A Fully Integrated Battery-Powered System-on-Chip in 40-nm CMOS for Closed-Loop Control of Insect-Scale Pico-Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

We demonstrate a fully integrated system-on-chip (SoC) optimized for insect-scale flapping-wing pico-aerial vehicles. The SoC is able to meet the stringent weight, power, and real-time performance demands of autonomous flight for a bee-sized robot. The entire integrated system with embedded voltage regulation, data conversion, clock generation, as well as both general-purpose and accelerated computing units, weighs less than 3 mg after die thinning. It is self-contained and can be powered directly off of a lithium battery. Measured results show open-loop wing flapping controlled by the SoC and improved energy efficiency through the use of hardware acceleration and supply resilience through the use of adaptive clocking.