Solid State Circuits Society

Feb 26, 2004

• Our speaker was Dr. Kris Pister (Dust Inc.), and the topic of his presentation was
  “Smart Dust: Circuits and Applications”.

Wireless sensor networks and mesh networking have recently come to the attention of the media and the venture community. Companies such as Crossbow, Dust Inc, Ember, and Millennial are all working to commercialize this “next big thing”. Applications of the technology include building automation, industrial automation, medical monitoring, asset tracking, security, and homeland defense. The Science Fiction community was introduced to some of these Ideas through stories written by Vernor Vinge, who is also a communications professor at UCSD.

The Key concept here is a peer-to-peer network created by a number of very low power transceivers that form a communication mesh. In the science fiction version, they are as small as dust, and are distributed as an aerosol. In present incarnations, they are quite a bit larger, as we will hear from our Speaker.

Dr. Kris Pister has spent the last decade of his life pushing the academic limits of research in this field, as a Professor at UCLA and then UC Berkeley. Much of the enthusiasm for the field of wireless sensor networks can trace its roots to his DARPA-funded Smart Dust project, which set several world records in ultra-low power circuits and extreme miniaturization. For an example of his recent work see ‘An ultra low-energy ADC for Smart Dust’; IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, July 2003 Pages: 1123 – 1129.

Kris is an experienced leader who brings a record of successfully partnering with industry and government to deliver groundbreaking research into commercial applications. As the inventor of Smart Dust, he provides the leadership and vision to bring this technology to market. His prior successes include commercializing CAD for MEMS with Tanner Research, polysilicon MEMS Micromirrors with OMM Inc, and xenon difluoride etchers for semiconductor processing with STS and Xactix, which was subsequently licensed by Sony. Kris is co-director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC), actively participates in the Department of Defense research planning, and is a member of the JASONs. He serves on the Advisory Boards for CrossBow and Nanomix. Kris holds a PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a BS from UC San Diego. He is currently on extended leave from his position as professor of Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley. In January of 2003 Pister became CEO of Dust Inc, with the goal of bringing low-cost, long-life mesh networking to the masses.

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