Michigan Micro Mote – World's Smallest Computer

Very cool.<p>The pessimist (realist?) in me can&#x27;t avoid remembering Vernor Vinge&#x27;s &quot;A Deepness in the Sky&quot; novel, where the perfect surveillance device is a network of &quot;dust computers&quot;.

This is really cool.<p>The article is pretty light on the technical details about the actual processor architecture.<p>I think their choice of naming is unfortunate, confusion with ARM&#x27;s Cortex-M3 is quite likely. Or are you supposed to pronounce this &quot;M to the third&quot; or something?<p><i>Update</i>: D&#x27;oh, of course it&#x27;s &quot;M-cubed&quot;. I knew that, I blame not being a native speaker for not thinking about it. :)

Smaller, lower power computers are great. But the problem is, and remains, the power consumption of the RF channel. It&#x27;s all well and good that your processor consumes microamps, but one second of WiFi traffic at a reasonable transmit power takes hundreds of milliamps. Smart sensing system&#x27;s power consumption is dominated by wireless communication energy costs.

And I thought it was hard to find my phone now.<p>But seriously, ambient light harvesting and (eventually) a 20 meter communication range are the coolest parts of all this.<p>Ignoring the &quot;smart swarm&quot; applications I could see these being generally useful as an alternative to JTAG for other really small devices.

I&#x27;m having troubles finding the actual spec (e.g. size of ram, rom etc). Anyone has more info about it?

Is this named in homage to this? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qsl.net&#x2F;wb5ude&#x2F;kc6wdk&#x2F;transmitter.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qsl.net&#x2F;wb5ude&#x2F;kc6wdk&#x2F;transmitter.html</a>

This is really cool. Running off of ambient light! I am looking forward to what they can do with swarms of them.

Dust-computing is upon us. All hail the holy grey goo!<p>Seriously though, I wonder what the setback is with using energy harvesting in general - or are we just at the beginning of the wave of energy harvesting revolution?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.st.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;en&#x2F;press&#x2F;p3498" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.st.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;en&#x2F;press&#x2F;p3498</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linear.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;energy_harvesting" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linear.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;energy_harvesting</a>

Stretching this a bit, when someone marriages this with the MIT things that auto-assemble... we&#x27;ll risk getting some sort of Stargate&#x27;s Asurans race, which are based on nanites. Self-assembling nanobots [0].<p>Of course this is just sci-fi... but nonetheless...<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stargate.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asuran" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stargate.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asuran</a>

In the linked paper, they describe their choice of 180nm as optimal for power. Given the tools they used, they could make an even smaller computer with 130nm or 90nm technology. But the power draw would be higher according to the graph. Or they could add more memory instead of a smaller size.<p>The CPU is absolutely tiny, not much larger than the temperature sensor.

So there would literally be a microchip in my brain?! All kidding aside, this is cool.

Can&#x27;t wait for the Arduino equivalent of one of these.