Green at the micro-scale: towards self-powered embedded systems

The field of green computing, which has gained tremendous importance and popularity over the past few years, has mainly focused on large computing systems such as server farms. This talk makes the case that it is equally important for green computing to be applied at the micro-scale, targeting the billions of embedded devices found everywhere around us. A promising start in this direction is to power embedded systems using environmental (renewable) energy sources such as solar, wind, vibration, etc., which raises the possibility of self-sustaining embedded systems. This tutorial highlights the challenges involved in architecting such self-sustaining embedded systems and discusses various hardware and software techniques for their efficient design and operation.