The Ultra-WideBand (UWB) technique, which offers good energy efficiency, flexible data rate, and high ranging accuracy, has recently been recognized as a revived wireless technology for short distance communication. This paper presents a brief overview of two UWB techniques, covering Impulse-Radio UWB (IR-UWB) and Frequency-Modulation UWB (FM-UWB) methods. The link margin enhancement technique, Very-WideBand (VWB), and power consumption reducing technique, chirp UWB, are also introduced. Then, several potential applications of IR-UWB with transceiver architectures are addressed, including high data rate proximity communication and secure wireless connectivity. With fine-ranging and energy-efficient communication features, the UWB wireless technology is highly promising for secure mobile Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

A smart image sensor was developed which integrates a digital pixel image sensor array with an image processor, designed for wireless endoscope capsules. The camera-on-a-chip architecture and its on-chip functionality facilitate the design of the packaging and power consumption of the integrated capsule. The power reduction techniques were carried out at both the architectural and circuit level. Gray coding and power gating in the sensor array to eliminate almost 50% of the switch activity on the data bus and more than 99% of the power dissipation in each pixel at a transmitting rate of 2 frames per second. Filtering and compression in the processor reduces the data transmission by more than 2/3. A parallel fully pipelined architecture with a dedicated clock management scheme was implemented in the JPEG-LS engine to reduce the power consumption by 15.7%. The smart sensor has been implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS technology.

This paper presents a novel method of lossy image compression for digital colorful image sensors with Bayer color filter arrays (CFAs) based on an analysis of existing compression-first methods. An improved compression and decompression structure is described. The captured CFA raw data are firstly low-pass filtered in RGB space by a smooth filter followed by a down-sampling operation. Next, the data are transformed from RGB space to YCbCr space. Lastly, the filtered data in YCbCr space are compressed directly before full color interpolation to avoid redundancy. The presented method can provide a lower compression ratio and has lower complexity than both conventional interpolation-first image compression methods and other similar existing compression-first methods.