Reconfigurable Technology Based Processor Design for Sensor Network Nodes Applications

Abstract

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) nodes have sensors to monitor the surrounding environment. The nodes of Sensor networks are low-cost, small size, and use embedded processors in their nodes designed.  The design concept of the nodes is to use low-cost embedded processor and other components in developing such nodes.

The present embedded processors are typically use for general-purpose applications. These embedded processors could reprogrammed to match the need of the target applications of the sensor networks. In addition, supporting these embedded processors with reconfigurable technology will enable sensor nodes to support hardware recodifications, in addition to software reprograming capability, even after releasing the nodes in the applications field. Supporting sensor nodes design with remote software and hardware modifications design will enable to use the sensor nodes to support large set of applications [1].

The sensor network applications cover large type of applications that require different type of processing and therefore a general propose processor may useful for these applications. Moreover, the general-purpose processors may support many instructions and support some architecture features that may not useful and not required by sensors networks applications.  

The core of the embedded processors that capable to support both software reprogramming and hardware reconfiguration will be reference as soft-core in this paper. The soft-core processor design will then support modifying both hardware and software that can upgrade the processor to match the needs of the target applications.  Moreover, developing the soft-core based sensor node will help to support the integration of most, if not all, sensor node’s components on a single chip without the need to develop a new system that cut the cost for the new system development, and improve the node design reliability and reduce the node’s size and cost. 

This book chapter present the use of the technology Reconfigurable to design a processor for sensor node applications. The processor, instructions set, and performance evaluation will present in this work.