Spintronics technology extends battery life for wireless sensors by up to 10 times

Tohoku University and NEC Corporation have developed a Micro Control Unit for wireless sensors using spintronics-based logic integrated circuit technology.

Early testing has demonstrated that power consumption of the new MCU has been reduced to as little as 1/80 of conventional systems.

As a result, the battery life of sensors equipped with this new MCU can be extended by as much as 10 times.

Currently, expectations are growing for technology that analyzes a large volume of data (big data) collected from various sensing systems to identify current conditions, such as system errors and equipment failures, and to make use of the data for predicting future conditions.

The maintenance of social infrastructure, such as bridges and tunnels, requires a high-performance wireless sensor capable of stable, prolonged operation in order to constantly collect and transmit data related to the infrastructure's status.

Although it is essential to improve the performance of the MCU, which is the processing center, increased power consumption becomes a challenge when the performance of a wireless sensor is improved.

Tohoku University and NEC have jointly developed a new MCU technology to significantly reduce the power consumption of a high-performance MCU.

A high-performance MCU normally consumes a large amount of power, but this technology reduces the standby power of the entire MCU by making the logic circuits and memory in the MCU non-volatile, and achieving both high performance and power savings at the same time.

Applying this MCU to a wireless sensor enables the advanced processing of data while substantially reducing power consumption.

Tohoku University and NEC have developed a variety of integrated circuits applying spintronics logic integrated circuits technology.

Through the development and demonstration of this technology, Tohoku University and NEC have achieved their target of reducing the power efficiency index of various kinds of LSI to 1/64 or less.