Harsh Desai

Profile

Ph.D. Candidate
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Email: harshd@andrew.cmu.edu

My Advisor: Brandon Lucia
My Lab: The ABSTRACT research group at CMU
My Resume



Research Interests:

I like to design computers that run without batteries.
These batteryless computers extract their energy from their environments, using the harvested energy for sensing, processing and communication tasks.
I am interested in designing full-stack (microarchitecture through to software) batteryless computers, with a focus on improving end-to-end performance.

Camaroptera sample Camaroptera

Projects:

1. Camaroptera: I have a developed a tiny camera that runs entirely on solar power, capable of intelligent on-board processing (DNN-based human detection) and JPEG compression with only a few kilobytes of memory.
This camera, called Camaroptera (after the bird), can send these JPEG-compressed images across several kilometers to a remote basestation using a LoRa radio.

2. PHASE: I have developed the first performance model for energy-harvesting systems, called the PHASE model, that incorporates energy-recharging latency into the end-to-end performance of the system.
Energy-harvesting systems collect energy from their surroundings and store it in some small energy-storage element, like a battery or a capacitor. During operation, they consume this stored energy. When the energy-storage element depletes below a certain threshold, energy-harvesting systems wait in a deep-sleep or OFF state for the energy to recharge.

Publications: