“Smart Dust” & Internet of Things (IoT): Progress & Challenges

Abstract

Copyright: © 2017 Sadana DK, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The breath taking progress in CMOS scaling over last five decades has made it possible to shrink complex digital integrated circuits (ICs), such as a microprocessor into dimensions that are approaching a dust particle (<1 mm). For example, the latest 10 nm CMOS product is expected to have ~ 100 million transistors/mm2 (1). This makes fabrication of highly advanced smart dust equipped with a low-power (μW) micro-processor a reality and at a cost of less than a dime! Such unimaginable cost reduction is achievable because a 300 mm Si wafer can easily accommodate over 100,000 advanced ICs on a foot print of <0.8 mm × 0. 8 mm. This allows the recent emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) to be expanded using the “smart dust”. Continued proliferation of IoT is expected to exploit advances in smart dust and low-power wireless communication technologies in conjunction with progress in data security. The impact of IoT in monitoring and controlling various environments, such as agricultural fields, medical, healthcare, manufacturing plants, transportation systems and sending continuous streams of accurate and real-time data can be truly transformational (Figures 1 and 2).