From digital processors to analog building blocks: Enabling new applications through ultra-low voltage design

Moore's Law has received much attention over the last decades. However, the lesser known “Bell's law” has potentially had equal impact on the transformation of electronic systems. Bell's law dictates that every decade the size of a complete computing system shrinks in volume by 100x while the number of such devices per person increases. Bell's law has driven the transformation of gigantic mainframes in the 1960s to small handheld devices in the new millenium. It is generally held, that the next class of computing systems on the trajectory of Bell's law are miniature sensing systems that will instrument numerous aspects of our daily lives. In particular, we focus on millimeter sized systems which, being nearly invisible, will open up a host of new application areas in computing such as medical implantable devices for monitoring vital signs and disease, surveillance and entry detection, and environmental monitoring.