M² — Microwatt Microwave Oscillator

MobiSys '26 presentation

M² stability demo

M² audio streaming demo

ACM MobiSys '26ACM MobiCom '26 DemoACM/IEEE ISLPED '26

Backscatter and tunnel-diode transmitters reach microwatt power budgets by delegating carrier generation to external infrastructure, which ties every deployment to a nearby carrier emitter. M² asks whether a tag can generate and modulate its own microwave carrier at a similar power budget, restoring a true two-device architecture.

M² is a microwatt-scale microwave oscillator built around a tunnel diode, engineered for frequency stability so that it can act as a standalone transmitter and receiver. The resulting transceiver operates at roughly 105 µW while streaming data to commodity receivers, without any external carrier source.

The work appeared as a full paper at MobiSys ‘26, where it was selected as a Featured Paper and its poster won the Best Poster Runner-Up award. A live demonstration was shown at MobiCom ‘26, and a design-contest demo at ISLPED ‘26 received a Best Demo Honorable Mention.

Publications

Microwatt Microwave (M²) Oscillator: Going Beyond the Delegation Architecture of Low-power Wireless Communication

Pramuka Sooriya Patabandige^*, Dhairya Shah^*, C. Rajashekar Reddy, Spanddhana Sara, Prabal Dutta, and Ambuj Varshney

ACM MobiSys ’26 Full Paper 🏅 Featured Paper (10/302) 🏅 Best Poster Runner-Up 🏅 ISLPED ’26 Circuit Design Contest: Honorable Mention

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{m2_mobisys26,
  author = {Sooriya Patabandige, Pramuka and Shah, Dhairya and Reddy, C. Rajashekar and Sara, Spanddhana and Dutta, Prabal and Varshney, Ambuj},
  title = {Microwatt Microwave (M²) Oscillator: Going Beyond the Delegation Architecture of Low-power Wireless Communication},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3745756.3809248},
  doi = {10.1145/3745756.3809248},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys '26)},
  pages = {941--959},
  series = {ACM MobiSys '26}
}

Poster: Going Beyond the Delegation Architecture of Low-power Wireless Communication

Dhairya Shah, Pramuka Medaranga, C. Rajashekar Reddy, Spanddhana Sara, Prabal Dutta, and Ambuj Varshney

ACM MobiSys ’26 Poster 🏅 Best Poster Runner-Up Award

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{m2_mobisys26poster,
  author = {Shah, Dhairya and Medaranga, Pramuka and Reddy, C. Rajashekar and Sara, Spanddhana and Dutta, Prabal and Varshney, Ambuj},
  title = {Poster: Going Beyond the Delegation Architecture of Low-power Wireless Communication},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3812835.3814882},
  doi = {10.1145/3812835.3814882},
  booktitle = {Companion of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys '26)},
  pages = {66--67},
  series = {ACM MobiSys '26}
}

Demo: Enabling Low-power Data Streaming through Microwatt Microwave Transceivers

Dhairya Shah^*, Pramuka Sooriya Patabandige^*, Rajashekar Reddy Chinthalapani, Spanddhana Sara, Prabal Dutta, and Ambuj Varshney

ACM MobiCom ’26 Demo

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{m2_mobicom26demo,
  author = {Shah, Dhairya and Sooriya Patabandige, Pramuka and Chinthalapani, Rajashekar Reddy and Sara, Spanddhana and Dutta, Prabal and Varshney, Ambuj},
  title = {Demo: Enabling Low-power Data Streaming through Microwatt Microwave Transceivers},
  year = {2026},
  isbn = {979-8-4007-2505-0},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3795866.3848446},
  doi = {10.1145/3795866.3848446},
  booktitle = {The 32nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking},
  location = {Austin, TX, USA},
  series = {ACM MobiCom '26}
}

Microwatt Microwave (M²) Oscillator: Enabling 105 μW, Stable and Standalone Transceivers

Dhairya Shah, Pramuka Sooriya Patabandige, C. Rajashekar Reddy, Spanddhana Sara, Prabal Dutta, and Ambuj Varshney

ACM/IEEE ISLPED ’26 Demo 🏅 Low-power Circuit Design Contest: Best Demo Honorable Mention

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{m2_islped26demo,
  author = {Shah, Dhairya and Sooriya Patabandige, Pramuka and Reddy, C. Rajashekar and Sara, Spanddhana and Dutta, Prabal and Varshney, Ambuj},
  title = {Microwatt Microwave (M²) Oscillator: Enabling 105 μW, Stable and Standalone Transceivers},
  year = {2026},
  booktitle = {ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED '26) Design Demo Contest},
  series = {ACM/IEEE ISLPED '26},
  doi = {10.1145/3830720.3830731}
}

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