Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief

Applications ranging from health care to environmental, structural, and spectrum monitoring are driving the need for low-power sensors that will permeate our world, delivering data that enhances our quality of life. EDN estimates that manufacturers will develop and deploy 1000 sensors per person over the next 10 years, amounting to more than 1 trillion sensors.

Those sensors in turn will produce a lot of data for processing. Perhaps that processing will take place in remote server farms, but it’s a good bet that at least some processing will occur within embedded microcontrollers near the sensors themselves. The resulting data then will need transmitting—often over a wireless link. The entire operation—sensing, processing, and communications of the results—must take place with extremely low power consumption, affording low heat dissipation and long battery life or, perhaps, elimination of the battery through energy-harvesting techniques. Read the rest of this article.