What is energy-proportional sensing?

Sensing (S) is essentially a process of measurement of a physical quantity and presenting its value in a form that can be used for electronic or human data manipulation. It is a (sequential) composition of transduction (T) and conversion (C), i.e. S = T;C.

Suppose we have a way of transduction of a sensed quantity, i.e. turning it into an electrical parameter, such as voltage or current. One way of transduction could be to turn the sensed parameter into energy. The energy can then be turned into a computation whose final results could represent the energy used in this computation, which in its turn could represent the original parameter. To make such a sensor we need two aspects of proportionality (ideally, in linear relationship). One is that the original parameter is turned into the amount of energy in a proportional way, and the other is that the obtained amount of energy is turned into an information representation also in a proportional way.

Our proposed voltage sensor (see my previous posting about our patent application on voltage sensor) is based exactly on this principle. The input voltage is converted into a electric charge (energy) in a sampled capacitor, and then this charge (energy) is converted into a binary code produced by the electronic circuit which is fed by the energy of the charge.

Title (EN) APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR VOLTAGE SENSING
(FR) APPAREIL ET PROCEDE POUR LA DETECTION DE TENSION

Pub. No.: WO/2011/121323 International Application No.: PCT/GB2011/050390
Publication Date: 06.10.2011 International Filing Date: 28.02.2011

http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2011121323&recNum=1&docAn=GB2011050390

Biological systems typically have two types of operation, regular and bursty, and manage to organise their operation in an energy efficient and robust way, which also supports natural tendency for survival. Regular activities take place all the time, and are meant to serve the needs of the overall system and are determined by the overall structure and dynamics of the system. Bursty activities are typically not those that are constantly triggered by normal periodic cycles of the system, but rather they are triggered by or in accordance with the needs to react to the demands of the environment. Why not to build a computer system in a similar fashion, such that a constantly active part has to be relatively slow and all the fast processing has to be done in specialised units, whose activation is bursty?

For more information visit the URL and find my recent technical memo on this …
http://async.org.uk/tech-memos/NCL-EECE-MSD-MEMO-2012-005.pdf

I have just changed Y-GREEN to EnyMoCo to make the blog more focused on Energy-Modulated Computing

DATE 2011 event in Grenoble with its special days on smart devices and on energy generation and consumption were a success. See http://www.date-conference.com/conference/thursday-special-day for more details.
There were excellent talks, including the one by Jan Rabaey, Professor from UC Berkeley and a recognised authority on low power electronics. Jan talked about “POWERING AND COMMUNICATING WITH MM-SIZE IMPLANTS”. My talk on Energy Modulated Computing went really well.
The Wednesday and Thursday sopecial days were followed by Friday workshops, including the Workshop on Micro Power Management for Macro Systems on Chip (uPM2SoC) http://www.date-conference.com/conference/workshop-w1 where James Docherty and I presented two talks (mine was also co-authored by Danil Sokolov, who was the lead author and should have been there) – http://www.date-conference.com/conference/workshop-w1

It is quite interesting to see how an ancient Iraqi polymath Al-Jazari used the nergy of falling water to drive various mechanisms such as camshafts, clocks, and musical robot bands. He was a pioneer of automation, and invented auomatic gates, water clocks, muscial automata. His mechanisms and ideas look analogous to what we now want to achieve in driving computations by electrical power …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jazari#Water-raising_machines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camshaft