still, he believes two near-term technical breakthroughs for these wireless sensors in the areas of power and size are poised to occur. The first involves paring the several semiconductors needed today to operate these motes down to a single semiconductor, a development Horton foresees occurring about two years from now. On the power side, Horton points to research by UC Berkeley's Shad Roundy on fuel cells that can "scavenge" energy to make smart-dust devices run longer. This includes drawing off the ambient vibration energy generated by an industrial machine or gathering energy from low levels of light. These scavenger energy technologies might be five years off, Horton says. While researchers and commercial developers are agog over the potential applications for smart dust, they're also careful to point out the design and power issues that still need to be resolved. Says Fedder, "There are a lot of people champing at the bit to commercialize this technology, but the technology still has to mature, and widespread use is still several years off."