1) "COTS-dust" or "Macro-motes" really took off due to the
interaction with David Culler and his students in CS who
wrote an operating system (tinyOS)
for them. There are several
follow-on projects at Berkeley using tinyOS on 1" scale motes,
they are commercially available from Crossbow
(www.xbow.com),
and are being used in research at about a dozen different
companies and universities.
2) we had a really outstanding time with an air-emplaced
network demo
in 29 Palms, CA.
3) The cubic-millimeter goal is still alive. We are currently (7/1/01)
testing a 0.15 mm^3 CMOS ASIC which contains a 1Mbps optical
receiver, 8 bit ADC, light sensor, and digital controller. We
are about to start fabbing the partner chip to the ASIC, which
will be a MEMS chip containing several multi-junction solar power
supplies, an accelerometer, and a modulatable corner-cube
retroreflector.
Together these two chips will have a volume of just about a cubic
millimeter. We're still hopeful that we will have a functional
laboratory demo by the end of the contract (August '01).
ksjp