Title: Low-power smart passive REU for industrial IoT applications

Authors: Vyasa Sai; Marlin H. Mickle

Addresses: RFID Center of Excellence, Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA ' RFID Center of Excellence, Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA

Abstract: Energy management at passive terminal nodes is a critical design goal in the industrial internet of things (IoT) network. This article introduces a programmable low power remote execution unit (REU) based on an 8051 instruction set architecture (ISA) for passive radio frequency identification (RFID) applications in industrial IoT. The REU acts as a passive device processor requiring the interrogator to transmit instructions to be executed over a wireless link. This paper investigates the proposed asynchronous REU implementation with respect to the power consumption, area and speed and also provides a performance comparison to an existing clocked REU implementation. Based on the post-layout simulation results, the proposed asynchronous REU has lower power consumption when compared to the clocked REU operating at higher frequencies. Such a low power REU in the context of passive processing has a significant impact on IoT, a ubiquitous industrial application of RFID technology.

Keywords: asynchronous; internet of things; industrial IoT; radio frequency identification; passive RFID; remote execution unit; low power REU; smart REU; energy management; passive terminal nodes; energy consumption; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAD.2016.082131

International Journal of Circuits and Architecture Design, 2016 Vol.2 No.2, pp.105 - 117

Received: 27 Aug 2015
Accepted: 21 Oct 2015
Published online: 08 Feb 2017 *

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