Sensors in the darkness under a bridge might harvest energy from the vibrations of traffic.

What if there were enough safety inspectors to regularly examine every old structure everywhere in the world, identifying signs of wear and tear long before a building came crashing down or a dam failed? And what if those inspectors worked 24/7 for peanuts?

They’re on their way, and they’ll be made of silicon.

Sensor technology is on the verge of bursting on the scene with applications practically everywhere: from monitoring patients at home to observing changing conditions on the sea floor.

Their most dramatic impact, however, could entail preventing the kind of drama that ensues regularly amid all the man-made infrastructure on the planet, from hundreds of feet below ground to thousands of feet above. And the enabling technologies for such sensors are well under way at TI.

• Low power: Such sensors must operate on ultra-low power, and system-level optimization is one approach to ensuring this. This includes algorithm optimizations that have sensors spend most of their time sleeping, waking up briefly only when necessary to take a reading or to receive or transmit data, then returning to sleep mode.
• Energy harvesting: Freeing sensors from the limitations of short battery life is essential to their wide dispersal and lack of required upkeep. Sunlight is one obvious source, but clever engineers can find energy even in the darkness under a highway bridge where a structural-monitoring sensor might harvest energy from the vibrations of traffic.
• Wireless nodes: Ultra-low-power wireless communications is also essential for ubiquitous sensing, and TI engineers are exploring innovative ways to drive the power required for such communications down to just a few microwatts.
• MEMS: Sensors can come in many forms, including micro-electromechanical systems. That’s the path TI engineers chose when developing an innovative temperature sensor, devising a tiny silicon cavity to do the job. MEMS are also part of the engineering toolkit for developing tomorrow’s infrastructure sensors – as are innovative analog front ends.
• Processors: TI engineers are also exploring innovations in architecture and memory systems with ultra-low-power operation in mind, designing systems that minimize the energy required for any given task.

Of course most of the time infrastructure sensors will have nothing to report. But like a silent baby monitor, that lack of news is valuable reassurance in itself.