Power Management Units (PMU) are present in most electronic devices today. However, for power and area constrained applications, their design becomes a real challenge, especially when cell-sized autonomous microsystems are targeted. This paper presents an LDO regulator and a voltage reference, which are usually a must in any PMU, for autonomous microsystems fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology. This PMU has been designed to minimize quiescent power and area, consuming a minimum power of 15.6 nW and occupying only$391~\mu m^{2}$, while being able to deliver up to$40~\mu A$to the load. No significant degradation was observed, as the measured line regulation is 0.173%/V, the temperature coefficient is 128.4 ppm/°C over a very wide temperature range going from 0 °C up to 120 °C, and the PSR at low frequencies is −67.1 dB.

Soft actuators with integrated sensing have shown utility in a variety of applications such as assistive wearables, robotics, and interactive input devices. Despite their promise, these actuators can be difficult to both design and fabricate. As a solution, we present a workflow for computationally designing and digitally fabricating soft pneumatic actuators via a machine knitting process. Machine knitting is attractive as a fabrication process because it is fast, digital (programmable), and provides access to a rich material library of functional yarns for specified mechanical behavior and integrated sensing. Our method uses elastic stitches to construct non-homogeneous knitting structures, which program the bending of actuators when inflated. Our method also integrates pressure and swept frequency capacitive sensing structures using conductive yarns. The entire knitted structure is fabricated automatically in a single machine run. We further provide a computational design interface for the user to interactively preview actuators’ quasi-static shape when authoring elastic stitches. Our sensing-integrated actuators are cost-effective, easy to design, robust to large actuation, and require minimal manual post-processing. We demonstrate five use-cases of our actuators in relevant application settings.

With the recent interest in wearable electronics and smart garments, digital fabrication of sensing and interactive textiles is in increasing demand. Recently, advances in digital machine knitting offer opportunities for the programmable, rapid fabrication of soft, breathable textiles. In this paper, we present KnitUI, a novel, accessible machine-knitted user interface based on resistive pressure sensing. Employing conductive yarns and various machine knitting techniques, we computationally design and automatically fabricate the double-layered resistive sensing structures as well as the coupled conductive connection traces with minimal manual post-processing. We present an interactive design interface for users to customize KnitUI’s colors, sizes, positions, and shapes. After investigating design parameters for the optimized sensing and interactive performance, we demonstrate KnitUI as a portable, deformable, washable, and customizable interactive and sensing platform. It obtains diverse applications, including wearable user interfaces, tactile sensing wearables, and artificial robot skin.

Daily human activities, e.g., locomotion, exercises, and resting, are heavily guided by the tactile interactions between the human and the ground. In this work, leveraging such tactile interactions, we propose a 3D human pose estimation approach using the pressure maps recorded by a tactile carpet as input. We build a low-cost, high-density, large-scale intelligent carpet, which enables the real-time recordings of human-floor tactile interactions in a seamless manner. We collect a synchronized tactile and visual dataset on various human activities. Employing a state-of-the-art camera-based pose estimation model as supervision, we design and implement a deep neural network model to infer 3D human poses using only the tactile information. Our pipeline can be further scaled up to multi-person pose estimation. We evaluate our system and demonstrate its potential applications in diverse fields.

Recent experiments since the discovery of monolayer graphite or graphene have led to an exciting revival in the interest in the electronic applications for graphene, as well as other 2-D materials such as hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and molybdenum disulfide (MoS$_{2}$). These layered materials serve as an exciting new platform for flexible and transparent electronics where surfaces can be enriched with new functionality. This paper aims to provide an overview behind these new class of materials ranging upon important issues for electronic integration including synthesis all the way to current state-of-the-art circuits and devices made from these materials.

This special issue aims to highlight some of the different devices and applications currently being pursued. This volume of the Special Issue has 19 papers that roughly cover five subareas that are important for future applications of graphene in electronic and photonic devices, circuits, and systems. The subareas are: 1) epitaxial growth of graphene; 2) single field-effect transistors (FETs), high-frequency RF mixer circuits, frequency multipliers, and oscillators; 3) multiscale modeling of graphene-based transistors; 4) graphene photonics, including plasmonic applications, graphene-based teraHertz devices, and graphene-based photodetectors; and 5) other graphene-based devices and applications such as resistive memory, on-chip interconnects, microelectromechanical systems, and graphene bioelectronics. The papers are briefly summarized here.