Two recent articles describe a project at the University of California at Berkeley to develop 'smart dust' ó sensor-laden networked computer nodes that are just cubic millimetres in volume. While hardly nanoscale, such work is likely to provide useful experience when it comes to developing cooperative swarms of nano-scale devices in the future.
- "Network in a dust storm", by Luke Collins, 5 April 2002, in the UK edition of EE Times. As the article notes, "As [the Berkeley researchers] develop the various elements of smart dust, researchers are also creating new units of measurement, where data transfer and computing performance will be measured in nano or even picoJoules of energy consumed per bit handled. The smart dust project envisions a complete sensor network node, including power supply, processor, sensor and communications mechanisms, in a single cubic millimetre."
- "Computing with a pinch of sand", 9 April 2002, from ZDNet News, provides additional detail.
Similar work by a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison was noted in a Nanodot post from 20 December 2001.
