Wireless Circuits for Insect Flight Control

For decades, scientists and engineers have been fascinated by cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, that fuse artificial and natural systems. Cyborgs enable harnessing biological systems that have been honed by evolutionary forces over millennia to achieve astounding feats. Male moths can detect a single pheromone molecule, a sensitivity of roughly 10-21 grams. Thus, cyborgs can perform tasks at scales and efficiencies that would ordinarily seem incomprehensible. Semiconductor technology is central to realizing this vision offering powerful processing and communication capabilities, as well as low weight, small size, and deterministic control. An emerging cyborg application is moth flight control, where electronics and MEMS devices are placed on and within a moth to control flight direction. Our efforts on this project have focused on developing the low power circuits required by this cyborg moth application. We also are working with biologists and other engineers to integrate the electronics in the cyborg moth system and demonstrate robust flight control.

Through our research efforts, we have demonstrated several circuits and systems. An all-digital pulsed ultra-wideband (UWB) transmitter was developed that requires only 19pJ/pulse and meets the FCC spectral mask without requiring any off-chip filtering. A highly integrated, pulsed UWB receiver SoC was developed that achieves near compliance with the 802.15.4a wireless standard. The receiver includes an RF front end, a digital demodulator and synchronizer, clocking circuitry, extensive calibration logic, and a moth stimulator. The receiver SoC has successfully demonstrated in the cyborg moth system – it has received packets and caused a change in the flight direction of a flying moth. Die stacking and a flexible PCB were combined to reduce overall system weight, including the battery, to 1g.