The Precursors To Smart Dust?
by
Randy Mears
When I read this article about the worlds tiniest radio I didn’t expect it to be much more than fluff. Then I remembered an article that I had just read about tiny solar cells and it didn’t seem so fluffy anymore.
Smart dust is a concept that technology futurists throw around with reckless abandon. For most of us the concept is interesting but the current state of miniaturization and power generation tells us that the actual implementation of smart dust is something for the very distant future.
The two technologies demonstrated in these articles, when combined, bring that distant future much closer. Combining MEMS power generation with MEMS micro radio would have been sufficient, but the technologies in these articles go a step further, allowing us to conceptually take the whole smart dust idea from the MEMS to the NANO scale. With such technology on the horizon, it makes me think that the really big issues around smart dust won’t be based on technological feasibility (as I had previously thought) but will instead focus on security and privacy issues.
