Nanoliter-Scale Autonomous Electronics: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Abstract

While CMOS scaling has long been driven by economic and performance concerns in macroscale systems such as computers and smartphones, it has also been recognized that such physically small electronic components could pave the way to vanishingly small autonomous systems. Originally dubbed “smart dust”, these emerging systems include ultra-small wireless sensors, ID tags, and even robots. Such “Smart Dust” was envisioned to be smaller than a grain of sand, yet measuring and reporting signals around it while being powered and communicating entirely wirelessly [1], [2].