ARM-ECS Awarded EPSRC iCASE PhD Scholarship

The ARM-ECS Research Centre has been awarded an ARM iCASE scholarship for research on the topic of: “Off and On Again: Optimising Intermittently-Powered Systems”.

The scholarship offered includes both tuition fees (UK/EU students) and an annual tax-free stipend of £17,000 pa for living costs (EU students may be eligible, e.g. if you’re currently studying an undergraduate degree in the UK, see www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/eligibility).

Candidates who are intelligent, enthusiastic and have an interest in digital systems are encouraged to apply.

PROPOSED RESEARCH AREA: Powering billions of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes will be a significant challenge: batteries increase cost, environmental impact and maintenance. Energy harvesting (EH) scavenges power from sources such as light, vibration, or temperature difference. EH sensor nodes are now being deployed with a battery topped up to smooth out temporal variations in EH and ensure reliable operation. A recent competing approach proposes nodes with no energy storage, which only operate when power is available, maintaining their state in non-volatile memory (NVM) between intermittent power cycles. Such systems either use a purely software approach (taking regular program state checkpoints in NVM) or purely hardware (with all state being in NVM). This project proposes to explore and demonstrate a HW/SW co-design strategy to maximise the amount of useful computation per power-cycle through optimising software structures and the use of NVM.

For more information, click here.