A Co-designed Hardware/Software Architecture for Augmented Materials

Recent advances in materials, sensing, power harvesting, context-awareness and miniaturisation have opened-up the possibility of constructing materials that directly include considerable computing power. We present an architecture for the hardware/software co-design of such “augmented” materials that allows designers to address the links between the physical and informational properties of artefacts. The architecture is highly modular in terms of sensor, communications, power and processing capabilities, and utilises an advanced semantically well-founded software model.