Kristofer Pister

Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Co-Director, BSAC and Swarm Lab

512 Cory Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-1740

He received a B.A. in Applied Physics from UC San Diego, 1986, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1989 and 1992. Prior to joining the faculty of EECS in 1996, he taught in the Electrical Engineering Department, UCLA.

Professor Pister developed Smart Dust, a project with the goal of putting a complete sensing/communication platform inside a cubic millimeter. For this project, he was awarded the second annual Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation, in 2006, from the I/UCRC Association, for developing and successfully commercializing Smart Dust. He has also focused his energies on synthetic insects, which he has characterized as “basically Smart Dust with legs.” Professor Pister was award the Alfred F. Sperry Founder Award in 2009 for his “contributions to the science and technology of instrumentation, systems, and automation.”

Kris is a co-Director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) and the Ubiquitious Swarm Lab.

Click here to view Kristofer Pister’s Google Scholar Bio.

Research

Research interests include micro robotics, synthetic insects, and smart dust.

Research Description

Kris Pister’s two most entertaining research projects right now are synthetic insects and smart dust. The Smart Dust project is aimed at putting a complete sensing/communication platform inside a cubic millimeter, including power supply, analog and digital electronics, etc. Thousands or millions of these dust motes will all communicate simultaneously. Applications are all over the map. Instrumented hospital rooms so that your syringe knows if you’re the right patient or not, instrumented bodies so that we can all participate in 3D virtual ballet, instrumented atmosphere so we can predict weather.

The synthetic insect project is basically smart dust with legs. They’re shooting for millimeter scale legged locotion, or possibly flying. They’re working with people in biology who study insect walking, running, and flight. In his vision of the project, within a few years we’ll be able to use a web-based cut-and-paste design tool to select legs, motors, sensors, and electronics to design our own custom insects, download control algorithms to them, and turn them loose in a 3D interactive simulation to socialize or do battle with other virtual bugs. Once you get the design you like, you press the button, it gets submitted for fabrication, and two months later you’ve got the actual device (more likely hundreds of them) running around on your desk.

Research Areas

Micro/Nano Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS)
Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics (CIR), Micro-robotics
Integrated Circuits (INC), Low-power circuits

Research Centers

Research Support

Thomas Parsons
353 Cory
“6430664”
tparsons@berkeley.edu

Education

1992, Ph.D., EECS, UC Berkeley
1989, M.S., EECS, UC Berkeley
1986, B.A., Applied Physics, UC San Diego

Awards

Publications

S. Venkatraman, J. D. Long, K. Pister, and J. M. Carmena, “Wireless inertial sensors for monitoring animal behavior,” in Proc. 29th Annual Intl. Conf. of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS 2007), Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2007, pp. 378-381.
B. W. Cook, A. Berny, A. Molnar, S. Lanzisera, and K. Pister, “Low-power 2.4-GHz transceiver with passive RX front-end and 400-mV supply,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 41, no. 12, pp. 2757-2766, Dec. 2006.
B. W. Cook, A. D. Berny, A. Molnar, S. Lanzisera, and K. Pister, “An ultra-low-power 2.4GHz RF transceiver for wireless sensor networks in 130nm CMOS with 400mV supply and an integrated passive RX front-end,” in 2006 IEEE Intl. Solid-State Circuits Conf. (ISSCC ’06). Digest of Technical Papers, L. C. Fujino, Ed., Vol. 49, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2006, pp. 370-371.
B. S. Leibowitz, B. Boser, and K. Pister, “A 256-element CMOS imaging receiver for free-space optical communication,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 40, no. 9, pp. 1948-1956, Sep. 2005.
M. D. Scott, B. Boser, and K. Pister, “An ultralow-energy ADC for Smart Dust,” IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 38, no. 7, pp. 1123-1129, July 2003.
M. Last, B. S. Leibowitz, B. Cagdaser, A. Jog, L. Zhou, B. Boser, and K. Pister, “Toward a wireless optical communication link between two small unmanned aerial vehicles,” in Proc. 2003 IEEE Intl. Symp. on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2003), Vol. 3, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2003, pp. 930-933.
S. Hollar, A. Flynn, S. Bellew, and K. Pister, “Solar powered 10 mg silicon robot,” in Proc. IEEE 16th Annual Intl. Conf. on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 2003, pp. 706-711.
B. A. Warneke, M. D. Scott, B. S. Leibowitz, L. Zhou, C. L. Bellew, J. A. Chediak, J. M. Kahn, B. Boser, and K. Pister, “An autonomous 16 mm3 solar-powered node for distributed wireless sensor networks,” in Proc. 2002 1st Intl. Conf. on Sensors, Vol. 2, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2002, pp. 1510-1515.
J. V. Clark, D. Bindel, W. Kao, E. Zhu, A. Kuo, N. Zhou, J. Nie, J. Demmel, Z. Bai, S. Govindjee, K. Pister, M. Gu, and A. Agogino, “Addressing the needs of complex MEMS design,” in Proc. 15th IEEE Intl. Conf. on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2002, pp. 204-209.
B. S. Leibowitz, B. Boser, and K. Pister, “CMOS “smart pixel” for free-space optical communication,” in Proc. SPIE: Sensors and Camera Systems for Scientific, Industrial, and Digital Photography Applications II, M. M. Blouke, J. Canosa, and N. Sampat, Eds., Vol. 4306, Bellingham, WA: SPIE, 2001, pp. 308-318.
L. Doherty, B. A. Warneke, B. Boser, and K. Pister, “Energy and performance considerations for smart dust,” Intl. J. Parallel and Distributed Systems & Networks, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 121-133, March 2001.
B. Warneke, M. Last, B. Liebowitz, and K. Pister, “Smart Dust: Communicating with a cubic-millimeter computer,” Computer, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 44-51, Jan. 2001.
P. B. Chu, J. T. Chen, R. Yeh, G. Lin, J. C. P. Huang, B. A. Warneke, and K. Pister, “Controlled pulse-etching with xenon difluoride,” in TRANSDUCERS ’97 Digest of Technical Papers, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 1997, pp. 665-668.
K. Pister, M. W. Judy, S. R. Burgett, and R. S. Fearing, “Microfabricated hinges,” Sensors and Actuators A (Physical), vol. A33, no. 3, pp. 249-256, June 1992.