Abstract
In recent year, sensors are used to provide information about the measured parameters or to identify control states. Although they are widely used by diverse applications nowadays, they still cannot be easily integrated due to the lack of a set of common interfaces. To build unified, low-cost and networked smart sensors, IEEE 1451.3 is a very feasible solution. It provides a common interface for distributed multi-drop systems, which can relieve the burden of the manufacturer for supporting a cross product of sensors versus networks. In this thesis, I design and implement IEEE 1451.3 MAC layer into a chip. The implementation includes IEEE 1451.3 MAC (Media Access Control) functions, such as framing/deframing, addressing, and error detection. In addition, I also realize a CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection) scheme used to resolve the collision problem in the sensor network. All of these functions are synthesized with UMC advanced 0.18um cell library provided by CIC. Since the goal of this design is to implement an IEEE 1451.3 MAC chip which is suitable for applications in sensor nodes, issues such as power consumption and area cost are most important. The one with lower power consumption is the one with the long life time, which in turn is of greater worth. To meet this requirement, the power consumption and gate counts must be taken into consideration carefully. In this design, the total gate counts of the circuit are about 6.3k with the power consumption about 570uW.