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| What Is Smart Dust? (A Must Read)
| Swedishoo from Chemtrail and Company III |
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| What Is Smart Dust? (A Must Read) |
 Posted 7-22-2001 20:08 |
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Posted by gradenigo on September 07, 19100 at 13:58:07:
In Reply to: Smart Dust posted by Michael McDonald on October 14, 1999 at 11:37:20:
BERKELEY, Calif., Oct. 11 - They say walls have ears, but with a new breed of dust-sized computers, even the air could be listening - and watching too.
So-called "smart dust," now under development at the University of California at Berkeley, will pack sensors, communicators and computing power into silicon "motes" light enough to float on air. They could be put to a variety of uses, ranging from monitoring battlefield conditions to observing weather patterns or even spying.
DROPPED FROM AN aircraft, the motes could remain suspended in the atmosphere for hours - detecting heat, temperature, sound or light, among other things. An observer could then collect the results from miles away. It's no surprise that the U.S. Department of Defense, which helps fund smart dust research, is keenly interested in military applications for the technology. However, the possible uses range far beyond keeping an eye on the enemy, said Kris Pister, the principal researcher on the smart dust project.
"I like to imagine every flight across the country spitting out smart dust every five seconds," said Pister, who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. "Then the next airplane through can interrogate this cloud of dust to see what the turbulence is like," instead of depending on what another plane may have reported 20 minutes earlier.
GRAINS OF SILICON
Right now, motes are five millimeters wide, about the size of an aspirin. By July 2001, the Berkeley researchers hope to reduce that to one or two millimeters, the size of a grain of sand. Depending on its use, a mote will contain a sensor that can detect a range of conditions, from temperature to sound to light, or even the neutron decay of a nuclear weapon. A tiny onboard computer will help store the mote's readings, combine them with other motes' readings and sort out what data is worth reporting. Because radio communications take so much power, the motes communicate with each other and with a base station using lasers and hinged micro-mirrors that flash millions of Morse-code-like signals per second. To keep motes aloft for longer, researchers are experimenting with adding "wings" like those on maple tree seeds or dandelion seed-like parachutes.
The same technological advances that make computers smaller and faster every year are the driving forces behind smart dust. Like semiconductors - the brains of computers - each mote will be carved entirely of silicon. The brains of the mote will be etched into one part of the grain of silicon. The mechanical parts will be fabricated from the rest. Similar to a child's pop-up book, each mechanical structure is "folded out" of the silicon after it has been cut out.
"We go in with probes and by hand, typically with a little threaded screw manipulator, fold things up that way," said Pister. In the case of smart dust, the pop-up structures would include communications mirrors and
maybe the "wings" that help keep it aloft. As the technology improves, flaps or other steering mechanisms might also be added.
PINT-SIZED POTENTIAL
Pister predicts smart dust motes could be manufactured for as little as 10 cents each in the next few years. Today it's possible to pack the computing power of one of the first personal computer chips - the Intel 8086 - into 200 microns or 0.2 square millimeters of silicon. For less than a penny, that's plenty of computing power for smart dust, said Pister. Silicon lasers can be manufactured for less than a cent today, too, he said. The sensing, power and steering would make up the bulk of the cost because they still have to be crafted by hand.
As the technology improves, scientists see smart dust going from passively observing to actively pursuing its targets. "I would imagine that in the not-too-distant future these things will start to have swarm-like processing capabilities where they are doing intelligent processing based on their sensor readings," said smart dust researcher Randy Katz, a Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who is developing smart dust's communications techniques. "They might be able to propel themselves in a certain direction or follow something around."
NOT JUST DUST IN THE WIND
For now, smart dust doesn't have to be airborne to be useful. It also could be dropped on the ground, stuck to walls or even sewn into clothing. The father of four young children, Pister looks forward to the day when motes in baby pajamas can detect breathing, temperature and blood pressure to alert parents' of problems. Katz likes the idea of gluing these cheap sensors all around a room so that nobody in an office freezes or fries. "Given that information, the air-conditioning system could be smart enough to keep everybody comfortable," Katz saidSmart dust could be sucked up into tornadoes to give meteorologists an inside view. Or neutron-detecting smart dust could be sprinkled on the streets of Washington to warn of nuclear terrorist threats. Spying may be the most tempting use of smart dust. Katz and Pister say the motes could conceivably be used to transmit surveillance images.
"A spy satellite might pass overhead a few minutes once or twice a day, so they're not looking all the time," said Katz. "If you think something interesting or dangerous or important is going to happen, it might make sense to figure out how to drop smart dust into that area so that you can have some kind of continuous sensing."
Any fear that Big Brother will be watching you by flushing smart dust in through your house's ventilation system, though, is probably overblown, the researchers said. "I understand the concern, but I think smart dust isn't particularly useful as a listening device," Katz said. "The FBI, the Department of Defense, all of those guys have incredible listening devices, they don't really need smart dust at this stage to make your house transparent."
http://amtexpo.com/nano/messages/1277.html
Christy
| Swedishoo from Chemtrail and Company III |
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| Smart Dust ~ Soon Spying On You |
Posted 7-22-2001 19:48 |
"Smart dust" could soon by spying on you
By Duncan Graham-Rowe,
New Scientist . 08.26.99
Cleanliness freaks have a new rationale for their pathological hatred of dust -- it could soon be spying on them.
Packed full of sensors, lasers and communications transceivers, particles of "smart dust" are being designed to communicate with one another. They could be used for a range of applications from weather monitoring to spying.
The tiny "motes" are being developed at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of a programme to produce the smallest possible devices that have a viable way of communicating with each other.
Each mote is made up of a number of microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, wired up to form a very simple computer. At present each mote is 5 millimetres long, but Kris Pister, one of the developers, says that in future they could be small enough to remain suspended in air, buoyed by the currents, sensing and communicating for hours.
The latest version not only has a thick-film battery powering it but also a solar cell to recharge it. "This remarkable package has the ability to sense and communicate, and is self-powered," says Randy Katz, a communications engineer on the project. He presented the latest work at last week's Mobicom99 mobile computing meeting in Seattle.
MEMS are made using the same photolithographic techniques as integrated circuits, so once perfected they should be easy to mass-produce. Patterns are etched out of a silicon wafer to create structures such as optical mirrors or tiny engines.
Each mote in a smart-dust system will need to survive on extremely low power, while being able to communicate kilobits of data per second. To this end, says Katz, the team has designed motes that shut down parts of themselves when they are not being used.
The latest challenge has been to devise a system that enables the motes to communicate. Katz and his colleagues decided to use optical transceivers because of their low energy demand compared with radio communications. According to Pister they have already shown that they can monitor the dust 21 kilometres across San Francisco Bay.
"There's no way you're going to get that kind of range except with optical devices," he says.
"The base station may actually reside in a hand-held unit, much like a pair of binoculars," says Katz. This would allow for simultaneous viewing of the scene from afar while superimposing any measured data on the image. He adds that this approach could be especially useful for hazardous applications such as detecting chemical weapons or sending the dust into space.
The next task is to build distributed intelligence into the dust to produce "swarm behaviour."
http://explorezone.com/archives/99_08/26_ns_micro_bugs.htm
Christy | | | |
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