Jenshan Lin
$500,004
Case Western Reserve University
Ohio
Engineering (ENG)
In the post COVID-19 era, the medical community is increasingly adopting remote healthcare as an alternative to conventional medicine. Wirelessly-connected biomedical devices are an indispensable part of such remote healthcare solutions. With the increased longevity of patients, the long-term reliability of the wireless transceivers used in biomedical devices is becoming a concern. Furthermore, the sensitive nature of personalized healthcare raises concerns about the data security. This CAREER project will study the security threats and failure mechanisms in radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC) and develop intelligent, low-energy analog solutions so as to create a trusted wireless transceiver with the capability to detect and cure impairments. The proposed research in this CAREER project will fundamentally change the remote healthcare solutions by developing a new class of miniaturized self-healing and trusted wireless transceivers that can provide high-speed connectivity at the device level. Moreover, this project enhances the foundational knowledge in hardware security by introducing novel low-energy analog encryption techniques for use in secure data communications. The education plan in this project will significantly enhance the knowledge of students in communications and hardware security. Through collaboration with industry, students will have the opportunity to work with industrial mentors and gain practical knowledge in electronics. The plan also contains initiatives focused on STEM education in K-12. As part of this effort, summer workshops on secure electronics and data communications will be offered to local high school students and their teachers, followed by design competitions to inspire the students, particularly those from underrepresented groups and minorities, to seek post-secondary education in STEM related fields. Lab visits and boot camps will also be organized as part of outreach activities to share resources and facilitate the knowledge transfer to teachers and students.<br/><br/>The goal of this CAREER project is to develop intelligent, self-healing and trusted wireless transceivers by introducing low-energy analog asymmetric encryption and adaptive self-healing. The proposed research consist of two research thrust areas: (1) low-energy trusted data communications with smart threat detection capability, and (2) intelligent self-healing. Both research thrusts benefit from energy-efficient analog neural networks (ANNs) to improve the functionality. Applying innovative asymmetric analog encryption on the modulated waveforms in the wireless transceiver, an energy-efficient end-to-end encrypted wireless communication link is created. The proposed design will use scalable linear time-invariant (LTI) to generate the keys needed for encryption and decryption. A low-energy ANN will monitor the transceiver parameters for any sign of potential attack and notify the encryption engine accordingly. The transceiver will also be authenticated using low-overhead device fingerprinting techniques. Similarly, a low-energy adaptive analog self-healing unit will be developed to increase the reliability by detecting the performance degradation and abnormalities, and actively adjust the transceiver parameters. The self-healing unit uses an innovative dual-loop adaptive structure. The first loop is built within the analog front-end (AFE) and is always engaged to monitor short-term performance degradations while the second loop relies on a low-energy ANN and samples the data selectively to correct for long-term defects. The ANNs used in both research thrusts are built using energy-efficient spiking neural networks (SNNs) and are co-designed to reduce the delay and area overhead. The outcome of this CAREER project will enhance the remote healthcare by accelerating the adoption of smart personalized solutions in medical community, particularly for long-term treatment of chronic diseases. It will also lay the foundation of a smart, self-healing and trusted electronic platform for biomedical applications.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.