Enabling High-rate Backscatter Sensing at Scale

Abstract

This paper presents μTag, an ultra-low-power backscatter sensor that supports high-frequency sensing of a large number of targets simultaneously. The core of μTag is an RF "gene editing" technique that embeds both the identity of the sensor and the real-time motion state of the attached target intensively in the transient features of the sensor's RF signal, in a collision-resilient manner. We provide practical techniques which i) generate such "genetic signal" with purely analog and extremely simple circuits; and ii) separate the signals from a large scale of sensors reliably. Our experimental results show that our design can support concurrent tracking of 150 targets with a 12kHz per-tag sampling rate. We also demonstrate with multiple sensing applications that μTag can achieve high-speed and large-scale motion tracking and rotation frequency sensing. The PCB power consumption of μTag is 38~107μW, according to the operating frequency of the tag. Our ASIC simulation based on the 40nm CMOS process shows that the power consumption can be further reduced to 0.13~0.52μW.