Can we connect trillions of IoT sensors in a sustainable way? A technology/circuit perspective (Invited)

The Internet-of-Things is about to revolutionize our world with trillions of sensors to be deployed. However, this revolution raises sustainability issues at the economical, societal and environmental levels: security and privacy of the sensed data, environmental and economical costs of battery production and replacement, carbon footprint associated to the production of the sensor nodes, congestion of the RF spectrum due to numerous connected devices and electrical power consumption of the ICT infrastructure to support the Internet traffic due to the sensed data. In this paper, we show how these high-level challenges can be translated into IC design targets for three main functions of IoT nodes: digital signal processing (DSP), embedded power management (PM) and low-power wireless RF communications. We then demonstrate that CMOS technology scaling and ultra-low-voltage operation can help meeting these targets through an analysis of their benefits on simple yet representative DSP, PM and RF blocks.