A wireless sensor node SoC with a profiled power management unit for IR controllable digital consumer devices

Network enabled digital technology increases the connectivity of consumer devices within the home for the purpose of remote control and monitoring of network enabled devices. Such dynamic control scheme for multiple legacy IR controllable digital consumer electronics appliances increases power consumption and system complexity. In this paper, we present a wireless sensor node SoC with a profiled power management unit for reducing active power consumption of a battery operated interactive home remote controller. The profiled power management unit decides the behavior of the power management service and the classes of operating hardware blocks which is used to control power state and hardware reset management for a wireless sensor node SoC. A profile includes the consumer devices classes, activity property values, and methods for changing a pending power state and an immediate power state. Proposed wireless sensor node SoC consists of an 8- bit embedded microcontroller with 64 Kbytes in-system programmable flash memory, hardwired media access control (MAC), RF transceiver and digital baseband. We fabricate a wireless sensor node SoC using 0.18 um CMOS technology and organize a wireless sensor network for home automation. These results show that it reduces active power consumption about 18% and it can be successfully applied in wireless sensor networks for further interactive home automation system.