First Battery-Powered Standalone Software-Defined Radio
Wireless protocol design for IoT networks is an active area of research which has seen significant interest and developments in recent years. The research community is however handicapped by the lack of a flexible, easily deployable platform for prototyping IoT endpoints that would allow for ground up protocol development and investigation of how such protocols perform at scale. We introduce tinySDR, the first software-defined radio platform tailored to the needs of power-constrained IoT endpoints. TinySDR provides a standalone, fully programmable low power software-defined radio solution that can be duty cycled for battery operation like a real IoT endpoint, and more importantly, can be programmed over the air to allow for large scale deployment. We present extensive evaluation of our platform showing it consumes as little as 30 uW of power in sleep mode, which is 10,000x lower than existing SDR platforms.
Features
Frequency Coverage
TinySDR supports both Sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz ISM bands.
Low-Power Architecture
TinySDR has minimum power consumption in various operation.
Over the Air Programming
TinySDR FPGA and microcontroller can be wirelessly programmed.
Internet of Things
TinySDR can support most IoT communication protocols.
Efficient Power Management
TinySDR has full control on power management.
Standalone Operation
TinySDR can operate stanalone without any computer.
License
This work is licensed under Apache License 2.0.
RF Front-End
Sample Rate
0.4 ~ 4 MHz
ADC/DAC Resolution
13 bits
Frequency
389.5 ~ 510 MHz
779 ~ 1020 MHz
2.4 ~ 2.483 GHz
FPGA
LUT Size
24K
Embedded Memory
1008 Kbits
18 x 18 Multipliers
28
Distributed RAM
194 Kbits
Microcontroller
Flash Size
256 KB
SRAM Size
64 KB
Frequency
Up to 48 MHz
Software and Harware Design
We provide open source software and hardware schematic for research on GitHub.