The recently introduced 5G New Radio is the first wireless standard natively designed to support critical and massive machine type communications (MTC). However, it is already becoming evident that some of the more demanding requirements for MTC cannot be fully supported by 5G networks. Alongside, emerging use cases and applications towards 2030 will give rise to new and more stringent requirements on wireless connectivity in general and MTC in particular. Next generation wireless networks, namely 6G, should therefore be an agile and efficient convergent network designed to meet the diverse and challenging requirements anticipated by 2030. This paper explores the main drivers and requirements of MTC towards 6G, and discusses a wide variety of enabling technologies. More specifically, we first explore the emerging key performance indicators for MTC in 6G. Thereafter, we present a vision for an MTC-optimized holistic end-to-end network architecture. Finally, key enablers towards (1) ultra-low power MTC, (2) massively scalable global connectivity, (3) critical and dependable MTC, and (4) security and privacy preserving schemes for MTC are detailed. Our main objective is to present a set of research directions considering different aspects for an MTC-optimized 6G network in the 2030-era.

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A versatile resistive temperature sensor for Internet-of-Things is presented, based on an all-dynamic architecture. This allows efficient scaling of power with conversion rate, enables optional oversampling for an adaptable resolution, and provides efficient adaptability to different resistor values. A new double-sided measurement mode is proposed to compensate for offset, 1/f noise and nonidealities at system level. The sensor achieves a minimum power consumption of 174 pW at 1 S/s measurement rate, which scales up to 488.3 nW at 100 kS/s. It offers a nominal rms resolution of 0.61 • C and a resolution FoM as low as 1.82 pJ• • C 2 .

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Recently, there has been an increasing demand for advanced classification capabilities embedded on wearable battery constrained devices, such as smartphones or -watches. Achieving such functionality with a tight power and energy budget has proven a real challenge, specifically for large-scale Neural Network based applications. Previously, cascaded systems have been proposed to minimize energy consumption for such applications, either through using a single wake-up stage, or by using a linear-or tree based cascade of consecutive classifiers that allow early termination. In this work, we expand upon these concepts by generalizing cascades to hierarchical cascaded processing, where a hierarchy of increasingly complex classifiers, each designed and trained for a specific subtask is used. This hierarchical approach significantly outperforms the wake-up based approach by up to 2 orders of magnitude in energy consumption at iso-accuracy, specifically in systems with sparse input data such as speech recognition and visual object detection. This paper presents a general design framework for such systems and illustrates how to optimize them towards minimum energy consumption. The text further proposes a roofline model for cascaded systems, derives system level trade-offs and proves the approaches validity through a visual classification case-study.

We propose a post-fabrication calibration technique for RF circuits that is performed during production testing with minimum extra cost. Calibration is enabled by equipping the circuit with tuning knobs and sensors. Optimal tuning knob identification is achieved in one-shot based on a single test step that involves measuring the sensor outputs once. For this purpose, we rely on variation-aware sensors which provide measurements that remain invariant under tuning knob changes. As an auxiliary benefit, the variation-aware sensors are non-intrusive and totally transparent to the circuit. The technique is demonstrated on a 65nm RF power amplifier.

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