14-10-2010, 12:30 PM
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Smart Dust
Introduction:
Smart dust is a tiny dust size device with extra-ordinary capabilities. Smart dust combines sensing, computing, wireless communication capabilities and autonomous power supply within volume of only few millimeters and that too at low cost. These devices are proposed to be so small and light in weight that they can remain suspended in the environment like an ordinary dust particle. These properties of Smart Dust will render it useful in monitoring real world phenomenon without disturbing the original process to an observable extends. Presently the achievable size of Smart Dust is about 5mm cube, but we hope that it will eventually be as small as a speck of dust. Individual sensors of smart dust are often referred to as motes because of their small size. These devices are also known as MEMS, which stands for micro electro-mechanical sensors.
2. Background:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding Smart Dust research heavily since the late 1990s, seeing virtually limitless applications in the sphere of modern warfare. So far the research has been promising, with prototype smart dust sensors as small as 5mm.But further scaling down needs advance technological changes. Costs have been dropping rapidly with technological innovations, bringing individual motes down to as little as $50 each, with hopes of dropping below $1 per mote in the near future.
