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  Catalog   Brief Introduction What Is System on Chip?         Content of The Study Bus Architecture Technology IP Core Reuse Technology Reliability Design Technology   Software and Hardware Co-design Technology SoC Design Verification Technology   Chip Synthesis / Timing Analysis Technology   Testability / Debuggability Design Technology Low Power Consumption Design Technology New Circuit Implementation Technology Embedded Software Migration / Development     SoC classification   Technical Characteristics of CSoC   Technical Characteristics of SoPC Technical Characteristics of ASIC SoC Classification Principles of SoC Classification Model of SoC     Development Direction of SoC Technology   Computer Science Promotes the Level of SoC      Technology SoC Promotes the Development of Computer Architecture SoC Opens Up a New World for The Development  of      Interdisciplinary Disciplines Brief Introduction of SoC A system on chip (SoC) is a microchip which has all the necessary electronic circuits and other parts of a given system on a single integrated circuit. This technology is especially used in small yet extremely complex consumer electronic devices. There are some devices which have more processing power and memory than a standard desktop. This is possible only with the use of system on chip design. In simple terms a system on chip is an integrated circuit which integrates all components of a computer or any other electronic system into a single chip. It may include analog, digital, mixed-signal and other radio frequency funtions on a single chip substrate. Due to their low power consumption, SoCs are quite common in the mobile electronics market. Embedded systems is the best example of the use of system on chip. Figure 1   The structure of a typical system of chip consists of: —A microcontroller, digital signal processor or microprocessor core. —Memory blocks along with a selection of RAM, ROM, EEPROM and flash memory. —Oscillators, phase-locked loops and other timing sources. —Counter-timers, eral-time timers as well as power-on reset generators. —USB, FireWire, Ethernet, SPI, USART and other external interfaces as well. —Analog interfaces including ADCs and DACs.   Along with the above mentioned hardware, system on chip design also has software which controls the microcontroller, microprocessor, peripherals and interfaces. The design flow of a SoC aims at developing both the hardware and software in a parallel manner. Typically most of the system on chip are developed from pre-qualified hardware blocks along with the software drivers which control their operation. While the hardware blocks are arranged together with the help of CAD tools, software-development environment is used to integrate the software modules.   The next step is functional verification of the system on chip design to verify and debug both harware as well as software prior to tapeout. The technologies with which SoC can be fabricated are: —Standard Cell —Full Custom —Field-programmable Gate Array   As SoC designs consume less power and have higher reliability and lower cost as compared to the multi-chip systems which they replace, they are regarded as the best option to be used.   The major problems/ challenges faced by SoC designers are as follows: Functional content complexity – The amount of the content involved in build SoCs leads one to the conclusion that designing these systems is not easy even for large design teams. This is why some form of intellectual property reuse has become an inevitable part of SoC design. Along with functional content complexity, architectural as well as verification challenge are some of the major problems inherent in the SoC designing.     Content of The Study SoC design methodology mainly studies Bus Architecture Technology, IP Core Reuse Technology, Reliability Design Technology, Software and Hardware Co-design Technology, SoC Design Verification Technology, Chip Synthesis / Timing Analysis Technology, Testability / Debuggability Design Technology, Low Power Consumption Design Technology, New Circuit Implementation Technology, etc. In addition, Operating System / Embedded Software Migration, Development and Research are also needed to be done in this new interdisciplinary field of research.   Bus Architecture Technology Bus structure and interconnection technology directly affect the overall performance of the chip. For a single application field, mature bus architecture can be selected; for those with high serialization or comprehensive performance requirements, in-depth architecture research can be carried out, and the bus architecture with its own characteristics can be constructed. Therefore, it can be refined and strengthened without being restricted by third parties, develop synchronously with the system and become more competitive. At present, the development of SoC is mainly based on platform (including independent construction of the overall architecture), based on core, based on synthesis and other methods, and constantly introduce better performance, stronger scalability of the bus specification.   IP Core Reuse Technology IP core is generally divided into hard IP core, soft IP core and firm IP core. Hard IP core refers to the IP core which has been pre-arranged and cannot be modified by the system designer. The soft IP core is usually submitted in the form of HDL language. Firm IP core is composed of RTL description and synthesizable network table. The research focus of IP core reuse is to develop the integration of specification and testability to adapt to a variety of bus interfaces in order to achieve the purpose of reuse with as few outsourcing and test vectors as possible. IP cores should have good development documentation and reference manuals, including data manuals, user guidelines, simulation and reuse models, and compatibility is an important factor.   Reliability Design Technology Because SoC is composed of multi-level bus and each bus contains multiple devices (IP core). Therefore, it is very important to ensure the normal operation of the whole chip. And the anti-"deadlock" mechanism and "unlocking" mechanism must be considered, which means that a device (IP core) will not affect the other functions of the whole chip even if it is paralyzed. In addition, with the development of ultra-deep submicron technology, the reliability of bus transmission becomes a serious challenge, so it is necessary to study the fault-tolerant mechanism and fault recovery mechanism.   Software and Hardware Co-design Technology Due to the pressure of market and design risk, SoC hardware and software co-design becomes particularly important. Improving hardware / software co-description, co-analysis, co-design, co-simulation and co-verification can greatly reduce the risk of hardware design and shorten the development and debugging time of embedded software. At the same time, the fatal problems existing in the software and hardware can be found in the co-verification environment in time, and the readjustment of the software and hardware can be avoided in the final integration test.   SoC Design Verification Technology It is mainly divided into three levels: IP core verification, IP core and bus interface compatibility verification and system-level verification, including design concept verification, design implementation verification, design performance verification, fault simulation, chip testing and so on. From the type of verification, there are compatibility test, corner test, random test, real code test, regression (Regression) test, assertion verification and so on. Due to the increasing complexity of the chip and the high cost of software simulation, hardware simulation verification has become an important verification method. Verification accounts for about 70% of the whole design work. And how to improve the verification coverage and efficiency is the eternal topic of design verification.     Chip Synthesis / Timing Analysis Technology Due to the increasing complexity and scale of SoC system, new topics such as multi-clock, multi-voltage and ultra-deep submicron continue to emerge, which puts forward higher requirements for the comprehensive research of SoC. In particular, the research on how to classify and decompose the time series budget and special constraints of critical path requires researchers to master a great deal of system background knowledge. At the same time, the static timing analysis (STA) is becoming more and more complex and the efficiency of back-end dynamic simulation is low, which poses a severe challenge to the overall designers.     Testability / Debuggability Design Technology This paper mainly studies and solves the problems of batch production testability and online debuggability. The implementation technologies include DFT, SCAN, BIST, Iddq, JTAG/eJTAG. To study the SoC test architecture based on various IP cores and test the efficient transitivity of vector, It is more important to consider the parallelization of testing and reduce the time occupied by chip testing. In addition, we should pay attention to online debugging to facilitate users to develop and debug SoC-based products.   Low Power Consumption Design Technology Low power consumption has become an equally important design goal as area and performance, so accurate evaluation of power consumption has also become an important issue. The power consumption of the chip is mainly composed of jump power consumption, short circuit power consumption and leakage power consumption. In order to reduce power consumption, it is necessary to study the circuit implementation technology, input vector control (IVC) technology, multi-voltage technology, power consumption management technology and software (algorithm) low-power utilization technology from the perspective of SoC multi-level stereo to solve the problem comprehensively.   New Circuit Implementation Technology Due to the sharp increase in the number of transistors, the decreasing chip size, the increasing density, the increased reuse frequency of IP cores, the emergence of low voltage, multi-clock, high frequency, high testability, new and difficult packaging and other requirements, as well as the endless emergence of new design technologies, the minimum dimensions of semiconductor technologies develop towards deep submicron. And this requires SoC designers to constantly study new technologies, new tools, key circuit architecture, timing convergence, signal integrity, antenna effect and so on.     Embedded Software Migration / Development The main research and development of BIOS and embedded operating system transplantation / development of SoC is to support multi-task, to make program development easier, to improve the stability and reliability of the system, to make maintenance convenient, to make reading and understanding easier. Therefore, it should have the characteristics of good security, strong robustness, high code execution efficiency and so on. For example, the embedded Linux operating system code implantation research on SoC chip can reduce the difficulty based on BSP development for system developers. At the same time, it improves the development efficiency and shortens the development cycle.     SoC classification In this paper, SoC is classified into three categories: CSoC, SOPC and ASIC SoC, and then unified them into SoC architecture classification model.   Technical characteristics of CSoC CSoC is generally composed of processor, memory, ASIC-based kernel and on-chip reconfigurable components, which has obvious advantages over ASIC SoC and multi-chip board-level development based on standard components. It is characterized by:    —CPU + reconfigurable processing artifacts. —Efficiency and flexibility combine well. —Refactoring based determination processing function. —It is superior to supercomputer in image processing, pattern matching and so on. —According to the needs of the task, it can be dynamically reconfigurable to improve the performance-price ratio.   At present, the academia pays more attention to the XPP (eXtreme Processing Platform), which is the efficient processor with dynamic reconfiguration. XPP embeds programmable logic modules in a SoC based on a microprocessor core based on a bus architecture to form a reconfigurable SoC platform, as shown in figure 1. The applicable reconfigurable data processing architecture is often composed of processing array element (PAE), communication network packet oriented, hierarchical reconfiguration management tree (CM) and I/O module. XPP has the ability to automatically reconstruct streams and process data streams, breaking through the traditional John von Neumann instruction stream mode. Because of the high degree of regularity, it is easy to obtain instruction-level parallelism and pipeline efficiency.   Figure 2.     CSoC Architecture based on XPP/Leon   Technical characteristics of SoPC SoPC is a special on-chip system. It is a programmable system which has flexible design mode. It can be cut, expanded and upgraded and it also has programmable functions in the development of software and hardware on-line system. It combines the advantages of SoC and FPGA, including the following basic characteristics: —Contains at least one embedded processor IP core —Small capacity on-chip high-speed RAM resources —Rich IP core resources for choice —Sufficient on-chip programmable logic resources —Shared or coexisting processor debugging interface and FPGA programming interface —May contain partially programmable analog circuits   The block diagram of SoPC is shown in figure 2. In addition to the above characteristics, it also involves the software and hardware co-design technology, which has aroused widespread concern at present. Because the main logic design of SoPC is carried out in programmable logic devices, and BGA packaging has been widely used in the field of micropackaging, traditional debugging equipment, such as logic analyzer and digital oscilloscope, has been difficult to carry out direct test and analysis. Therefore, it is necessary to put forward higher requirements for software and hardware co-design technology based on simulation technology. At the same time, new debugging technology has been emerging.   Figure 3.  The block diagram of SoPC Technical characteristics of ASIC SoC ASIC SoC is an application-specific on-chip system, which has the characteristics of high performance, strong real-time, high reliability, low power consumption, low cost and so on. It generally has the following basic characteristics:  —At least one CPU kernel.  —Normative bus architecture  —RAM resources (or on-chip memory access controller)  —An appropriate amount of I/O equipment (including analog ones)  —Extensible interfaces (such as PCI)  —On-line debugging port (eJTAG)  —Circuits with testability   Figure 4.  L*BUS Bus Architecture Diagram   ASIC SoC is generally a product based on IP core or SoC development platform. It requires expertise, IP libraries, SoC bus architecture, and embedded software support (including BIOS, OS). It also requires a wide range of multifunctional IP cores and the design to integrate customer logic with it to meet customers’ needs for product development. SoC designers not only take advantage of the latest technology, but also reduce the development cycle and risk by reusing the proven IP core.   At present, there are many kinds of SoC bus architecture and each of them is developed to meet the requirements of its specific application field. Some are suitable for downmarket embedded products, some are suitable for handheld products, and some are suitable for high-energy products. In a word, everyone has its own advantages. The development of SoC cannot be separated from the constraints of power consumption, performance, cost, testability, reliability, IP core reusability, platform technical support and software and hardware’s co-development. Developers need to have a strong background in computer architecture in order to support its rapid development.   Classification principles of SoC SOC can be classified according to the architecture it adopts: One is the architecture based on instruction stream computing, which is typically represented by the traditional ASIC SoC. According to the control of instruction stream and data stream, this type can be divided into SISD (single instruction stream-single data stream), SIMD (single instruction stream-multiple data stream), MISD (multiple instruction stream-single data stream) and MIMD (multiple instruction stream-multiple data stream) in order to flexibly adapt to the needs of different algorithms in various applications.   The second one is an architecture based on data stream computing, which only controls the input / output data of the unit. Working according to the principle of data stream, it is more efficient than instruction stream, but less flexible. Pulsating array based on data stream computing is a typical architecture of this kind. A pulsating array is an array of data path components DPU (Data Path Unit). The data streams out of the data memory according to the beat, completes the calculation through the PU array, and the result flows back to the data memory. PU arrays have only the ability to control data, which is also the origin of FlowWare. Conventional SoPC is its typical technical representative.   The third is the architecture based on configuration stream computing. Using coarse-grained FPGA chip as carrier，SoC can dynamically reconstruct the hardware form of architecture design by adopting Morphwave. It can be an array of rPU (reconfigurable Processing Unit) and implemented by Configuwave. The configuration stream comes from the configuration memory called CM (reConfiguration Memory), which controls the changes of the rPU array through reConfiguration Manager and works according to the principle of data stream. CSoC is its typical technical representative.   Classification model of SoC According to the classification principles of the SoC architecture mentioned above, we establish a three-dimensional classification model of CDI architecture on the basis of the concepts of instruction stream, data stream and configuration stream, corresponding to I (Instruction Stream Architecture) axis, D (Data Stream Architecture) axis and C (reConfiguration Stream Architecture) axis. And it is shown in figure 4.   Any SoC with hybrid computer architecture of instruction stream computing, data stream computing and configuration stream computing can be summarized in CDI three-dimensional space. There are four basic architecture classifications on I axis: SISD, SIMD, MISD and MIMD. On the D axis, there are only two basic states: single data stream architecture and multiple data stream architecture. And there are also only two basic states on the C axis: single reconfiguration stream architecture and multiple reconfiguration stream architecture.      Figure 5.  CDI Classification Model Diagram     Development Direction of SoC Technology Since the concept of SoC was put forward in the late 1990s, the technology has been developed rapidly. Whether it is CSoC, SoPC or ASIC SoC, all of them are gradually related to computer science, microelectronics, materials and technology, electronic communication and so on. Their interdisciplinary development provides a strong support for the technical development of SoC.   Computer Science promotes the level of SoC Technology John von Neumann architecture and data stream architecture are the mainstream architectures of computers. The first one is characterized by the integration of program and data while the second one is characterized by the separation of program and data. The miniaturization of general purpose computer provides a source for the development of SoC technology.   Bus Architecture Technology, Algorithm Implementation Technology, Modular Design Technology, BIOS Technology, Software Engineering Technology, Software and Hardware Debugging Technology, System Verification Technology, performance Evaluation Technology, Real-time Processing Technology, Reliability Design Technology, Human-computer Interaction Technology, Load Balancing Technology and Low-power Consumption Design Technology in computer field are all reflected in SoC design technology. It also promotes the rapid development of SoC in a few years and becomes one of the main development directions of computers in the post-PC era.   Although the development of SoC technology is closely related to the development of technology and the improvement of EDA design means, its core is CPU core, bus architecture and various IP cores. In the overall performance evaluation and implementation technology, all of them are related to the computer professional field. Especially in upmarket applications, such as multi-CPU core integration and heterogeneous integration and other system requirements, computer science will continue to promote the development of SoC technology from different levels.   SoC promotes the Development of computer Architecture The development of SoC technology is closely related to the market demand. The main application fields of SoC are computer, communication, consumer electronics, industrial control, transportation and so on. Communications, computers and consumers account for more than 80 percent of SoC's sales, and the proportion of consumers is growing.   It can be divided into different categories if we further subdivide SoC market. For computer, there is image processing, hard disk drive, high-grade printer, personal assistant and so on. For communication, there is wired network, wireless network, mobile phone, visual equipment, communication base station and so on. For industrial control, there is process control or processing, test or instrument, medical equipment, monitoring system and so on. And for transportation, there is engine control, instrument device, safety system and so on. With the increasing scale of SoC market, it plays a more and more important role in the field of information technology and electronic products. At present, the SoC market is basically based on middle and low-grade SoC products. With the increasing demand for digital products, the demand for upmarket SoC is becoming more and more urgent. For example, in audio, video, communication and other fields, higher requirements are placed on SoC such as dual-core, quad-core and other multi-core integration. SoC will replace the traditional CPU in the middle and high grade to develop in the direction of better system performance, lower power consumption, lower cost, higher reliability and easier development in order to meet the interactive needs of people with GUI screen-centered multimedia interface and information terminals such as handwritten text input, identity recognition, voice dial-up Internet, sending and receiving e-mail, video playback, online games, videophone, language simultaneous interpretation and so on.SoC will embed enhanced processing devices such as 32-bit, 64-bit RISC chips or digital signal processing chips (DSP). At the same time, it supports the development of embedded RTOS and uses real-time multi-task programming technology and cross-development tool technology to control functional complexity to Inherit and develop computer processor technology. All of this poses greater challenges to computer architecture.   Under the guidance of computer architecture, SoC will usher in a new round of technical development. It takes embedded system application as the core, integrates software and hardware, and pursues the maximum inclusiveness of product system in system integration. SoC chip design not only needs strong background knowledge of computer architecture, but also highlights the status of software development, and puts forward higher requirements for development platform and embedded operating system. It provides a broad world for computer professionals to show their skills.   With the rapid development of processor / IP core design technology at home and abroad, it provides a powerful driving force for the development of computer architecture. Persisting in the development of processor core, core IP core and bus architecture with independent property rights, and ensuring compatibility, will make the development of SoC in China competitive thus driving the domestic IC industry to further develop. In order to meet the needs of industry, the of SoC designers’s in-depth researches on the architecture of configuration stream, instruction stream and data stream will also make a significant contribution to the development of computer science.   SoC opens up a new world for the development of interdisciplinary disciplines SoC is a new field of technology that needs the support of many disciplines. Its development has been inseparable from the technical support from computer science, microelectronics, materials and technology, electronic communications and other fields. New technology and new products will continue to emerge and more in-depth researches on SoC are needed.   At present, the development of SoC technology is mainly realized at the same process level, mainly electronic technology. However, in practical applications, higher requirements for microminiaturization and system integration technology are constantly put forward. The development of micro-systems that integrate micro-mechanisms, micro-sensors, micro-actuators, signal processing and control and communication interface circuits and energy, which can perform specific functions, has put on the agenda. MEMS, which combines microelectronics and micromechanics, will become a new basis for the development of SoC. MEMS is also a multidisciplinary frontier research field, involving electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, material engineering, information engineering, physics, chemistry, optics, biomedicine and other disciplines and technologies.   The obvious advantage of system integration is to inherit and develop the benefits of various process technologies. Although the development of various processes is extremely unbalanced, SiP (System in Package) design technology can be used to integrate various integrated circuits of different processes such as CMOS circuits, GaAs circuits, SiGe circuits or optoelectronic devices, MEMS devices, and various passive components such as capacitors, inductors, etc. into a package when multiple processes are needed to coexist in the process of system integration. The implementation of more complex systems in a single package can improve packaging efficiency, performance and reliability by about 10 times, and the size and cost can be greatly reduced.   The development trend of SoC technology will be the integration of SoC, MEMS and SiP, and the computer architecture will be constantly enriched and developed. SoC's CDI classification model can depict the development of system technology, meet the single chip requirements of more complex systems and promote the interdisciplinary development at the same time.   Related products XC7Z100-2FFG900I XC7Z010-1CLG400I    

A new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip has been developed that is virtually impossible to hack.If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn't steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and high-tech burglars couldn't swipe expensive goods from a warehouse and replace them with dummy tags.Texas Instruments has built several prototypes of the new chip, to the researchers' specifications, and in experiments the chips have behaved as expected. The researchers presented their research this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.According to Chiraag Juvekar, a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT and first author on the new paper, the chip is designed to prevent so-called side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks analyze patterns of memory access or fluctuations in power usage when a device is performing a cryptographic operation, in order to extract its cryptographic key."The idea in a side-channel attack is that a given execution of the cryptographic algorithm only leaks a slight amount of information," Juvekar says. "So you need to execute the cryptographic algorithm with the same secret many, many times to get enough leakage to extract a complete secret."One way to thwart side-channel attacks is to regularly change secret keys. In that case, the RFID chip would run a random-number generator that would spit out a new secret key after each transaction. A central server would run the same generator, and every time an RFID scanner queried the tag, it would relay the results to the server, to see if the current key was valid.BlackoutSuch a system would still, however, be vulnerable to a "power glitch" attack, in which the RFID chip's power would be repeatedly cut right before it changed its secret key. An attacker could then run the same side-channel attack thousands of times, with the same key. Power-glitch attacks have been used to circumvent limits on the number of incorrect password entries in password-protected devices, but RFID tags are particularly vulnerable to them, since they're charged by tag readers and have no onboard power supplies.Two design innovations allow the MIT researchers' chip to thwart power-glitch attacks: One is an on-chip power supply whose connection to the chip circuitry would be virtually impossible to cut, and the other is a set of "nonvolatile" memory cells that can store whatever data the chip is working on when it begins to lose power.For both of these features, the researchers—Juvekar; Anantha Chandrakasan, who is Juvekar's advisor and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Hyung-Min Lee, who was a postdoc in Chandrakasan's group when the work was done and is now at IBM; and TI's Joyce Kwong, who did her master's degree and PhD with Chandrakasan—use a special type of material known as a ferroelectric crystals.As a crystal, a ferroelectric material consists of molecules arranged into a regular three-dimensional lattice. In every cell of the lattice, positive and negative charges naturally separate, producing electrical polarization. The application of an electric field, however, can align the cells' polarization in either of two directions, which can represent the two possible values of a bit of information.When the electric field is removed, the cells maintain their polarization. Texas Instruments and other chip manufacturers have been using ferroelectric materials to produce nonvolatile memory, or computer memory that retains data when it's powered off.Complementary capacitorsA ferroelectric crystal can also be thought of as a capacitor, an electrical component that separates charges and is characterized by the voltage between its negative and positive poles. Texas Instruments' manufacturing process can produce ferroelectric cells with either of two voltages: 1.5 volts or 3.3 volts.The researchers' new chip uses a bank of 3.3-volt capacitors as an on-chip energy source. But it also features 571 1.5-volt cells that are discretely integrated into the chip's circuitry. When the chip's power source—the external scanner—is removed, the chip taps the 3.3-volt capacitors and completes as many operations as it can, then stores the data it's working on in the 1.5-volt cells.When power returns, before doing anything else the chip recharges the 3.3-volt capacitors, so that if it's interrupted again, it will have enough power to store data. Then it resumes its previous computation. If that computation was an update of the secret key, it will complete the update before responding to a query from the scanner. Power-glitch attacks won't work.Because the chip has to charge capacitors and complete computations every time it powers on, it's somewhat slower than conventional RFID chips. But in tests, the researchers found that they could get readouts from their chips at a rate of 30 per second, which should be more than fast enough for most RFID applications."In the age of ubiquitous connectivity, security is one of the paramount challenges we face," says Ahmad Bahai, chief technology officer at Texas Instruments. "Because of this, Texas Instruments sponsored the authentication tag research at MIT that is being presented at ISSCC. We believe this research is an important step toward the goal of a robust, low-cost, low-power authentication protocol for the industrial Internet."   

 Futurists are encouraged by possibilities residing in Internet-connected sensors for making us better aware of how to get through the day,Now a people-counting product called Density, a combo of hardware and software app, proposes one more step in humanizing data-collecting for our own benefit—figuring out how the day will go based on people-traffic. Density is both sensor and app; the population data of a place is shared real-time via the cloud.Placed on a doorframe, it is designed to tell you how crowded or empty is a conference room, store, restaurant or other place you need or want to visit."Our sensor gets attached to a place's entrance, measures anonymous movement as people come and go, and generates real-time and historical data that can be integrated anywhere," said Density. Density uses infrared light to measure movement. By design, Density cannot capture any personally identifiable information about consumers.The app works by surfacing data collected by small, Internet-connected, infrared optical sensors in the doorway of each business, said Rachel Metz in MIT Technology Review.Using Density, a restaurant, for example, could detect and then broadcast if there were open tables. If you wanted to visit a gym, you could check online to see if the treadmills were free to use. As for night life, "No one likes a bar that's too crowded, or for that matter, one that's too dead," said Fast Company. Density could help.This would not be the first time somebody has thought of a solution to count people. Surveillance cameras and so-called break-beam systems, said Metz, have been used to keep tally based on how often the infrared beam is broken by a passerby.Metz wrote that Density CEO Andrew Farah said Density's aim was to provide another way which would do away with privacy concerns over cameras, while also collecting data in realtime. For business owners, the sensors would help them understand their foot traffic from day to day.Developers would be another group to benefit, through a Density API. Density, said psfk, is "completely Internet-connected, and the data it collects can be accessed by the developer community, which gives rise to a whole new field of entrepreneurial startups."So far, said Metz, Density has installed prototypes of its sensors in over a dozen businesses. They include coffee shops as well as other types of establishments. Workfrom, for example, is a website that is aggregating data to notify remote workers of the least crowded places to get work done, said psfk"Their best spots get very busy," said Density, and Density measures real-time seating capacity. Workfrom integrates the data into their website.Density said another example is in Berkeley, California, where "a team is adding Density to school gyms and workspaces. From anywhere on campus, students will be able to see if a popular place is busy or quiet."Stacey Higginbotham of Fortune, in an earlier report on the startup, commented that Density's technology offering "has myriad potential applications. If applied to public institutions like the post office or motor-vehicles departments, Density's technology looks less like a plaything and more like a valuable tool for making the service economy more efficient." 

Harvard researchers have identified a whole new class of high-performing organic molecules, inspired by vitamin B2, that can safely store electricity from intermittent energy sources like solar and wind power in large batteries.The development builds on previous work in which the team developed a high-capacity flow battery rechargreable that stored energy in organic molecules called quinones and a food additive called ferrocyanide. That advance was a game-changer, delivering the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive, and low-cost chemicals that could enable large-scale, inexpensive electricity storage.While the versatile quinones show great promise for flow batteries, Harvard researchers continued to explore other organic molecules in pursuit of even better performance. But finding that same versatility in other organic systems has been challenging."Now, after considering about a million different quinones, we have developed a new class of battery electrolyte material that expands the possibilities of what we can do," said Kaixiang Lin, a Ph.D. student at Harvard and first author of the paper. "Its simple synthesis means it should be manufacturable on a large scale at a very low cost, which is an important goal of this project."Flow batteries store energy in solutions in external tanks—the bigger the tanks, the more energy they store. In 2014, Michael J. Aziz, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Roy Gordon, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Professor of Chemistry and their team at Harvard replaced metal ions used as conventional battery electrolyte materials in acidic electrolytes with quinones, molecules that store energy in plants and animals. In 2015, they developed a quinone that could work in alkaline solutions alongside a common food additive.In this most recent research, the team found inspiration in vitamin B2, which helps to store energy from food in the body. The key difference between B2 and quinones is that nitrogen atoms, instead of oxygen atoms, are involved in picking up and giving off electrons.."They have high stability and solubility and provide high battery voltage and storage capacity. Because vitamins are remarkably easy to make, this molecule could be manufactured on a large scale at a very low cost.""We designed these molecules to suit the needs of our battery, but really it was nature that hinted at this way to store energy," said Gordon, co-senior author of the paper. "Nature came up with similar molecules that are very important in storing energy in our bodies."The team will continue to explore quinones, as well as this new universe of molecules, in pursuit of a high-performing, long-lasting and inexpensive flow battery. 

If you want to save on your monthly electric bill and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions at the same time, you might buy a new, energy-efficient refrigerator. Or water heater. Or clothes dryer. But if you can only replace one of these, which will give you the biggest payback?You could try to figure that out by comparing the energy-use labels from your existing appliances with those of the models you might purchase—if you still have your old labels. Even then, the numbers may differ significantly from your actual usage, depending on factors such as age, condition, and your local climate. But soon, there could be a much easier way to figure out exactly how much power is being used by every appliance, lighting fixture, and device in your home, with pinpoint accuracy and at low cost, thanks to devices and software developed by researchers at MIT.The team's findings, developed over several years of intensive research, are described in a series of papers, including one published this week in the IEEE Sensors Journal, in a paper by MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering Steven Leeb and recent graduates David Lawrence MEng '16 and John Donnal PhD '16. Another paper from the team, which also includes as co-author James Paris PhD '13, is still in press.While many groups have worked on developing devices to monitor electricity use, the new MIT system has some key advantages over other approaches. First, it involves no complex installation: No wires need to be disconnected, and the placement of the postage-stamp-sized vibration sensors over the incoming power line does not require any particular precision—the system is designed to be self-calibrating. Second, because it samples data very quickly, the sensors can pick up enough detailed information about spikes and patterns in the voltage and current that the system can, thanks to dedicated software, tell the difference between every different kind of light, motor, and other device in the home and show exactly which ones go on and off, at what times.Own your own dataPerhaps most significantly, the system is designed so that all of the detailed information stays right inside the user's own home, eliminating concerns about privacy that potential users may have when considering power-monitoring systems. The detailed analysis, including the potential for specialized analysis based on an individual user's specific needs or interests, can be provided by customized apps that can be developed using the MIT team's system.Tests of the system have showed its potential to save energy and greenhouse emissions—and even to improve safety. One installation at a military base used for training exercises revealed that large tents were being heated all day during winter months, even though they were unoccupied for most of the daytime hours—a significant waste of money and fuel (which, in a combat setting, could be an important logistical concern). Another test installation, in a home, found an anomalous voltage pattern that revealed a wiring flaw that caused some copper plumbing pipes to carry a potentially dangerous live voltage."For a long time, the premise has been that if we could get access to better information [about energy use], we would be able to create some significant savings," Leeb says. He and his students have been tackling the problem for more than 10 years and bit by bit have found ways to circumvent the daunting problems involved in achieving this basic task.First was the ability to monitor changes in voltage and current without cutting the main incoming power line to a home or business (an expensive process requiring a licensed electrician) or plugging every appliance into a special monitoring device. Other groups have attempted to use wireless sensors to pick up the very faint magnetic and electric fields near a wire, but such systems have required a complex alignment process since the fields in some places can cancel each other out. The MIT team solved the problem by using an array of five sensors, each slightly offset from the others, and a calibration system that tracks the readings from each sensor and figures out which one is positioned to give the strongest signal.Interpreting the data flowThe next trick was in figuring out how to analyze the reams of data flowing in from the high-speed sensors, in order to tease out which bits correspond to current and voltage, and how that information could be used to identify "signatures" of specific appliances. This is possible because every motor or device has distinctive characteristics as to exactly how fast and how much the voltage varies, or spikes, at the moment the device switches on, or as it operates. After extensive testing in the lab, in homes, at the Fort Devens Army base outside Boston, and aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Spencer, the team was able to develop a catalog of such signatures, to identify each kind of electrical load.And finally, given the prodigious amount of raw data generated by the system, the team had to figure out how to extract the useful information and display it in a way that would make it easy for people to make decisions about energy investments. They developed an interface that allows users to "zoom in" on specific time segments, revealing enough data to tell when a refrigerator turns on or off, or goes into its defrost cycle, or how often a water heater is switching on and off during the day."A bunch of major players have gotten into, and out of, this field," says Leeb, including giants like Google and Microsoft. But now, he says, the MIT team has solved the key issues and come up with a practical and very powerful system. One of the major insights they had was that keeping most of the data within the home and sending only small subsets out into the cloud for processing solved two problems at once: It eliminated the privacy concerns of using such a system, and it eliminated the huge bandwidth and data transmission costs that would be required if the raw data was sent to a central facility.Once the system is developed into a commercial product, Leeb says, it should cost only about $25 to $30 per home. "We're trying to lower the barriers to installation," says co-author John Donnal, and this noncontact sensor is simple enough for most home users to install on their own. "It just goes on with a zip tie," he says.William Singleton, an engineer at the U.S. Army Fort Devens Base Camp Integration Laboratory, who was not involved in this research, says this work "is an excellent example of how theoretical scientific and mathematical principles can be brought to bear on real world, practical, problem-solving applications." By using the MIT team's sensing system, he says, "significant potential savings in fuel, water, and equipment maintenance can be realized. This will provide increased options for the battlefield commander in accomplishing his mission, reduce the overall base camp logistics footprint, and ultimately save lives of warfighters involved in base camp sustainment and resupply." 

Wearables and IoT gadgets, featuring smart functions in much smaller form factors, pose battery challenges and headaches by their small size. ARM has made moves that might change the story of battery life of many wearables and other small devices, with its recent acquisition of two companies. Reports on Friday about ARM focused on its having acquired two low-power wireless communications companies.The technology could extend the battery life of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including wearables, by up to 60 per cent (compared to radio hardware that operates at 1.2 volts), said Daily Telegraph technology reporter Sophie Curtis. ("ARM claims that the Cordio radio technology system, operating below one volt, can extend battery life by 60 per cent, compared to radio hardware that operates at 1.2 volts," said the report. The two companies, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, said Curtis, will form the basis of its new Cordio portfolio. The result could brighten the picture for the development of low-power wireless communications for power-hungry devices.Aatif Sulleyman in TrustedReviews similarly observed how "Much of the power consumed by wearables is used up while communicating with other devices, such as smartphones. ARM wants to make this process less draining."ARM describes Cordio as a family of standards-based, low-power radio IP solutions. Each Cordio solution includes a pre-qualified, self-contained radio block, related link layer firmware, stack and profiles. It also carries guidelines for design, test, integration, qualification, and application development. ARM said semiconductor companies can benefit by having access to sub-volt radio solutions.Sunrise Micro Devices, said ARM, focuses on radio IP solutions and provides "a pre-qualified, self-contained radio block and related firmware to simplify radio deployment." Central to SMD radios is native sub-one volt operation. "Operating below one volt enables the radio to run much longer on batteries or harvested energy." Wicentric focuses on providing Bluetooth Smart software solutions. Curtis said Wicentric's Bluetooth Smart software solutions will run on the sub-one volt radios and help ease power consumption too.Paul Buckley in EE/Times said, "ARM is keen to make the Cordio solutions efficient enough to be powered using energy harvesting and sees SMD's sub-one volt Bluetooth radio IP as a vital ingredient in the design armory."The Cordio radio IP is being promoted as a fully integrated platform which includes transceiver, baseband, and link layer (LL) subsystem including firmware. The subsystem, said ARM, provides an "energy efficient, timing-independent interface to the host processor, enabling easy implementation of the stack and application layers. In addition, the subsystem intelligently controls the sleep and wake-up times of the host processor leading to lower system-wide power consumption."ARM said that "Core to all Cordio radio hardware is native sub-volt operation. Operating below 1 Volt enables the radio to 'sip' energy from a battery, thus greatly extending the device's life. In addition, it makes it easier to run without batteries by using energy harvesting technologies."In the bigger picture, "ARM is gradually building up a suite of IoT-focused solutions," said Buckley, "that address key stumbling blocks associated with developing commercially viable IoT products."