Capybara: A Reconfigurable Energy Storage Architecture for Energy-harvesting Devices

Wednesday March 21, 2018
Location: CIC Panther Hollow Conference
Time: 4:30PM

Abstract

Battery-free, energy-harvesting devices operate using energy collected exclusively from their environment. Energy-harvesting devices allow maintenance-free deployment in extreme environments, but requires a power system to provide the right amount of energy when an application needs it. Existing systems must provision energy capacity statically based on the highest-energy task in the application, which compromises responsiveness of sensing tasks. This work presents Capybara: a co-designed hardware/software power system with dynamically reconfigurable energy storage capacity to match the demand of each task.

Bio

Alexei Colin is a PhD student in the Abstract Group lead by Prof. Brandon Lucia at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is focused on system support for reliable and efficient intermittent computing on energy-harvesting devices. His projects span the embedded computing stack from language to hardware circuits.