Prof. dr. Makinwa installed as KNAW member

• Monday, 24 September 2018

On 17 September 2018 Prof. Kofi Makinwa was inaugurated as KNAW (The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) Member. KNAW Members are selected for their scientific and scholarly achievements. The 21 new Dutch KNEW Members were installed during a festive ceremony at the The Amsterdam Public Library, central branche.

Professor Kofi Makinwa builds sensors based on chip technology. One of his achievements is a wind sensor without moving parts. Sensors form the connection between the real world and computers. ‘My field involves designing smart sensors: microchips that combine sensors and signal processing,’ explains the TU Delft Professor of Microelectronics. ‘I build chips that can ‘feel’ their environment, as it were, that can process this information and subsequently transfer it to a computer, all in one. Chip technology means that we can produce them very cheaply. Tyre pressure sensors in cars are one example of such a sensor. They measure the pressure in a rotating tyre and communicate the information wirelessly to the dashboard. Or the temperature sensors that can be found everywhere nowadays: in your smartphone, your car, your household appliances. Sensors that I developed at TU Delft are now in production at companies including SiTime, AMS and NXP, and are being used in Apple’s latest gadgets, for example’. Students appreciate Makinwa's enthusiasm and involvement. Thanks to Makinwa's contacts with the industry, they can often convert their designs into real prototypes. Makinwa was previously a member of the Young Academy of the KNAW and invented a cheap weather station for developing countries.

List of new members

Photos from the ceremony

Zhao Chen wins second prize in SSCS Benelux Chip Design Contest

• Monday, 28 May 2018

For the third year, the IEEE SSCS Benelux Chapter organized a Chip Design Contest for MSc and PhD students in the Benelux. This year, the second prize was won by Zhao Chen, for his contribution “A Front-End ASIC with Integrated Subarray Beamforming ADCs for Miniature 3D Ultrasound Probes”. Zhao received the award at the 2018 SSCS Benelux Chip Design Workshop, which was held at the University of Leuven on May 22, 2018.

More details on Zhao’s award-winning work can be found in the following paper: C. Chen, Z. Chen, D. Bera, E. Noothout, Z. Y. Chang, M. Tan, H. J. Vos, J. G. Bosch, M. D. Verweij, N. de Jong, and M. A. P. Pertijs, “A 0.91mW/element pitch-matched front-end ASIC with integrated subarray beamforming ADC for miniature 3D ultrasound probes,” in Dig. Techn. Papers IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), pp. 186-188, Feb. 2018.

Kofi @Plantenna

• Monday, 7 May 2018

Plantenna - Botanic sensor networks, towards an Internet Of Plants
The Plantenna programme focuses on the heavily intertwined problems of climate change, pollution and food shortages. In view of the growing world population and increasing urbanisation, these are issues that are set to intensify. A key component of the project will be the development of sensor technology that will collect information within plants about the condition of the crop and its immediate environment. By linking together plants equipped with this technology in networks – an ‘internet of plants’ – the information collected can be used to monitor the climate and weather and increase crop yields through more efficient fertilisation and irrigation. Kofi Makinwa is one of the researchers involved in Plantenna project.

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KNAW chooses Kofi Makinwa

• Thursday, 26 April 2018

Prof. Dr. Kofi Makinwa, Professor Electronic Instrumentation and chair of the Micro Electronic department to the faculty of EEMCS, is selected as a new member of The Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Members of the KNAW, leading scientists from all disciplines, are chosen on their scientific achievements. The new academy members will be installed in September.

Professor Kofi Makinwa builds sensors based on chip technology. One of his achievements is a wind sensor without moving parts. Sensors form the connection between the real world and computers. ‘My field involves designing smart sensors: microchips that combine sensors and signal processing,’ explains the TU Delft Professor of Microelectronics. ‘I build chips that can ‘feel’ their environment, as it were, that can process this information and subsequently transfer it to a computer, all in one. Chip technology means that we can produce them very cheaply. Tyre pressure sensors in cars are one example of such a sensor. They measure the pressure in a rotating tyre and communicate the information wirelessly to the dashboard. Or the temperature sensors that can be found everywhere nowadays: in your smartphone, your car, your household appliances. Sensors that I developed at TU Delft are now in production at companies including SiTime, AMS and NXP, and are being used in Apple’s latest gadgets, for example’. Students appreciate Makinwa's enthusiasm and involvement. Thanks to Makinwa's contacts with the industry, they can often convert their designs into real prototypes. Makinwa was previously a member of the Young Academy of the KNAW and invented a cheap weather station for developing countries.

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Slimme sensor die energie uit de lucht plukt, heeft eindeloos veel toepassingsmogelijkheden

• Thursday, 19 April 2018

Begin oktober gingen ze in het kader van een pilot het asfalt in: slimme sensoren die de temperatuur in het wegdek meten, zodat onder andere veel gerichter en efficiënter tegen gladheid kan worden gestrooid. De innovatie werd mede mogelijk gemaakt door de sectie Bioelectronics binnen de faculteit Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica van de TU Delft die zich volgens hoogleraar Wouter Serdijn vooral bezig houdt met…de elektronische behandeling van aandoeningen in het menselijk lichaam.

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PhD Defense Chao Chen

• Tuesday, 3 April 2018

On April 3, 2018, Chao Chen successfully defended his PhD thesis. Chao worked in the Ultrasound ASICs group under guidance of Michiel Pertijs.

Chao's thesis, entitled "Front-End ASICs for 3-D Ultrasound: From Beamforming to Digitization", describes the analysis, design and evaluation of front-end application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for 3-D medical ultrasound imaging, with a focus on the receive electronics. Chao's work was part of the MICA project.

TU Delft stands strong at the 2018 “Chip Olympics”

• Tuesday, 6 February 2018

From February 11 to 15, the 65th International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) will be held in San Francisco. ISSCC, the most prestigious and competitive scientific conference in the field of chip design and sensors, is informally known as the “Chip Olympics.” With ten papers, a forum presentation and a tutorial, TU Delft continues its significant yearly contribution to this prestigious conference.

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Best MSc Award 2017 goes to Douwe

• Thursday, 30 November 2017

On Thursday 30 November Douwe van Willigen received the best MSc award at the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory. Four students were nominated for their excellent thesis work: Michele D’Urbino, Douwe van Willigen, Shoubhik Karmakar and Said Hussaini. They presented their work at the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory and the audience voted for the best student of 2017.

Douwe developed a chip that makes it possible to connect 64 small ultrasound transducers to an imaging system using a single coaxial cable. His work enables 3D acoustic imaging from the tip of a catheter and is a step forward in miniaturizing 3D ultrasound probes. After his MSc Douwe continues in Michiel Pertijs’ group as a PhD candidate, working on electronics for ultrasonic flow measurement.

Michele D'Urbino wins the A-SSCC Student Design Contest

• Monday, 13 November 2017

At the 2017 Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC), Michele D'Urbino won the Student Design Contest with the paper "An Element-Matched Band-Pass Delta-Sigma ADC for Ultrasound Imaging". Michele worked in Michiel Pertijs' group at the Electronic Instrumentation Lab and obtained his MSc Degree earlier this year.

Michele developed an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) capable of digitizing the signals received by every individual element of a 2D ultrasound transducer array. This is an important step towards the realization of next-generation ultrasound probes with full in-probe digitization of the received echo signals. Michele’s ADC has an record-small element-matched size of 150 μm × 150 μm, which is realized by exploiting each piezo-electric transducer element not only as the signal source, but also as the electro-mechanical loop-filter of a continuous-time band-pass ΔΣ ADC.

A-SSCC is a major IEEE Conference on Integrated Circuit Design, and was held in Seoul on Nov. 6-8. At the conference, Michele gave a live demo of his prototype. This work is a collaboration with Oldelft Ultrasound, and was co-authored by Chao Chen, Zhao Chen, Zu-Yao Chang, Jacco Ponte, Boris Lippe and Michiel Pertijs.

TU Delft "Female Fellowship" Tenure Track Academic Positions

• Monday, 16 October 2017

All academic levels; apply before Jan 8, 2018.

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Kofi nominated for the Huibregtsenprijs 2017!

• Friday, 13 October 2017

Kofi was one of 6 candidates nominated for the Huibregtsenprijs 2017! See the short film about his project at: https://www.npo3.nl/genomineerd-voor-de-huibregtsenprijs-2017-kofi-makinwa/06-10-2017/WO_NTR_11137372

Ten papers from TU Delft at the 2018 Chip Olympics

• Friday, 13 October 2017

Ten papers from the TU Delft were accepted for publication at the 2018 chip Olympics - the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)

Chao Chen wins Best Student Paper Award

• Thursday, 21 September 2017

At the 2017 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium in Washington DC, PhD student Chao Chen has won the Best Student Paper Award. Chao works in Michiel Pertijs’ group at the Electronic Instrumentation Lab on integrated circuits for miniature ultrasound probes, in close collaboration with the Acoustical Wavefield Imaging group at TNW, and the Thoraxcenter at Erasmus MC. Chao’s paper describes a chip that makes it possible to connect 1000’s of small ultrasound transducer elements integrated at the tip of an endoscope or catheter to an imaging system. It represents an important step towards the realization of future miniature 3D ultrasound probes. The International Ultrasonics Symposium is IEEE’s main forum for researchers to present new results and learn about recent advances in medical and industrial ultrasonics.

ESSCIRC 2016 Best Paper Award

• Thursday, 14 September 2017

On 14th September 2017, Ph.D. student Junfeng Jiang has won the ESSCIRC 2016 Best Paper Award for his paper "A Hybrid Multi-Path CMOS Magnetic Sensor With 76 ppm/°C Sensitivity Drift". Junfeng works in Kofi Makinwa's group at the Electronic Instrumentation Lab on wide bandwidth magnetic sensors for current measurements.

BSc Group at ELCA awarded with IEEE Best High Tech Start-up Business Plan

• Monday, 10 July 2017

At the Bachelor Electrical Engineering Graduation Grand Finale held on 7 July 2017, the six-student group formed by Bilal Bouazzata, Laurens Buijs, Jun Feng, Martijn Hoogelander, Alexander Louwerse and Niels van der Kolk received the IEEE Best High Tech Start-up Business Plan award from Koen Bertels for their business plan on the topic of their graduation project at ELCA.

The group was supervised by Marco Pelk and Morteza Alavi while the project was proposed by Leo de Vreede.

During this project, the group accomplished a proof of concept for a promising "interpolating-supply" power amplifier efficiency enhancement technique, laying a foundation for future research.

Best student paper award VLSI Symposium for PhD Bahman Yousefzadeh

• Wednesday, 14 June 2017

At the 2017 VLSI Symposium, Bahman Yousefzadeh received the 2016 best student paper award! The award was for the design of a CMOS temperature sensor with record-breaking inaccuracy of less than +/-0.06 °C over a wide temperature range (-70 °C to 125 °C). Saleh Heidary and Kofi Makinwa were co-authors, and the work was done in collaboration with NXP Semiconductors. The resulting journal paper can be found in the here.

EI Lab hosted the 2nd Chip Design Workshop

• Wednesday, 24 May 2017

EI Lab hosted the 2nd Chip Design Workshop organized by IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Benelux Chapter on 23 May 2017. The event was attended by 29 SSCS Benelux Chapter members. The purpose of the workshop was twofold: it brought together the Benelux SSCS members around their common passion for IC design, and the winners of the 2016–2017 Student Chip Design Contest were awarded their prizes. The workshop was opened by Prof. Kofi Makinwa’s welcome. Prof. Filip Tavernier of KU Leuven, representing SSCS Benelux Chapter, then gave a short presentation about the purpose of the workshop and gave the awards to the winners: Burak Gönen (TU Delft), Bert Moons (KU Leuven) and Nicholas Butse (KU Leuven). The winners then gave short talks on the topics of their works including a wide range of applications: ADCs, digital processors, and power converters. These talks were followed by two invited speakers from TU Delft. Klaas Bult’s talk “Design mistakes you’d rather not talk about” summarized the common design mistakes he faced as an expert in the industry. Prof. Fabio Sebastiano’s talk “Cryo-CMOS for Quantum Computing” was on the challenges and the IC design research for quantum computing at TU Delft. The workshop was concluded with a reception where all the attendees found a chance to meet in person.

Having fun at AACD 2017 in Eindhoven

• Tuesday, 28 March 2017

Four papers at VLSI 2017!

• Tuesday, 21 March 2017

Members of the EI lab will present four papers at the 2017 VLSI Circuits Symposium in Kyoto, Japan! The papers are about multi-function sensor interfaces, resistor-based temperature sensors, eddy-current displacement sensors and precision amplifiers, respectively.

Kofi is the Analog Subcom Chair of ISSCC!

• Tuesday, 21 March 2017

The ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference) is the premier forum for presenting advances in integrated circuit design

Burak wins 1st prize in the SSCS Benelux Chapter's Student Chip Design Contest!

• Thursday, 23 February 2017

Burak Gonen won 1st prize in the Student Chip Design Competition organized by the Benelux Chapter of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS). He received the award for the design of "A Dynamic Zoom ADC with 109-dB DR for Audio Applications." The ADC, developed in collaboration with NXP, achieves state-ot-the-art performance in terms of both its area and energy efficiency.

To recognize the excellence and to promote chip design in Benelux region, the IEEE Solid State Circuits Society Benelux Chapter organized a chip design contest for students. The Award includes 750€ as well as a travel grant up to 1000€ for Advances in Analog Circuit Design Workshop (AACD) or European Solid State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC). The awards will be given in a workshop at TU Delft in spring 2017 together with the award winners' presentations and other technical talks about chip design research in TU Delft.

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Kofi Makinwa in BNR radio show about the influence of computer chips

• Thursday, 19 January 2017

On Wednesday January 18th Kofi Makinwa, chair of the Microelectronics Department has participated in the radio show of Business News Radio 'Ask Me Anything' presneted by Jörgen Raymann. The topic of the show is the influence on our daily lives of computer chips. Besides Professor Kofi Makinwa Professor Bram Nauta from the University of Twente participated as well. The public was given the opportunity to submit questions for the two professors. Listen to the show online Listen to the show online

Kofi's VLSIx webinar on Smart Sensor Design is now on-line!

• Friday, 16 December 2016

Kofi's VLSIx webinar on Smart Sensor Design is now on-line! http://resourcecenter.sscs.ieee.org/sscs/product/vlsix/SSCSVLSI0031
Kofi's earlier ISSCC tutorials are also available on the SSCS site. Topics covered are:

• Smart Sensor Design in Standard CMOS (2010): http://resourcecenter.sscs.ieee.org/sscs/product/short-courses-tutorials/SSCSTUT0092
• Dynamic offset-cancellation techniques (2007): http://resourcecenter.sscs.ieee.org/sscs/product/short-courses-tutorials/SSCSTUT0503
• CMOS Temperature sensors (2008): http://resourcecenter.sscs.ieee.org/sscs/product/short-courses-tutorials/SSCSTUT2060

Kofi visits the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

• Monday, 5 December 2016

Kofi, Shanthi (Pavan) and the attendees of his "Smart Sensor Design" class at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

Six talks at ISSCC 2017!

• Monday, 24 October 2016

Lab members will be responsible for 6 talks at ISSCC 2017! Hui, Sining, Vikram and Bahman will be presenting regular papers (on bridge readout, resistor-based temperature sensors, eddy-current sensors and BJT-based temperature sensors, respectively), Fabio contributed to a paper about Cryo-CMOS, while Kofi has an invited talk on micropower ADCs.

Kofi and Said visit Cypress Semiconductor (Cork)

• Wednesday, 19 October 2016

Kofi and Said visit Cypress Semiconductor (Cork)

From left to right, Dermot, Paul, Said and Kofi at the kick-off meeting of Said's MSc project (on the design of a nanopower capacitive sensor).

Vacancy: Team manager for Electrical Engineering Education (EEE)

• Thursday, 6 October 2016

The Faculty of EEMCS is creating a special team to fully focus on teaching using our unique and innovative ‘Delft method’. This method integrates practical and theoretical electrical engineering education and trains students to be hands-on, theoretically versed electrical engineers ready for a future career in science or industry.

We are looking for a team manager specialising in Electrical Engineering Education (EEE) who will be both a group leader and a teacher in his/her capacity as the role model of EE Education.

More information

Marcel Pelgrom receives Kirchhoff Award

• Tuesday, 4 October 2016

The Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory congratulates Prof. Marcel Pelgrom with the prestigious Kirchhoff Award 2017. Prof. Pelgrom, who is guest lecturer for our course “Nyquist-Rate Data Converters”, receives this award “for seminal contributions to systematic analysis of random offsets in semiconductor devices and their impact on circuits.” The award will be officially presented to Marcel at the ISSCC in February 2017 in San Francisco.

Pelin has won Best Student Paper Award

• Tuesday, 4 October 2016

Pelin has won Best Student Paper Award

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Pelin Ayerden has won Best Student Paper Award

• Thursday, 28 July 2016

Pelin Ayerden (Department of Microelectronics, Electronic Instrumentation Laborabory), who recently received her PhD degree from TU Delft, has won the best student paper award at SPIE Photonics Europe 2016, Micro-Optics Conference. The conference took place from 3 to 7 April in Brussels, Belgium. In her paper "A highly miniaturized NDIR methane sensor" coauthored by G. de Graaf, P. Enoksson and R. F. Wolffenbuttel, she demonstrated the functionality of a compact gas sensor for methane detection.

7 July 2016: Opening of CryoLab for Extremely Sensitive Electronic Measurements

• Friday, 8 July 2016

The CryoLab of TU Delft's Faculty of EEMCS has been opened on Thursday 7 July by the dean Rob Fastenau. TU Delft scientists from the Tera-Hertz Sensing Group, Jochem Baselmans and Akira Endo, will be leading a team of young scientists and engineers working in the lab on astronomical instrumentation. The first instrument, DESHIMA (Delft SRON High-redshift Mapper), is being developed to be operated on the ASTE telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The goal of the research is to create 3D charts of so-called submillimetre galaxies that, in contrast to 2D charts, also show distance and time.

The large number of superconducting detectors, and the advanced electronics developed at SRON, allows DESHIMA to map a very large volume of space at once. While Endo leads the development of DESHIMA, Baselmans will soon install the next cryostat for testing novel THz array antennas, that will enable his upcoming instrument MOSAIC to target multiple galaxies at once. In the future, the CryoLab is envisioned to also host new coolers from QuTech. Superconducting electronics used for astronomical instrumentation and quantum electronics have much in common, because they both push the limits of what can be observed.

3rd prize for Hui Jiang @ IEEE SSCS chip design contest

• Wednesday, 15 June 2016

Since long, the Benelux has a strong expertise in IC design. To recognize this excellence and to promote chip design among the Benelux EE students, the IEEE SSCS Benelux Chapter organizes a yearly chip design contest for students. This year, the third prize was won by Hui Jiang, for his contribution “Ring-Down-Based Readout Circuit for Resonant Sensors”. Hui received the award at the 2016 SSCS Benelux Workshop, which was held at the University of Twente on June 8. More details on Hui’s award-winning work can be found in the following paper: H. Jiang, Z. Y. Chang and M. A. P. Pertijs, “A 30-ppm <80-nJ Ring-Down-Based Readout Circuit for Resonant Sensors,” IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 187-195, Jan. 2016.

4 papers at VLSI

• Wednesday, 1 June 2016

PhD candidates Bahman and Saleh presented a 60mK-accurate temperature sensor and a 36A integrated current sensing system, respectively, while Kristof (now at NXP) presented an energy-efficient SoC in which a microprocessor and its memory are stacked and so share the same supply current. Chao presented a front-end ASIC with receive sub-array beamforming integrated with a 32 × 32 PZT matrix transducer for 3-D transesophageal echocardiography.

A snowy visit to AACD 2016

• Friday, 1 April 2016

A snowy visit to AACD 2016

3 papers at VLSI 2015!

• Tuesday, 1 March 2016

PhD candidates Bahman and Saleh will be presenting a 60mK-accurate temperature sensor and a 36A integrated current sensing system, respectively, while Kristof (now at NXP) will be presenting an energy-efficient SoC in which a microprocessor and its memory are stacked and so share the same supply current.

Burak wins ICT.OPEN2016 and ProRISC best poster award

• Tuesday, 1 March 2016

Burak wins the best poster award of both ICT.OPEN2016 and ProRISC track. The title of the poster is "An Energy Efficient Dynamic Zoom-ADC for Audio Applications".

Happy 2016!

• Thursday, 14 January 2016

Here are some pictures of the New Year Reception of the Microelectronics department

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Paddy French, named 2016 IEEE Fellow

• Thursday, 10 December 2015

Piscataway, New Jersey, USA, January 2016: Paddy French, Prof, dr. from Delft, The Netherlands has been named an IEEE Fellow. He is being recognized: for contributions to micro-electromechanical devices and systems. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. He has been working in the field of sensors since 1982 and has had more than 500 publications in international journals and conferences. He has been active in many journals and conferences over the years. He has been a supporter of IEEE conferences as co-chair of IEEE MEMS and three times programme chair of IEEE Sensors.

Piscataway, New Jersey, USA, January 2016: Paddy French, Prof, dr. from Delft, The Netherlands has been named an IEEE Fellow. He is being recognized: for contributions to micro-electromechanical devices and systems. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

He has been working in the field of sensors since 1982 and has had more than 500 publications in international journals and conferences. He has been active in many journals and conferences over the years. He has been a supporter of IEEE conferences as co-chair of IEEE MEMS and three times programme chair of IEEE Sensors.

Bahman wins Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award

• Tuesday, 1 December 2015

Bahman Yousefzadeh has won the 2015 Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award. The award consists of a travel grant that partially covers the costs of attending ISSCC.

Saleh wins IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award!

• Tuesday, 1 December 2015

Saleh Shalmany has won the prestigious IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award! Given to promising graduate students, the award mainly consists of a fully sponsored trip to ISSCC.

Caspar gets his PhD

• Tuesday, 1 December 2015

Caspar gets his PhD

Wouter wins a best presentation award from IECON 2015

• Sunday, 1 November 2015

Wouter Brevet presented a paper about a smart wind sensor at IECON2015 in Yokohama, Japan. The paper, entitled "A 25mW Smart CMOS Wind Sensor with Corner Heaters," received a Best Presentation award.

Junfeng awarded an ASSCC travel grant

• Sunday, 1 November 2015

Junfeng Jiang was awarded a Student Travel Grant for ASSCC 2015. At the conference, he presented a paper entitled “A Multi-Path CMOS Hall Sensor with Integrated Ripple Reduction Loops.”

Chao gets the student travel grant @IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium

• Thursday, 15 October 2015

At the 2015 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium in Taipei, Taiwan, Chao received the student travel grant, in recognition of his work on the paper "A single-cable PVDF transducer Readout IC for Intravascular Photoacoustic Imaging".

TU Delft Female Fellowship Tenure Track Openings

• Friday, 9 October 2015

Academic openings at all professor levels

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Seven talks at ISSCC 2016!

• Thursday, 1 October 2015

Lab members will be presenting 7 talks at ISSCC 2016! PhD candidates Junfeng, Ugur and Burak have regular papers (on wide-band magnetic sensors, tiny temperature sensors and energy-efficient ADCs), while Fabio, Kofi and Albert have invited talks (on frequency references, calibration techniques, temperature sensors and image sensors).

ISCAS 2015 Keynote Presentation Ronald Dekker online

• Monday, 13 July 2015

Ronald Dekker's Keynote: ?From Chips for the Living to Living Chips?

Micro-fabricated devices are finding their way to the frontend of medical equipment, where they are the interface between body, or in general living tissue, and machine. They enable better and cheaper diagnostic equipment, they add ?eyes and ears? to minimally invasive instruments such as laparoscopic instruments and catheters, they allow for un-obtrusive monitoring of body functions, they add functionality to implants, and they enable the development of better and personalized medicines. Despite their great promise it has been proven difficult to bring these devices out of the laboratory phase into production. One of the reasons is the lack of a suitable fabrication infrastructure. Much more than standard CMOS or MEMS devices, these medical devices rely on the processing of novel materials, especially polymers, in combination with advanced molding, micro-fluidics, and assembly technologies. At the same time these devices have to be fabricated under strict quality control conditions in a certified production environment.

In the recently granted ECSEL project ?InForMed? a supply chain for the pilot fabrication of these medical devices is organized, which brings together key European technology partners in an integrated infrastructure linking research to pilot and high volume production. The pilot line is hosted by Philips Innovation Services, and open to third party users.

Speaker Biography:

Ronald Dekker received his MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Eindhoven and his PhD from the Technical University of Delft. He joined Philips Research in 1988 where he worked on the development of RF technologies for mobile communication. Since 2000 his focus shifted to the integration of complex electronic sensor functionality on the tip of the smallest minimal invasive instruments such as catheters and guide-wires. In 2007 he was appointed part time professor at the Technical University of Delft with a focus on Organ-on-Chip devices. He published in leading Journals and conferences and holds in excess of 50 patents.

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Fabio Sebastiano is now an Assistant Professor!

• Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Fabio Sebastiano is now an Assistant Professor!

Medical Delta speeds up development of cochlear implants

• Friday, 27 March 2015

Uit ?De Audiciens?, februari 2015: ?CI?s (cochleaire implantaten, Red.) volop in ontwikkeling.

Het is een traditie, de refereeravond van KNO/Centrum voor Audiologie en Hoorimplantaten (CAHIL) in het LUMC op de tweede donderdag van het jaar.

Ook op 8 januari 2015 zit de collegezaal weer vol. Het is dan ook een bijeenkomst waar een aantal disciplines uit de hoorbranche samenkomen. KNO-artsen, audiologen, akoepedisten, audiciens, fabrikanten en anderen luisteren naar voordrachten die inzicht geven in nieuwe ontwikkelingen op audiologisch gebied.

De avond wordt geopend door prof. dr. ir. J.H.M. Frijns, hoofd CAHIL. (?) In het kader van de Medical Delta (een samenwerkingsverband tussen het Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, de TU Delft en het LUMC in Leiden voor de ontwikkeling van medische technologie) is er een presentatie van Johan de Vos die als arts-onderzoeker KNO onderzoek verricht naar nieuwe technologie voor cochleaire implantaten. Onder begeleiding van Wouter Serdijn en Paddy French hebben drie promovendi van de TU een meetversterker (Cees Jeroen Bes), een elektrode ontwerp (Nishant Lawant) en een stimulatorchip (Wannaya Ngamkham) ontwikkeld. Deze technologie wordt onder leiding van Johan Frijns en Jeroen Briaire in het LUMC geimplanteerd en getest door Johan de Vos. Tevens ontwikkelt het LUMC nieuwe meetmethodes voor het terugmeten van de respons van de gehoorzenuw (Dick Biesheuvel).?

Lees meer hier: http://bioelectronics.tudelft.nl/~wout/documents/news/lumc_refereeravond_20150108.pdf

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Burak wins ProRISC best poster award

• Sunday, 1 March 2015

Burak wins ProRISC best poster award.

Pertijs elected Teacher of the Year 2013-2014 of the Electrical Engineering program

• Sunday, 15 February 2015

Hui Jiang awarded a ISSCC 2015 Student Travel Grant

• Sunday, 15 February 2015

PhD student Hui Jiang has been awarded a ISSCC 2015 Student Travel Grant of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. This award is a recognition by the Solid-State Circuits Society of his accomplishments as graduate student to the field of solid-state circuits. At ISSCC 2015, Hui presented a paper entitled “A 30ppm <80nJ Ring-Down-Based Readout Circuit for Resonant Sensors”.

Rui presents the world's smallest smart temperature sensor at ISSCC 2016.

• Sunday, 1 February 2015

Rui presents the world's smallest smart temperature sensor at ISSCC 2016. Watch here Rui's presentation.

Jan wins Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award

• Monday, 1 December 2014

Jan Angevare has won the 2014 Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award. The award consists of a travel grant that partially covers the costs of attending ISSCC.

Jiawei Xu wins the IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award 2014-2015!

• Monday, 1 December 2014

Jiawei Xu has won the prestigious IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award 2014-2015! Given to promising graduate students, the award essentially consists of a free trip to ISSCC 2015.

MP Jan Vos visits PARSAX

• Friday, 7 November 2014

On Friday 7 November, Jan Vos, MP for the PvdA, visited the TU Delft Climate Institute. The theme of the visit was climate change, TU Delft's research and the usefulness of and need for climate monitoring. The programme included a demonstration of cloud simulations in the Virtual Lab and a visit to the PARSAX radar. Thanks to the rain, it was possible to obtain good live measurements.

Albert Theuwissen honored with European SEMI Award 2014

• Friday, 24 October 2014

Albert Theuwissen, CEO of Harvest Imaging and professor at Delft University of Technology, is the recipient of the European SEMI Award 2014. The Award, which recognizes Theuwissen�s outstanding contribution to the continuing education of engineers, was presented during the SEMICON Europa Executive Summit in Grenoble today.

Albert Theuwissen is professor at the Electronics Instrumentation Laboratory of Delft University of Technology. He is a highly regarded specialist in solid-state image sensors and digital imaging. He worked for nearly 20 years at Philips Research and then at DALSA in lead engineering and management roles. In 2001, Theuwissen became a part-time professor at Delft University of Technology. In 1995, he wrote the textbook �Solid-State Imaging with Charge-Coupled Devices� which is now a standard reference work in the field of solid-state imaging.

After �retiring� in 2007, Theuwissen founded Harvest Imaging and has played a major role in the continuing education of engineers in the field of solid-state imaging and digital cameras. He has taught and trained over 3,000 engineers at image sensor companies (such as Kodak, Sony, Samsung, Aptina, ST Microelectronics, Micron, Intel, Philips, Canon, DALSA, and Panasonic) and consumer product companies (such as Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Research InMotion, Thomson, and many others). In addition, he has conducted short courses at IEEE�s IEDM, ISSCC, ICIP and SPIE�s Electronic Imaging Conference.

Solid-state image sensors such as the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) and CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) are complex electron devices. About one billion image sensor chips are fabricated and sold each year and represent a multi-billion dollar per year IC business segment. Understanding the fabrication and device physics operation of these devices is difficult and is rarely taught in universities at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

Solid-state image sensors such as the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) and CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) are complex electron devices. About one billion image sensor chips are fabricated and sold each year and represent a multi-billion dollar per year IC business segment. Understanding the fabrication and device physics operation of these devices is difficult and is rarely taught in universities at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

�Albert recognized the need for technical education and created a successful continuing education offering that navigates and conforms to the competitive and proprietary IP environment, benefitting thousands of electron-device engineers and also the industry,� said Heinz Kundert, president of SEMI Europe. �It is an honor to recognize Albert for his outstanding contributions to the European semiconductor and microsystems industry.�

The European SEMI Award was established more than two decades ago to recognize individuals and teams who made a significant contribution to the European semiconductor and related industries. Prior award recipients hailed from these companies: Infineon, Semilab, Deutsche Solar, STMicroelectronics, IMEC, Fraunhofer Institute, and more.

Ugur at the STW congress demonstrating his TD sensors

• Wednesday, 1 October 2014

During the STW annual congress, Ugur Sonmez demonstrated the world's smallest TD sensor (8000um2) to attendees. Details about the sensor were presented at ESSCIRC 2015.

ISCAS 2014 a big success!

• Thursday, 26 June 2014

Wouter Serdijn (Section Bioelectronics) served as Technical Program Chair for this year's edition of ISCAS. Next year's edition will be held in Lisbon, Portugal. For this edition Wouter Serdijn will change hats and be General Chair.

Ugur wins Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award

• Sunday, 1 December 2013

Ugur Sonmez has won the 2013 Analog Devices Outstanding Student Award. The award consists of a travel grant that partially covers the costs of attending ISSCC.

Qinwen gets her PhD

• Sunday, 1 December 2013

Qinwen gets her PhD

Muhammed gets his PhD

• Tuesday, 1 October 2013

Muhammed gets his PhD

Muhammed wins JSSC Best Paper Award

• Friday, 1 February 2013

Muhammed Bolatkale, Robert Rutten, Lucien Breems and Kofi Makinwa have won the 2011 Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC) best paper award for a paper describing a high-speed continuous-time delta-sigma ADC with a record-breaking bandwidth of 125MHz. The JSSC is the world's foremost journal in the area of integrated circuit design.

Kofi recognized as an ISSCC Top Ten Author

• Friday, 1 February 2013

At the 60th anniversary of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Kofi Makinwa was recognized as one of its top ten contributing authors. The ISSCC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.

Kamran wins SSCS Predoctoral Award

• Saturday, 1 December 2012

Kamran Souri has won the The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award 2012-2013! Given to promising graduate students, the award essentially consists of a free trip to ISSCC 2013.

TU Delft wins Gold at the Chip Olympics

• Saturday, 1 December 2012

With 12 regular papers and 1 invited talk, the TU Delft is the top contributor to this year's International Solid-State Circuits conference - popularly known as the chip Olympics. The Precision Analog Group contributed four of these papers.

Muhammed wins ISSCC Best European Paper Award

• Wednesday, 1 February 2012

Muhammed Bolatkale, Robert Rutten, Lucien Breems and Kofi Makinwa have won the ISSCC 2011 Jan van Vessem Award for Outstanding European Paper for their work on a high-speed continuous-time delta-sigma ADC in a 45nm CMOS process. The ADC has a bandwidth of 125MHz and operates at a 4GHz sampling frequency. The ISSCC is the world's leading conference on the design of integrated circuits.

Kofi's group in 2012

• Sunday, 1 January 2012

Youngcheol gets a VENI grant

• Friday, 1 July 2011

Youngcheol Chae has been awarded a VENI grant by NWO. The Veni grant is awarded to excellent post-doctoral researchers to allow them to develop their ideas for a further three years.

Caspar wins Transducers Best Paper Award

• Wednesday, 1 June 2011

Caspar van Vroonhoven and Kofi Makinwa have won a best paper at Transducers 2011 for their work on a temperature sensor based on the well-defined thermal diffusivity of silicon. The sensor achieves an inaccuracy of ±0.6°C over a wide-range (-70°C TO 170°C). Transducers is the world's largest conference on microsensors, microactuators and microsystems.

Caspar demos at ISSCC 2011

• Tuesday, 1 February 2011

At ISSCC 2011, Caspar van Vroonhoven demonstrated a 250°C-capable temperature sensor based on the relative thermal diffusivities of silicon and silicon dioxide.

Kofi becomes an ISSCC Fellow

• Saturday, 1 January 2011

Kofi Makinwa has become a fellow of the IEEE "for the development of precision analog circuits and integrated sensor systems. IEEE Fellow is one of the most prestigious honors of the IEEE, and is bestowed upon a very limited number of Senior Members who have made outstanding contributions to the electrical and information technologies and sciences"

Mahdi wins ESSCIRC Young Scientist Award

• Wednesday, 1 September 2010

Mahdi Kashmiri and Kofi Makinwa have won the Young Scientist Award of the 35th European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC 2009) for their work on a digitally-assisted electrothermal frequency-locked loop. This is the first fully integrated implementation of such a loop, which locks the output frequency of an on-chip oscillator to the thermal diffusivity, i.e. the rate of heat diffusion, of bulk silicon. Since bulk silicon is very pure, the spread of the loop's output frequency is less than 1000ppm after a single room-temperature trim.

Kofi gives his inaugural lecture

• Thursday, 1 April 2010

Kofi Makinwa gave his inaugural lecture: Sensing the future. This lecture can be seen here

Seven for ISSCC

• Monday, 1 February 2010

Seven for ISSCC! Research carried out under the supervision of Prof. Kofi Makinwa and in collaboration with NXP and the University of Twente, has led to seven papers at the prestigious International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The papers describe advances in temperature sensors, frequency references, voltage references, precision amplifiers and ultra-low-power radios.

Kofi appointed Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor

• Sunday, 1 March 2009

TU Delft has appointed Dr. Kofi Makinwa to the post of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor. TU Delft's Antoni van Leeuwenhoek chairs are aimed at promoting young, excellent scientists to professorships at an early age so that they can develop their scientific careers to the full.

Caspar wins ISSCC Best European Paper Award

• Sunday, 1 February 2009

Caspar van Vroonhoven and Kofi Makinwa have won the ISSCC Jan van Vessem Award for Outstanding European Paper for their work on a new smart sensor which measures the temperature of microchips precisely on the basis of heat diffusion in silicon. The sensor provides a solution for heat management in microprocessors, a function which has become increasingly important thanks to the miniaturisation of the past few years. They previously won an IEEE Sensors 2008 Best Student Paper Award for a similar sensor. The ISSCC is the world's leading conference on the design of integrated circuits.

Best MSc Award 2017 goes to Douwe

• Tuesday, 30 November -0001

IEEE Sensor Interfaces Meeting 2024

• Thursday, 25 -- Friday, 26 April 2024
• San Diego, CA, USA

IEEE Sensor Interfaces Meeting 2024

SIM will take place for the third time in 2024, on 25 and 26 April, and for the first time in San Diego, hosted by UCSD. SIM is a workshop-like event with only keynote talks from industry and academia

This year the Sensor Interfaces Meeting is expanding to include poster sessions to give participants the chance to share, discuss and debate the latest trends and advances, as well as industry-leading products.

We encourage the submission of state-of-the-art mature, already industrialized sensor interface solutions, as well as emerging interface concepts and solutions with highly innovative and revolutionary potential.

SIM is intended to be equally attractive for students, professors, and colleagues from industry, with particularly low registration fees for students.

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Monday, 15 April 2024
• 15:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

High-Performance Multilevel Class-D Audio Amplifiers

Huajun Zhang

Additional information ...

Mastermarket

• Friday, 9 February 2024
• 15:30-18:00
• HB20.150

The MS3/ELCA Mastermarket

MS3/ELCA groups

Dear Students,

Get ready for a journey into the world of cutting-edge research in RF technology, radar & communication!

On February 9, we are organizing the MS3/ELCA Mastermarket. On this occasion we, the MS3 and ELCA sections, will inform you about the Master thesis opportunities in our groups, and demonstrate our research with actual measurements, presenting processed experimental results and showing the added value of this research for applications such as automotive radar, 5G/6G, health and well-being, weather and climate change. As RF systems for radars and communication are sources of huge data, we also demonstrate AI capabilities.

We're opening the doors to our measurement labs: the Earl McCune Labs (21^st floor), the anechoic chamber (22nd floor), the mm-wave radar lab (22nd floor), and the surveillance radars (23rd floor and roof).

Mark your calendars for 15:30, and meet us in room HB20.150.

We start with a few short presentations followed by the tour and then we will enjoy the pizza and discuss more!

Please send an email to EWI-ME-Secr@tudelft.nl to let us know you will join (and we can make sure there is enough pizza ;-))

 We look forward meeting you!
The MS3 & ELCA sections

THz Symposium

• Thursday, 25 -- Thursday, 25 January 2024
• 09:30-17:00
• Lecture Hall D@ta, 36.HB.01.630

Dutch Symposium on Terahertz Science and Technology - 3rd Edition

You are cordially invited to join us for the third edition of the Dutch Terahertz Symposium on January 25, 2024. It is a co-organized event between the Delft and Eindhoven University of Technology. With these series of symposiums, we aim to create an environment to exchange information and allow the Dutch Terahertz community to find collaborations and funding opportunities.

 

The 2024 Dutch Terahertz Symposium aims to bring together the Dutch research community and industry interested in the field of terahertz science and technology. There will be six featured talks from both academic and industrial institutions about the latest developments in the field. You can find the list of speakers and topics attached to this email. There will be plenty of opportunities for interaction with each other and inspired further community building.

 

Save the date to join a full day of interesting presentations, Q&As, and panel discussions!

Additional information ...

Microelectronics Research Day 2023

• Thursday, 9 November 2023
• 09:30-17:30
• EEMCS

Microelectronics Research Day 2023

TU Delft Microelectronics Research Day
Fully booked!
Registering 2023 not for possible anymore

Additional information ...

EE-NL Day

• Wednesday, 8 November 2023
• 10:30-17:30
• EEMCS

EE-NL Day

EE-NL Day

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Wednesday, 27 September 2023
• 12:00-14:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

Pitch-Matched Integrated Transceiver Circuits for High-Resolution 3-D Neonatal Brain Monitoring

Peng Guo

Peng Guo will defend his PhD thesis entitled

Pitch-Matched Integrated Transceiver Circuits for High-Resolution 3-D Neonatal Brain Monitoring

on Wednesday, Sept. 27th. The layman's talk will be at 12:00, the defence starts at 12:30.

The thesis can be downloaded from the TU Delft repository. Peng's work was part of the MIFFY project.

Livestream of the defence: link

Promotors: Michiel Pertijs and Nico de Jong

Abstract: This thesis presents the design and implementation of integrated ultrasound transceivers for use in transfontanelle ultrasonography (TFUS). Two generations of ultrasound transceiver ASICs integrated with PZT transducer arrays intended for TFUS are presented. In the first generation, a novel AFE design that combines an LNA with the continuous TGC function is realized in a bid to mitigate the gain-switching and T/R switching artifacts. Besides, a new current-mode micro-beamforming design based on boxcar integration (BI) is also implemented to reduce the channel count within a compact layout. In the second generation, the AFE is derived from the first version, while the design focuses on RX backend circuitry and channel-count reduction, including a passive BI-based µBF merged with a charge-sharing SAR ADC, which digitizes the delayed-and-summed signals, and a subsequent multi-level data link, which concatenates outputs of four ADCs. In total, a 128-fold reduction in channel count is finally achieved. The techniques we developed have established the groundwork and removed the initial barriers for an electronics architecture suitable for a wearable 3D TFUS device.

Symposium

• Friday, 21 April 2023
• 09:00-18:00
• EEMCS - Lecture Hall Chip

Heterogeneous system integration - Driving the EU Chip Act ambitions

The Netherlands have a strong national ecosystem for quantum, photohics and semiconductor technologies, well connected to international key players. This symposium aims to build on this strength by intensifying collaboration among these domains.

Heterogeneous integration plays a crucial role in enabling future quantum, photonics and semiconductor technologies by creating new functionalities and business opportunities through the integration of different chips, technologies and materials into a single system.

This symposium will discuss the importance of heterogeneous integration and its potential for creating more industry and business value. It also aims to cultivate human resources for heterogeneous integration, further strengthening the Dutch ecosystem.

Join us to explore the exciting opportunities that heterogenous system integration can offer for the Dutch ecosystem and beyond, and to be part of the conversation on driving the EU Chip Act ambitions.

ME colloquium

• Thursday, 30 March 2023
• 15:30-16:30
• EEMCS (B36) lecture hall D@ta

Extreme III-V’s and Wide bandgap Semiconductors: Hall Sensors and Photoconductive Switches

Karen Dowling

Through my research career, I have worked with various wide bandgap and III-V materials to create sensors and opto-electronic power devices. High electron mobility is desirable for high performing, high precision sensors and low on-resistance in power devices. In this talk, I will present two concepts that leverage unique device operation regimes. First, I will highlight my previous work on GaN 2DEG Hall-effect magnetometers at Stanford University. Here, the 2DEG heterostructure enables high mobility which corresponds to higher sensitivity, operation as high as 600C, and lower offset compared to state-of-the-art silicon devices. Next, I will highlight my creation of the first pulse compression photoconductive semiconductor switch (PCPS), a GaAs based opto-electronic device which leverages electric fields beyond saturation in materials that showcase negative differential mobility (NDM). This unique device operation regime is promising for high voltage, sub-ns pulse generation for RF and power device drivers. Finally, I will conclude with my new projects in the pipeline at TU Delft: GaN current sensing and single-device 3D Hall effect sensors, and my future directions into ultra-wide bandgap materials.

Additional information ...

Guest lecture Gregor Lenz (SynSense)

• Friday, 10 March 2023
• 13:00-14:30
• EEMCS, B36, Boole

Training robust computer vision models for interference on neuromorphic hardware

Gregor Lenz
SynSense

Event cameras output changes in illumination asynchronously rather than frames at a certain interval. For computer vision tasks, this data can be processed efficiently using spiking neural networks, which promise very-low-power applications. To harness the potential of such models, we have to execute them on specialised neuromorphic hardware. In this talk we look into the data, training and deployment stages that are related to SynSense's Speck chip and the challenges that arise in each of those.

Online Zoom Link to webinar:

https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/95129047745?pwd=MngzWHIxUXh0Y3dyLy9kcHBuaEU4Zz09. 

Any questions? Please contact the organizers:

Fabrizio Ottati: fabrizio.ottati@polito.it
Charlotte Frenkel: C.Frenkel@tudelft.nl

PhD Thesis Defence

• Friday, 3 March 2023
• 09:30-12:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

Yannick Hopf - PhD Defence

Yannick Hopf

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

 

It is my pleasure to invite you to the defense of my PhD entitled:

Integrated Circuits for 3D High-Frame-Rate Intracardiac Echocardiography Probes

 

The event will take place in the Senaatszaal/Aula on Friday, 3^rd March 2023 and the schedule is as follows:

• 09:30 – Layman’s Talk
• 10:00 – Defense
• 11:30 – Reception

 

A link for online participation will be shared once provided by the Graduate School.

The thesis can be accessed via:

https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:7016e74d-c7df-42a8-8257-11326940ad7f

 

While this marks the end of my PhD project at TU Delft, I will still be around as a postdoc until mid April.

So while I would already like to thank you for all the support and good times, this is not a farewell yet and I’m looking forward to my remaining time in the team!

 

Best regards,

Yannick

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Tuesday, 31 January 2023
• 15:00-16:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Ultrasound Imaging through Aberrating Layers

Pim van der Meulen

Whereas aberrating layers are typically viewed as forming an impediment to medical ultrasound imaging, they can surprisingly also be used to our benefit. As long as we can model the effect of an aberrating layer,we can utilize ‘model-based imaging’, the imaging technique explored throughout this thesis, to reconstruct ultrasound images where traditional beamforming methodswould fail, employing the ever increasing computational power available to us nowadays. Not only does this allow us to image through layers, but it also leads to interesting applications, such as 3D ultrasound imaging with spatially undersampled data, using an aberrating ‘coding mask’. The formulation of a measurement model, a fundamental part of model-based imaging, also gives insight into the imaging problem mathematically, and allows us to investigate methods for estimating the effect of an aberrating layer ‘blindly’, i.e., without explicitly measuring it.

In this thesis, we thus investigate (a), imaging through a layer when the layer’s aberration effect is known, and how it can be applied to imaging with spatially undersampled data, and (b), methods and algorithms for estimating the effect of the aberrating layer without knowing it a priori.

In the first part of this thesis, we illustrate how using model-based imaging can be utilized for 3D ultrasound imaging using a single ultrasound transducer, and equipping it with a plastic coding mask. The plastic mask acts as an analog coder, that scrambles the transmitted and received waves in a manner that is location dependent. As a result, the temporal shape of an ultrasound echo can be used instead of the traditional method of using phase differences between sensors in a sensor array. Imaging is instead accomplished using model-based imaging. By measuring the pulse-echo response of each pixel, we can form an image by solving a regularized linear least squares problem, which takes into account the measured pixel-specific pulse-echo signals. The proposed device and imaging method is then verified experimentally.

In the following chapter, a coding mask design method is proposed for the aforementioned imaging device. A measurement model is formulatedwhere themask geometry is an explicit parameter to be optimized. After forming this model, a numerical optimization method is proposed and numerically tested. Our numerical experiments show that optimized mask geometries exhibit an energy focusing effect on the region-of-interest, whilst simultaneously decorrelating echo signals between pixels.

In the second part of this thesis, in contrast, we consider methods for calibrating propagation models when the pulse-echo response per pixel is not known. The most important calibration challenge we consider is that of imaging through an aberrating layer in front of an ultrasound array. This could be subcutaneous fat or the human skull, for example. In this thesiswe formulate ameasurement model consisting of a partwhere wave propagation is known (i.e., the assumed homogeneous region behind the aberrating layer, where the contrast image of interest is located), and an unknown propagation part, consisting of the Green’s functions from an array sensor to any point on the the interface of the aberrating layer and the imaging medium. We then investigate methods for finding this set of Green’s functions without explicitly measuring them (so called ‘blind’ calibration).

The first proposed method exploits the singular value decomposition of the measurement data in combination with the assumed Toeplitz structure of the matrices representing the aberrating layer’s Green’s functions. However, the method is lacking in practicality since an additional set ofmeasurements is required with a phase screen mounted on the interface of the aberration layer and the imaging medium. The second method resolves these practical issues by utilizing a covariance matching technique. A sufficiently large set of measurements is obtained where each measurement is different due to e.g. moving particles such as blood flow or micro-bubbles. Using the covariance of the data, algorithms are then defined that can estimate the transfer functions of the aberrating layer from the measurement covariance data.

Finally, we propose a method for estimating the electro-mechanical impulse response of an ultrasound sensor, by simply measuring its pulse-echo response from a flat plate reflector in front of the sensor. Estimating the one-way (electro-mechanical) impulse response then becomes a de-autoconvolution problem, for which we propose a method by solving a semi-definite relaxation of the de-autoconvolution problem.

Additional information ...

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Tuesday, 29 November 2022
• 15:00-15:40
• HB17.140

A New Logarithmic Quantization Technique and Corresponding Processing Element Design for CNN Accelerators

Longxing Jiang

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have become a popular solution for computer vision problems. However, due to the high data volumes and intensive computation involved in CNNs, deploying CNNs on low-power hardware systems is still challenging. The power consumption of CNNs can be prohibitive in the most common implementation platforms: CPUs and GPUs. Therefore, hardware accelerators that can exploit CNN parallelism and methods to reduce the computation burden or memory requirements are still hot research topics. Quantization is one of these methods.

One suitable quantization strategy for low-power deployments is logarithmic quantization.

Logarithmic quantization for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN): a) fits well typical weights and activation distributions, and b) allows the replacement of the multiplication operation by a shift operation that can be implemented with fewer hardware resources. In this thesis, a new quantization method named Jumping Log Quantization (JLQ) is proposed. The key idea of JLQ is to extend the quantization range, by adding a coefficient parameter ”s” in the power of two exponents (2sx+i ).

This quantization strategy skips some values from the standard logarithmic quantization. In addition, a small hardware-friendly optimization called weight de-zeroing is proposed in this work. Zero-valued weights that cannot be performed by a single shift operation are all replaced with logarithmic weights to reduce hardware resources with little accuracy loss.

To implement the Multiply-And-Accumulate (MAC) operation (needed to compute convolutions) when the weights are JLQ-ed and dezeroed, a new Processing Element (PE) have been developed. This new PE uses a modified barrel shifter that can efficiently avoid the skipped values.

Resource utilization, area, and power consumption of the new PE standing alone and in a systolic array prototype are reported. The results show that JLQ performs better than other state-of-the-art logarithmic quantization methods when the bit width of the operands becomes very small.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Monday, 28 November 2022
• 15:00-15:40
• HB17.140

Off-chip Self Timed SNN Custom Digital Interconnect System

Yichen Yang

To support the spike propagates between neurons, neuromorphic computing systems always require a high-speed communication link.

Meanwhile, spiking neural networks are event-driven so that the communication links normally exclude the clock signal and related blocks.

This thesis aims to develop a self-timed off-chip interconnect system with ring topology that supports multi-point communication in neuromorphic computing systems. This interconnect system is implemented in high-level modeling with SystemC and involves the burstmode two-wire protocol in point-to-point communication. In order to ensure the flexibility of the system, the distributed control system is involved. Further, the system can be configured with different numbers of chiplet to fulfill various spiking neural network structures.

We also explore optimization methods, which is a bi-directional ring topology achieving the growth of throughput. Based on evaluation and simulation results, the interconnect system can achieve 4.57Gbps with the specific application scenario.

Additional information ...

ME colloquium

• Thursday, 24 November 2022
• 16:00-17:00
• EEMCS, Snijderszaal

Piezoelectric Microsystems for a New Generation of Sensors

Tomás Manzaneque

The developments of the last decades in sensor technologies have greatly impacted our lives and promise to further revolutionize society by bringing the Internet of Things. Microsystem technologies constitute one of the main innovation drivers in sensing. In this talk, I will summarize my research efforts focused on building novel piezoelectric microsystems to tackle three aspects. The first aspect concerns studying fundamental principles of microsystems and materials, for sensing new magnitudes or achieving superior sensing performance. Second, I focus on enabling electrical readout schemes for highly sensitive microsystems, aiming for compact and inexpensive sensors. The third important aspect is that of improving the autonomy of sensors to be deployed in settings not accessible before. By tackling these three goals, I envision piezoelectric microsystems will realize compact and high-resolution mass sensors that will enable future particle sensors for air quality monitoring.

Additional information ...

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Monday, 31 October 2022
• 10:00-10:45
• EWI - Meeting room 15.1

A Low-Noise Transimpedance Amplifier for Ultrasound Imaging with 40dB Continuous-Time Gain Compensation

Qian Wang

This work presents a low-noise amplifier (LNA) for miniature 3D ultrasound probes. Time gain compensation (TGC) is required to provide continuously variable gain and compensate for the attenuated echo signal, resulting in decreased output dynamic range (DR). As TGC is embedded in the LNA, a power-hungry LNA is no longer needed to handle the full dynamic range of attenuated echo signal. Compared to prior art where TGC is applied after the LNA, this structure reduce die area and power consumption greatly.

The LNA with built-in TGC functionality is comprised of a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) with exponentially increasing feedback resistive network. Since a transducer with a relatively high impedance is targeted, a TIA is utilized to interface with the tranducer and sense the signal current. TGC is implemented in a continuous fashion by tunable resistors so as to alleviate imaging artifacts associated with gain switching moments. The resistive feedback network is achieved by triode transistors with exponentially decreasing gate voltages. Three parallel branches of triode transistors are varied simultaneously to obtain 40dB gain range. Each branch consists of two back-to-back triodes to mitigate non-linearity related to the body effect.

The variable-gain loop amplifier employing a current-reuse topology enables constant closed-loop bandwidth in an energy-efficient way. The first stage is a fixed-gain stage with dynamic biasing to save power at the lowest gain setting. The next two stages are variable-gain stages with variable resistive loads. The load resistor is implemented in the same fashion as the TIA’s feedback resistor to achieve intrinsic gain matching. The last stage is a buffer to provide low output impedance for stability.

The LNA has been designed in 0.18 μm CMOS technology and occupies an estimated die area of 0.0339 mm2. The effective gain range is 40 dB with ±1 dB gain error. The LNA’s noise floor at the highest gain is below 1.15 pA/rt-Hz and its harmonic distortion is better than -40 dB. During 100 μs receive period, the total power consumption is 6mW from a ±0.9 V supply. The LNA featuring small area and high power efficiency is a promising circuit for miniature 3D ultrasound probes.

Microelectronics Colloquium

• Thursday, 27 October 2022
• 15:30-16:30
• LB 1.010 Snijderszaal

Advances in Low-Field MRI Hardware Design and Data Processing

Rob Remis

In this talk we discuss several recent advances in low-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). We focus on magnet and gradient coil design for a low-field MR scanner in which the strong background field is generated by permanent magnets (Halbach systems). These design problems are treated as inverse source problems, which are severely ill-posed in general. How to obtain approximate (regularized) solutions to these problems is discussed and the practical implementation of these solutions is addressed as well. Several processing algorithms that can handle compressed noisy MR input data are also presented and we illustrate the performance of these algorithms on simulated and measured low-field MR data.

Additional information ...

Microelectronics Colloquium

• Thursday, 22 September 2022
• 15:30-16:30
• TBD

Sparsity-constrained Linear Dynamical Systems

Geethu Joseph

Abstract: At the intersection of control engineering and signal processing sits the upcoming field of sparse control and state estimation of linear dynamical systems. It deals with linear dynamical systems with control inputs having a few nonzero entries compared to their dimensions. Constraining the inputs to be sparse is often necessary to select a small subset of the available sensors or actuators at each time instant due to energy, bandwidth, or physical network constraints. Bringing together research from classical control theory and compressed sensing, the talk presents a comprehensive overview and critical insights into the conceptual foundations of sparsity-constrained systems, including the formulation, theory, and algorithms. We look at the concrete example of a budget-constrained external agent controlling the opinion of a social network.

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Thursday, 15 September 2022
• 12:00-13:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Advanced Measurement Techniques and Circuits for Array-Based Transit-Time Ultrasonic Flow Meters

Douwe van Willigen

This thesis describes the design, prototyping and evaluation of matrix-based clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters. Several new measurement techniques are presented as well as an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designed for accurate measurement of flow velocity with matrix transducers.

The influence of circuit topologies on the zero-flow performance of ultrasonic flow meters has been analyzed and an algorithm is presented to reduce the offset. With a linear transducer array, flow measurements have been performed via two different acoustic paths, demonstrating the ability to accurately measure flow with array transducers through a stainless-steel pipe wall. In order to improve signal quality, an ASIC has been designed that is able to drive and read-out 96 piezo transducer elements. The ASIC has been characterized electrically and flow measurements have been performed in combination with the linear transducer arrays.

Several new techniques, enabled using transducer arrays, have also been explored. By tapering the amplitude of the transmit signals, spurious waves can be suppressed. An auto-calibration technique has been developed that uses additional acoustic measurements to estimate the diameter of the pipe and the speed of sound in the pipe wall and liquid. Finally, a simulation study has been performed to explore the possibility of exploiting the beam-steering capabilities of transducer arrays to measure flow velocity profiles by using measurements obtained via multiple acoustic paths.

Thesis:
https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:e2f4b411-3d8e-4b93-b037-096009c59f61

Collegerama (live stream of the defence):
https://collegerama.tudelft.nl/mediasite/play/571eb84f3e724d47b46df7e8d0eb3a7a1d

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Tuesday, 13 September 2022
• 12:00-13:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Integrated Transceiver Circuits for Catheter-based Ultrasound Probes and Wearable Ultrasound Patches

Mingliang Tan

Promotors: Michiel Pertijs and Ronald Dekker

Thesis: link

Collegerama link (live stream of the defence): link

Abstract: This thesis describes the design, prototyping, and experimental evaluation of transceiver ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) for catheter-based ultrasound probes and wearable ultrasound patches. Various circuit techniques are proposed to address requirements and implementation bottlenecks in these applications. Prototype chips are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques. To reduce the loading effect of micro-coaxial cables in an ICE probe based on capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducers (CMUTs), an ASIC prototype including element-level high-voltage pulses and low-noise trans-impedance amplifiers has been implemented. Besides reducing the loading effect from micro-coaxial cables, ASICs play an important role in achieving cable-count reduction, which is crucial for 3-D imaging catheters, such as forward-looking IVUS probes. Circuit techniques are proposed to implement a prototype ASIC which only requires 4 cables to interface with a 2D piezoelectric transducer array. Additionally, to address the challenges in interface electronics for wearable ultrasound patches, a prototype ASIC is presented that contains 64 reconfigurable transceiver channels that can interface with different transducer elements by employing channel-parallelizing techniques.

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Special EI Colloquium

• Tuesday, 13 September 2022
• 10:00-11:00
• EWI - Lecture Hall F

Piero Tortoli, Michael Kraft

Real-time High-Frame Rate imaging: Novel Methods and Applications

Prof. Piero Tortoli
Microelectronics Systems Design Laboratory
University of Florence, Italy

Medical imaging is increasingly based on High-Frame-Rate (HFR) methods, which are in principle capable of producing one frame (or even one data volume) per transmission event. However, achieving such a goal in real-time implicitly involves the transfer and processing of huge amount of data at high rates, and this can be done only through an appropriate experimental setup.

In this talk, the main characteristics of the hardware-based open scanner ULA-OP 256 are briefly reviewed, and its recent advancements, such as the data transfer acceleration obtained through an architectural change, and the possible expansion toward the control of an unlimited number of probe elements, are reported in detail. The “virtual real-time” modality will also be described as ideal to obtain the best performance from specific HFR imaging modalities. Finally, the combination of ULA-OP 256 with properly designed sparse 2-D arrays will be shown suitable for the investigation of full volumes. The talk will be concluded with the presentation of experimental results in a few sample applications, including multi-plane imaging, HFR CFM and HFR vector Doppler.

 

Micro- and Nanosystems at ESAT, KU Leuven

Prof. Michael Kraft
ESAT, Micro- and Nano-Systems
KU Leuven, Belgium

This seminar will give an brief overview of the activities in micro- and nanosystems at the Electrical Engineering Department (ESAT) of KU Leuven. It will describe the available infrastructure and give a short overview of current research activities in the division Micro- and Nanosystems (MNS), which currently comprises 24 PhD students, 4 postdoctoral researchers and 2 technicians.

A selection of current active projects and recent highlights will be presented, including work on:

• Coupled resonators for mass sensing applications
• Piezoelectric ultrasound technology arrays for medical imaging and underwater communication
• Micromachined probes for neuro recording and stimulation
• Multi-parameter sensing chip for bioreactor condition monitoring
• Genetic Algorithm for the design of MEMS devices (accelerometers and microgrippers)

Finally, the newly founded Leuven Institute for Micro- and Nano Integration (LIMNI) will be briefly introduced.

Note: This Colloquium precedes the PhD defence of Mingliang Tan, which will take place in the Aula on the same day at 12:00 (layman’s talk), 12:30-13:30 (defence). More information can be found here.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Tuesday, 30 August 2022
• 10:00-10:45
• EWI - Meeting room 16.1

A Monolithic Photoplethysmogram (PPG) Sensor

Jixuan Mou
Silicon Integrated

A photoplethysmogram (PPG) is an important optically-obtained bio-sginal that enables convenient daily monitoring of heart rate and Oxygen saturation (SpO2). Most state-of-the-art PPG sensing systems require an off-chip photodiode, and the photodiode’s output parasitic capacitance limits the power-noise trade offs. The objective of this project is to implement a monolithic low-power PPG sensor for heart-rate detection. A novel sensing system has been developed, which has arrays of photogate imagers as front-ends and a compact successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter serving as the readout circuit. The readout power consumption is 0.64 uW at a sampling rate of 40 Hz. The minimum required LED power consumption is predicted to be 3 uW according to the post-layout simulation. The die area is 6.05 mm² including the pads. Compared with prior art, the readout power consumption reduces by four times and the die area reduces by 3 times. The chip was submitted for fabrication in June in TSMC180nm.

Invited talk

• Friday, 12 August 2022
• 11:00
• EEMCS (B36) lecture hall D@ta

What comes after digital? The Rain roadmap for neuromorphic artificial intelligence

Gordon Hirsch Wilson, CEO, Rain co-founder of Neuromorphics

The deep learning revolution that began in 2012 was sparked by the integration of two preexisting technologies: the back propagation algorithm for training neural networks, and the GPU architecture for scaling them up to large sizes.  For a decade, the roadmap defined by these two technologies has enabled immense progress in digital artificial intelligence.  Now, the costs associated with this approach make further progress impractical.  At Rain, we have focused on developing a new learning algorithm and scaling architecture for neuromorphic hardware.  The equilibrium propagation algorithm and the sparse neural array architecture form the backbone for a new roadmap of analog artificial intelligence.  In this talk, I will discuss our mission, our past 5 years of research and development, plans for partnerships, and the path forward as we scale our organization after closing Series A funding in January 2022.

Gordon Hirsch Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of Rain Neuromorphics.  Gordon studied mathematics and statistics at the University of Florida, where he met his co-founders, CTO Jack Kendall and Chief Scientific Advisor Juan Nino.  Gordon and Jack are unique among Silicon Valley semiconductor founders, in that they do not come from a background in the industry.  Founding Rain when they were both 25 years old, they seek to bring a fresh and interdisciplinary perspective to the chip industry. Gordon lives in the Castro district of San Francisco, California.

• Wednesday, 18 -- Wednesday, 18 May 2022
• 10:00-11:00
• EEMCS, Snijderszaal

Circuits Crossing the Border

Dr. Taekwang Jang
ETH Zurich

Circuit designers are entering an exciting era in which circuit innovations will be the key enablers of future innovation. Emerging trends such as Machine Learning, the Internet-of-Everything, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Autonomous Driving, 6G Communication and Quantum Computing will drive the design of novel circuits with drastically improved accuracy, speed, and energy efficiency.

However, achieving such improvements will not be straightforward, and will require innovation. A fruitful way of doing this is by using circuits developed for one application domain in other domains. By crossing the border, so to speak, novel circuits with significantly improved performance may be found. In this talk, I will discuss three examples of this design approach:

-  A high-power-density DC-DC converter based on class-D LC oscillators

- A noise-efficient amplifier based on a switched capacitor DC-DC converter

- A low-noise PLL with AC-coupled phase detectors from Instrumentation Amplifiers

Sensors and Interfaces Meeting (SIM)

• Monday, 16 -- Tuesday, 17 May 2022
• Veldhoven

Sensors and Interfaces Meeting (SIM) is a two-day event featuring 12 outstanding invited speakers from both academia and industry. The theme focus of the 1st day will be “Sensor interfaces for the Internet of Things,” while that of the 2nd day will be “High Performance Sensor Interfaces”. On each of the two days there will be six 40-minute talks followed by 10 minute Q&A sessions will be held.

Additional information ...

Sensors and CMOS Interface Electronics

• Monday, 9 -- Friday, 20 May 2022

Would you like to learn about smart sensors and interface circuits? Register for our course “Sensors and CMOS Interface Electronics”, co-organized by TU Delft and MEAD Education.

The course will take place online, on 8 days between May 9 and May 20, with two lectures per day timed conveniently for participation from anywhere on the globe.

Topics include smart-sensor design, calibration techniques, references, offset-cancellation, analog-to-digital conversion, instrumentation amplifiers and energy harvesting. Moreover, the course features lectures by experts in the field dedicated to smart inertial sensors, magnetic sensors, temperature sensors, image sensors, ultrasonic sensors, capacitive sensors, implantable medical devices and DNA microarrays.

Microelectronics Colloquium

• Thursday, 24 February 2022
• 16:30-05:00
• Online via TEAMS

An inclusive EEMCS faculty: An emphatic approach.

Jorge Martinez

Our faculty consists of a vibrant and diverse community. Diversity is a catalyst that allows us to achieve broad knowledge, and a base upon we can drive scientific innovation and improve education.

Moreover, diversity is one of the core values of TUDelft and our faculty and comes with great responsibility. Without equality and inclusion diversity becomes an empty gesture. But realising a safe, equal and inclusive environment requires the participation of everyone in our community. It starts by having a dialog, stablish communication channels at different levels, and debunking taboos with respect to the visible and invisible differences among each other and our students. An empathic approach for this process can play a key role in realising this ambition.

In this colloquium Jorge talks about his experience within EDIT: EEMCS Diversity & Inclusion Team. Join us to know more about EDIT, and for an informal discussion on the current advancements on addressing issues like harassment, discrimination, and gender (in)equality. Or if you want to know what are the channels and means within our faculty and our University to reach for advice or help in case you encounter any issues related to these important topics.

Additional information ...

Microelectronics Colloquium

• Thursday, 28 October 2021
• 15:30-16:30
• Microsoft Teams Meeting

On my personal journey into artificial intelligence

Justin Dauwels

In this presentation, I will start with a brief introduction to artificial intelligence (AI). I will then elaborate on two types of AI approaches that our research team is investigating: graphical models and neural networks. Next I will summarize some of the main research results of our group. I will review some of the applications of AI that we have been working on over the years, and will present some of our future research plans. I will also say a few words about the spin-off companies that have emerged from our research group. At last, I will conclude with a few thoughts on the potential impact of AI on society and will formulate a few important open research questions in the field of AI.

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Monday, 13 September 2021
• 14:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

In-pixel temperature sensors for dark current compensation of a CMOS image sensor

Accel Abarca Prouza

This thesis describes the integration of temperature sensors into a CMOS image sensor (CIS). The temperature sensors provide the in-situ temperature of the pixels as well as the thermal distribution of the pixel array. The temperature and the thermal distribution are intended to be used to compensate for dark current affecting the CIS. Two different types of in-pixel temperature sensors have been explored. The first type of temperature sensor is based on a substrate parasitic bipolar junction transistor (BJT). The second type of temperature sensor that has been explored is based on the nMOS source follower (SF) transistor of the same pixel. The readout system that is used for the temperature sensors and for the image pixels is based on low noise column amplifiers. Both types of in-pixel temperature sensors (IPTS) have been designed implementing different techniques to improve their accuracy. The use of the IPTSs has been proved by measuring three prototypes chips. Also, a novel technique to compensate for the dark current of a CIS by using the IPTS has been proposed.

For those who cannot attend, you can follow it by using this link:
https://collegerama.tudelft.nl/mediasite/play/84dc9775142d44db81aa38e5532c67ca1d

Ph.D. Thesis Defense of Sining Pan

• Monday, 12 April 2021
• 12:00-13:30

Resistor-based temperature sensors in CMOS technology

Sining Pan

Time: Monday, 12 April 2021, 12:00-12:15 (layman’s talk), 12:30-13:30 (defense)

Abstract: This thesis describes the principle and design of an emerging type of CMOS temperature sensors based on the temperature dependency of on-chip resistors. Compared to traditional BJT-based designs, resistor-based sensors have higher energy-efficiency, better scalability, and can operate under a wider supply range. Nine design examples are shown in this thesis to demonstrate how resistor-based sensors can be optimized for accuracy, energy-efficiency, or other application-driven specifications. Among all the records the designs achieved, the energy-efficiency improvement is the most impressive: 65× better than state-of-the-art before this research, or only 6× away from the theoretical value.

Please feel welcome to join the live stream: http://collegerama.tudelft.nl/mediasite/play/be505395bbf24debb7cf8fd61454a5261d

Thesis: https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:28108302-2d9b-4560-a806-8ba6d381812e

Additional information ...

ME Colloquium by Karen Dowling

• Thursday, 28 January 2021
• 03:30
• TEAMS

Offset and Noise Behavior of Microfabricated AlGaN/GaN Hall-effect Sensors

Karen Dowling
Stanford University

They are incredibly useful due to their non-perturbing nature. For example, they can be used to infer information about position, velocity, and current in power systems. In many applications, silicon Hall effect sensors are quite popular due to their low cost and ease of integration with silicon circuits. However, silicon Hall-effect plates cannot operate at extreme temperatures (< -100°C or above 300°C) due to carrier freeze out and intrinsic carrier leakage, respectively. In addition, Hall-effect plates have challenges with thermal drift, offset, and flicker noise.

In this talk, I will describe an AlGaN/GaN 2DEG Hall-effect plate with ~100 ppm/K drift, 0.5 micro-Tesla offset, and 200 Hz corner frequency. In addition, the GaN 2DEG Hall-effect plates have operated in an extended temperature range from 50 K to 600°C. These metrics beat out state-of-the-art silicon Hall-effect sensors. Through this work, I have achieved record-low offsets with GaN 2DEG Hall devices, presented a framework for studying noise in GaN Hall sensors, and initiated steps towards integration of Hall-effect devices in microsystems for low-earth orbit and current sensing in transformers. These contributions will enable a future monolithically integrated GaN platform for power electronics and extreme environments.

About the Speaker: Karen Dowling received her B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA in 2013 and M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, CA in 2015. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 2019. In 2011, she was a Systems Engineering Intern at Crane Aerospace Electronics, Burbank CA. In 2012, she was a Research Assistant at the Wireless Integrated Microsystems center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2015, she was an intern at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington MA, and in 2018 she was an intern at Infineon Technologies in Munich, Germany. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a focus on opto-electronics for power and RF devices. Her research interests include the use of wideband gap materials for the development of sensors for extreme environments, in particular magnetic field sensors for power electronic systems and navigation for exploration. Dr. Dowling is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and was the student president of the NSF engineering research center for power optimization of electro-thermal systems.

TEAMS link can be reuqested by sending an email to m.j.vanderput@tudelft.nl (department secretary ME)

Medical Delta Café

• Thursday, 14 January 2021
• 16:00-17:00
• Online via Teams

Medical Delta Café 'Zorg naar huis, en dan….? Van monitoren tot behandelen'

Wouter Serdijn, Frank Willem Jansen (Medical Delta), Gisela Terwindt (LUMC), Ries Biggelaar van den (ErasmusMC)

In het online Medical Delta Café 'Zorg naar huis, en dan….? Van monitoren tot behandelen' belichten prof. dr. Gisela Terwindt (LUMC) en drs. Ries van den Biggelaar (Erasmus MC) deze kwesties, waarna deelnemers worden uitgenodigd mee te discussiëren en kennis uit te wisselen in een paneldiscussie met onder andere Medical Delta hoogleraar prof. dr. ir. Wouter Serdijn (TU Delft).

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Monday, 21 December 2020
• 14:30-16:00

Integrated Circuits for Miniature 3-D Ultrasound Probes: Solutions for the Interconnection Bottleneck

Zhao Chen

14:30-15:00 (layman’s talk), 15:00-16:00 (defence)

Please feel welcome to join the live stream

Promotors: Michiel Pertijs and Nico de Jong

Abstract: This thesis describes low-power application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs to mitigate the constraint of cable count in miniature 3-D TEE probes. Receive cable-count reduction techniques including subarray beamforming and digital time-division multiplexing (TDM) have been explored and the effectiveness of these techniques has been demonstrated by experimental prototypes. Digital TDM is a reliable technique to reduce cable count, but it requires an in-probe datalink for high-speed data communication. A quantitative study on the impact of the datalink performance on B-mode ultrasound image quality has been introduced in this thesis for data communication in future digitized ultrasound probes. Finally, a high-voltage transmitter prototype has been presented for effective cable-count reduction in transmission while achieving good power efficiency. The application of these techniques is not limited to only the design of TEE probes and can be easily extended to the design of other miniature 3-D ultrasound probes, for instance intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) probes and IVUS probes, which are facing similar interconnect challenges with an increased number of transducer elements to enhance imaging quality.

Additional information ...

Microelectronics Colloquium

• Thursday, 29 October 2020
• 15:30-16:30
• Online

Artificial Retina: A Future Cellular-Resolution Brain-Machine Interface

Dante Muratore

A healthy retina transduces incoming visual stimuli into patterns of neural activity, which are then transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve. Degenerative diseases, like macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa, destroy the ability of the retina to transduce light, causing profound blindness. An artificial retina is a device that replaces the function of retinal circuitry lost to disease. Present-day devices can elicit visual percepts in patients, providing a proof of concept. However, the patterns of neural activity they produce are far from natural, and the visual sensations experienced by patients are coarse and of limited use to patients.

A main hurdle is that there are many types of cells in the retina. For example, some cells respond to increases of light intensity, while other cells respond to decreases of light intensity. In order to reproduce a meaningful neural code, it is crucial to respect the specificity and selectivity of these cells. Because cells of different types are intermixed in the circuitry of the retina, cell type specific activation of this kind requires that a future artificial retina be able to stimulate at single cell resolution, over a significant area in the central retina.

To achieve this goal, we are designing an epi-retinal interface that operates in two modes: calibration and runtime. During calibration, the interface learns which cells and which cell types are available for stimulation, by recording neural activity from the retina. During runtime, the interface stimulates the available cells to best approximate the desired scene. I will present a system architecture we are developing that can accomplish the overall performance goals, and the implications of this architecture for brain-machine interfaces.

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Wednesday, 26 August 2020
• 14:30-16:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Antenna Array Synthesis and Beamforming for 5G Applications: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Yanki Aslan

Realization of the future 5G systems requires the design of novel mm-wave base station antenna systems that are capable of generating multiple beams with low mutual interference, while serving multiple users simultaneously using the same frequency band. Besides, small wavelengths and high packaging densities of front-ends lead to overheating of such systems, which prevents safe and reliable operation. Since the strict cost and energy requirements of the first phase 5G systems favor the use of low complexity beamforming architectures, computationally efficient signal processing techniques and fully passive cooling strategies, it is a major challenge for the antenna community to design multibeam antenna topologies and front-ends with enhanced spatial multiplexing, limited inter-beam interference, acceptable implementation complexity, suitable processing burden, and natural-only/radiative cooling.Traditionally, array design has been performed based on satisfying the given criteria solely on the radiation patterns (gain, side lobe level (SLL), beamwidth etc.). However, in addition to the electromagnetic aspects, multi-beam antenna synthesis and performance evaluation in 5G systems at mm-waves must combine different disciplines, including but not limited to, signal processing, front-end circuitry design, thermal management, channel & propagation, and medium access control aspects. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of the problem, the main objective of this research is to develop, evaluate and verify innovative multibeam array techniques and solutions for 5G base station antennas, not yet used nor proposed for mobile communications. The research topics include the investigation of (i) new array topologies, compatible with IC passive cooling, including sparse, space tapered arrays and optimized subarrays, meeting key requirements of 3-D multi-user coverage with frequency re-use and power-efficient side-lobe control, (ii) adaptive multiple beamforming strategies and digital signal processing algorithms, tailored to these new topologies, and (iii) lowcost/competitive and sufficiently generic implementation of the above array topologies and multi-beam generation concepts to serve multiple users with the same antenna(s) with the best spectrum and power efficiencies. This doctoral thesis consists of three parts. Part I focuses on the system-driven aspects which cover the system modeling (including the link budget and precoding), propagation in mm-wave channels and statistical assessment of the Quality of Service (QoS). Although separate comprehensive studies exist both in the field of propagation/system modeling and antennas/beamforming, the link between the two disciplines is still weak. In this part, the aim of the study is to bridge the gap between the two domains and to identify the trade-offs between the complexity of beamforming, the QoS, and the computational cost of precoding in the 5G multi-beam base station arrays for various use cases. Based on the system model developed, a novel quantitative relation between the antenna SLLs/pattern nulls and the statistical QoS is established in a line-of-sight (LoS) dominated mm-wave propagation scenario. Moreover, the potential of using smart (low in-sector side-lobe) array layouts (with simple beam steering) in obtaining sufficiently high and robust QoS, while achieving the optimally low processing costs is highlighted. For a possible pure non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenario, the system advantages (in terms of the beamforming complexity and the interference level) of creating a single, directive beam towards the strongest multipath component of a user are explained via ray-tracing based propagation simulations. The insightful system observations from Part I lead to several fundamental research questions: Could we simplify the multiple beamforming architecture while keeping a satisfying QoS? Are there any efficient yet effective alternative interference suppression methods to further improve the QoS? How should we deal with the large heat generation at the base station? These questions, together with the research objectives, form the basis for the studies performed in the remaining parts. Part II of the thesis focuses on the electromagnetism-driven aspects which include innovative, low-complexity subarray based multibeam architectures and new array optimization strategies for effective SLL suppression. The currently proposed multi-beam 5G base stations in the literature for beamforming complexity reduction use either a hybrid array of phased subarrays, which limits the field-of-view significantly, or employ a fully-connected analog structure, which increases the hardware requirements remarkably. Therefore, in the first half of this part, the aim is to design low-complexity hybrid (or hybrid-like) multiple beamforming topologies with a wide angular coverage. For this purpose, two new subarray based multiple beamforming concepts are proposed: (i) a hybrid array of active multiport subarrays with several digitally controlled Butler Matrix beams and (ii) an array of cosecant subarrays with a fixed cosecant shaped beam in elevation and digital beamforming in azimuth. Using the active (but not phased) multiport subarrays, the angular sector coverage is widened as compared to that of a hybrid array of phased subarrays, the system complexity is decreased as compared to that of a hybrid structure with a fully-connected analog network, and the effort in digital signal processing is reduced greatly. The cosecant subarray beamforming, on the other hand, is shown to be extremely efficient in serving multiple simultaneous co-frequency users in the case of a fairness-motivated LoS communication thanks to its low complexity and power equalization capability. Another critical issue with the currently proposed 5G antennas is the large inter-user interference caused by the high average SLL of the regular, periodic arrays. Therefore, in the second half of Part II, the aim is to develop computationally and power-efficient SLL suppression techniques that are compatible with the 5G’s multibeam nature in a wide angular sector. To achieve this, two novel techniques (based on iterative parameter perturbations) are proposed: (i) a phase-only control technique and (ii) a position-only control technique. The phase-only technique provides peak SLL minimization and simultaneous pattern nulling, which is more effective than the available phase tapering methods in the literature. The position-only technique, on the other hand, yields uniform-amplitude, (fully-aperiodic and quasi-modular) irregular planar phased arrays with simultaneous multibeam optimization. The latter technique combines interference-awareness (via multibeam SLL minimization in a predefined cell sector) and thermal-awareness (via uniform amplitudes and minimum element spacing constraint) for the first time in an efficient and easy-to-solve optimization algorithm. Part III of the thesis concentrates on the thermal-driven aspects which cover the thermal system modeling of electronics, passive cooling at the base stations, and the role of antenna researchers in array cooling. The major aim here is to form a novel connection between the antenna system design and thermal management, which is not yet widely discussed in the literature. In this part, an efficient thermal system model is developed to perform the thermal simulations. To effectively address the challenge of thermal management at the base stations, fanless CPU heatsinks are exploited for the first time for fully-passive and low-cost cooling of the active integrated antennas. To reduce the size of the heatsinks and ease the thermal problem, novel planar antenna design methodologies are also proposed. In the case of having a low thermal conductivity board, using a sparse irregular antenna array with a large inter-element spacing (such as a sunflower array) is suggested. Alternatively, for the densely packed arrays, increasing the equivalent substrate conductivity by using thick ground planes and simultaneously enlarging the substrate dimensions is proven to be useful. The performed research presents the first-ever irregular/sparse and subarray based antennas with wide scan multi-beam capability, low temperature, high-efficiency power amplifiers, and low level of side lobes. The developed antenna arrays and beam generation concepts could have also an impact over a broad range of applications where they should help overcome the capacity problem by use of multiple adaptive antennas, improve reliability and reduce interference.

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SSCS WYE Webinar

• Friday, 7 -- Friday, 7 August 2020
• 17:00-18:00

To Academia, or to Industry, That is the Question.

Kofi Makinwa, Shin-Lien Lu

Abstract:

You are about to finish graduate school or perhaps a young or seasoned professional, contemplating a career transition. Which is better - a career in academia or industry? What are the pros and cons of one versus the other? How can you start exploring and build up your career accordingly? In this webinar, we will interview Dr. Linus Lu, a professor-turned-industry veteran, and Prof. Kofi Makinwa, an industry veteran-turned-professor, who will share their insights and perspectives from their personal journeys in both academia and industry careers. They will also address what triggered their transitions, how they staged their transitions, and offer their crystal ball projections on present and future career prospects in the solid-state-circuits profession.

REGISTER TODAY!

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PhD Thesis Defence

• Thursday, 12 March 2020
• 14:30-16:00

Compact Thermal Diffusivity Sensors for On-Chip Thermal Management

Ugur Sonmez

Today's systems-on-chip (SoCs) and microprocessors are complex systems that require multiple temperature sensors to monitor temperature variations across hotspots on a single silicon die. Specialized compact and accurate temperature sensors are required for such thermal management applications. This work discusses the development of a compact, digital-output temperature sensor exploiting the highly-temperature-sensitive thermal diffusivity of bulk silicon. The prototype sensors occupy only 0.00165 mm2 in a commercial 40nm standard CMOS process, and achieves 0.7C (3 sigma) inaccuracy after a room-temperature trim. Development of this sensor allows a denser thermal management system to be implemented, saving on SoC power consumption and improves reliability.

Additional information ...

Microelectronics / Medical-NeuroDelta Colloquium

• Thursday, 30 January 2020
• 15:30-17:00
• Lecture hall D@ta

Bioelectronics Medicine

Vasiliki Giagka (TU Delft/Fraunhofer IZM), Daniel Schobben (Founder, Chief Operating Officer, Salvia Bioelectronics)

Abstract Vasiliki Giagka

If the Medicine of the future is Bioelectronic, how does the pill of the future look like? – and what does it take to make it?

In a world where medicine is becoming more personalised the promise of Bioelectronic Medicine is that tiny implants will deliver energy in the form of electrical impulses, replacing pharmaceuticals, their conventional chemical counterparts. But how can we develop such tiny smart and autonomous implants that (need to) seamlessly interact with the tissue and live in the body for decades? How can we protect all the components in such an implant while still maintaining the small form factor and essential flexibility? How can we design electronics such that they remain better protected in such a harsh environment? How can we ensure autonomy under the above restrictions? Eventually, how can we make our medicine more precise, i.e. increase the specificity at which we interact with the tissue? And if we achieve all these, how will the pill of the future look like?

Abstract Daniel Schrobben

Salvia Bioelectronics, working on a novel interface and neurostimulation concept for chronic migraine treatment.

Since several years deep trench isolation (DTI) is used as a Chronic migraine – i.e. 15+ headache-days each month –affects 1.4% of the population, mostly 25-50 y/o women. Pharmacological treatments are available, but these have limited effectiveness and are associated with severe side effects (o.a. dizziness, nausea, weight gain). Many people are refractory to medication; they do not respond or cannot tolerate them.

Salvia develops a unique bioelectronic foil that is placed seamlessly below the skin to stimulate proven neural targets for the treatment of chronic headache. This patent-pending neurostimulation concept is designed for optimal safety and effectiveness and opens the market for this already-validated and long-awaited headache treatment.

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PhD Thesis Defence

• Friday, 17 January 2020
• Aula Senaatszaal

3D Elements for Phased-Array Systems: Analysis and Design.

Cristina Yepes

In recent years, radar systems and satellite communications require phased array antennas that are capable of incorporating frequency and angular selectivity while maintaining a low profile. Active phased array antennas must comply with stringent requirements in terms of sensitivity to interference caused by other nearby radiating systems, especially in complex platforms, where a multitude of sensors and radiating systems need to co-exist. In such environments, antennas working at different frequencies can interfere with each other and the implementation of frequency filtering functions with a good out-of-band rejection are needed. Moreover, the interference between different systems can be mitigated by reducing the radiation in the direct path between them. For this purpose, angular filtering functions for pattern shaping can be beneficial. However, standard planar printed circuit board technology puts constraints on the possible antenna elements that can be realized to achieve frequency and angular selectivity. Thus, using new methods such as additive manufacturing technology and 3D printing can provide more degrees of freedom to fabricate complex geometries with a desired operation.

For these reasons, this work focuses on studying new solutions for frequency selectivity with rejection of higher order harmonics, developing a spectral method of moment to study antennas to achieve angular shaping and finding the guidelines needed to design such antennas, and testing additive manufacturing technology to find its suitability at high frequencies for phased array antennas. A bandpass miniaturize-element frequency selective surface with harmonic rejection properties has been designed and manufactured. The design is based on an equivalent circuit model, taking a 3-pole Chebyshev bandpass filter as a starting point, where the inter-layer interaction is only described with a single transmission line representing the fundamental Floquet wave. The prototype consists of five metallic layers, interdigitated patches and grids, separated by dielectric slabs and exhibiting good stability over a wide conical incidence range. A practical case to estimate the effects of placing the FSS in the proximity of a wide-scanning wideband connected array of dipoles has been performed. The performance of the array combined with the FSS has been experimentally characterized, defining the optimal distance between FSS and array to avoid the propagation of surface waves between both structures, showing a good response within the FSS bandwidth and a good frequency rejection outside of this bandwidth.

A spectral method of moments for tilted elements in free space and in the presence of a backing reflector for infinite and finite arrays has been derived. Such method allows to study dipole and stacked dipole elements and find the guidelines needed to design, in a future, a phased array antenna with an undesired angular range where suppression of gain is intended. The parametric study concluded that the main parameters that shapes the pattern are the inter-element distance between elements and the tilt angle of the elements. The requirements to achieve an asymmetric radiation pattern are a directive element and an inter-elements distance higher than half wavelength, while the tilt of the elements allows to shape the gain levels in the suppressed angular region. To validate this study a linear arrays consisting of tilted dipoles loaded with artificial dielectric layers has been fabricated. The prototype shows a good comparison with simulations and measurements.

A simple design of a dipole antenna has been derived and fabricated using Stereolithography process as an additive manufacturing method. The polymer and metal paste used in the process have been characterized and results have been discussed. A good agreement between simulations and measurements has been achieved after including the geometric deviations found in the fabricated antenna. The fabrication process for high frequencies appears to be prone to systematic errors and the challenges related to the use of additive manufacturing technology for high frequency RF antennas and components has been discussed.

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Thursday, 28 November 2019
• 10:00-12:00
• HB 09.150 (Vassiliadiszaal)

A load-modulation digital data link for miniature ultrasound probes

Mengxin Yu

Miniature ultrasound probes, such as intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) probes, are valuable diagnostic tools and provide image guidance during minimally-invasive interventions. As more ultrasound transducer elements are built into such probes to improve image quality and frame rate, it becomes increasingly difficult to accommodate the cables needed to connect these elements to an imaging system. Among several reported cable-count reduction approaches, in-probe digitization of the received echo signals is a promising solution, as it allows digital data-link techniques to be leveraged to minimize cable count.

This work takes a previously-developed application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for an IVUS probe as a starting point. This ASIC employs a load-modulation datalink to transmit digitized echo signals of one element via a single micro-coaxial cable at 0.6 Gb/s. This thesis extends this work to multi-bit per-symbol signalling to increase the data rate, allowing the echo signals of multiple elements to be combined into one cable. First, the measured performance of the existing ASIC is compared to simulation results, showing the need for an S-parameter based cable model to faithfully reproduce the measured performance. Based on this simulation model, load modulation with a maximum of three bits per symbol and a maximum symbol rate of 600 MHz is investigated. The trade-off between data-transmission conditions and bit-error rate is investigated and gives a general idea about how fast the data rate can be.

An experimental setup is proposed to experimentally validate the performance of multi-bit load-modulation data links. For this, a prototype chip has been designed that includes a multi-bit load-modulation circuit and interfaces with an FPGA that provides test data. The chip has been taped out in a TSMC 0.18 um HV CMOS technology. Post-layout simulation shows that the prototype is able to generate a data rate of 1.6 Gb/s when there are two bits per symbol at the symbol rate of 800 MHz. Compared to the 0.6 Gb/s of the previous design, this is a substantially higher data rate.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Wednesday, 27 November 2019
• 15:00-17:00
• Snijderszaal, LB.01.010, EEMCS

A Programmable Temperature Switch

Shardul Rautmare

Temperature threshold sensors facilitate temperature protection in microprocessors by indicating when the processor gets overheated or too cold. This thesis presents a BJT based temperature sensor with a programmable temperature threshold from -40°C to 150°C. Comparison of a CTAT voltage with a PTAT voltage gives a one-bit digital output when the temperature of the die exceeds the set threshold. This work achieves a temperature detection accuracy of ±0.75°C, leading to the lowest reported relative inaccuracy among temperature switches by using a room temperature digital trim and without the use of any dynamic techniques. The design has a current consumption of 7uA, and the estimated area of the system is less than 0.05mm2 in 0.16um CMOS technology.

PhD Thesis Defence

• Tuesday, 19 November 2019
• 14:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Capacitively-Coupled Bridge Readout Circuits

Hui Jiang

This Ph.D. dissertation describes the design and realization of energy efficient readout integrated circuits (ROICs), that have an input referred noise density < 5 nV/√Hz and a linearity of < 30 ppm, as required by Wheatstone bridge sensors used in precision mechatronic systems. Novel techniques were developed, at both the system-level and circuit-level, to improve the ROIC’s energy-efficiency, while preserving its stability and precision. Two prototypes are presented, each with best-in-class energy efficiency, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

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PhD Thesis Defence

• Monday, 11 November 2019
• 12:00-14:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

High-Speed Interfaces for Capacitive Displacement Sensor

Sha Xia

This thesis describes the theory, design, and implementation of high-speed capacitive displacement sensor interface circuits. The intended application is to readout the capacitive displacement sensor used in a servo loop, where the measurement time needs to be low to ensure loop stability. The work employs baseline-capacitance cancellation technique to reach a high energy-efficiency and high conversion speed.

Operational Amplifiers: Theory & Design

• Monday, 4 -- Friday, 8 November 2019
• 08:00-18:00

The course is addressing systematic analysis and design as well as hands-on simulation of operational amplifiers. It is shown that the topology of all operational amplifiers can be divided in nine main overall configurations. High-frequency compensation techniques are analyzed for all nine configurations. Special focus is on low-power low-voltage architectures with rail-to-rail output and/or input ranges. The design of fully differential operational amplifiers is developed. New emphasis is on low-offset chopper amplifiers, and capacitive coupled chopper amplifiers for high input-voltage current-sense applications. During hands-on simulation hours several input, output and overall designs will be covered.

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Thursday, 31 October 2019
• 15:00-15:30
• Building 34, Lecture Hall E (Robert Hooke)

A Dynamic Zoom ADC for Audio Applications

Efraïm Eland

Audio ADCs used in high-fidelity portable audio and IoT are not only required to have high linearity and dynamic range (DR) but are also expected to be very energy efficient and occupy minimum silicon area. Zoom-ADCs combine a coarse asynchronous SAR with a fine Delta-Sigma Modulator (∆ΣM) to satisfy these requirements. Existing zoom ADC architectures are limited in terms of SQNR due to the need for the fine ADC to have some over-ranging. That, together with the leakage of the SAR ADC’s quantization noise, “fuzz,” into the audio band, puts a lower limit on the sampling frequency.
This thesis describes the design of a zoom-ADC for an audio bandwidth of 20kHz. Using a 4-level quantizer, instead of a conventional 1b quantizer, mitigates the adverse effects of over-ranging, making it possible to keep a very low sampling frequency. On top of that, it makes use of a simple, low power analog “fuzz” cancellation scheme to prevent the SAR quantization noise from leaking into the audio band.
The chip has been prototyped in a standard 160nm CMOS technology and consumes 339μW with 107.7dB DR and 105dB SNDR. Compared to state-of-the-art ADCs with a similar bandwidth, this work achieves a 2x lower OSR (fs = 2.5MHz), significantly improving the energy efficiency and achieving a Schreier FoM of 185.4dB.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Thursday, 31 October 2019
• 12:30-13:00
• Building 34, Lecture Hall E (Robert Hooke)

Rail-to-rail input and output amplifier for ADC front-end applications.

Shubham Khandelwal

This work presents a unity-gain stable operational amplifier for an ADC front-end application. The op-amp focuses on delivering high linearity with low noise and offset while driving a switched capacitor load. To accomplish this the op-amp employs Current Spillover, Chopping and Gain-Boosting techniques. The op-amp achieves THD of -108 dB at 10kHz, offset of 2.7 µV and input noise density of 19.3 nV/√Hz while consuming 504 µW; resulting in an NEF of 12.28. The op-amp is fabricated in 0.16 µm CMOS technology and occupies 0.1 mm2 area.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Friday, 25 October 2019
• 14:00-14:30
• LB 01.010 Snijderszaal

Electrothermal Filters for No-Trim Temperature Sensors

Daguang Liu

This thesis describes the design and characterization of thermistor-based electrothermal filters (ETFs) intended for use in high-accuracy CMOS temperature sensors. ETFs have been previously realized by placing an on-chip heater in close proximity to an on-chip thermopile, which then picks up the thermally-delayed signals generated by the heater. This delay is a well-defined function of absolute temperature and can be used as the basis for highly accurate temperature sensors. In this work, the thermopiles are replaced by a thermistor, resulting in greater sensitivity and higher resolution. Measurements show that the new ETFs can achieve 3.6mK resolution in a conversion time of 1s and 0.2°C(3 σ) untrimmed inaccuracy from 30 °C to 60°C.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Wednesday, 23 October 2019
• 15:00-15:30
• LB 01.010 Snijderszaal

A PLL-based eddy current displacement sensor for button applications

Matheus Ferreira Pimenta

This thesis presents an eddy current sensor (ECS) for button readout applications. The interface embeds the coil sensor in a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) and uses a highly digital phase locked loop (PLL) to convert the displacement information into a digital output.
The sensor achieves more than 12bit effective resolution, which translates into an equivalent displacement resolution in excess of 10nm RMS. The interface consumes less than 235µA from a 1.8V supply, resulting in a very power efficient architecture.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Thursday, 19 September 2019
• 15:30-16:00
• Lecture Hall Technology in PULSE, building 33a

An ASIC with Bipolar High-Voltage Transmit Switching for a Single-Cable Intra-Vascular Ultrasound Probe

Rishabh Nagarkar

An ASIC is presented for intra-vascular ultrasound imaging. Despite being connected via a single coaxial cable, it is able to pass arbitrary high-voltage bipolar signals to the transducers for acoustic imaging. The thesis talks about the need to reduce the cable count to one and reviews the existing work in literature. It builds upon an existing single-cable design and focuses on the transmit part to make it compatible with a large number of ultrasound imaging modes by allowing it to pass high-frequency signals up to 20MHz and bipolar signal voltages up to +/-25V. The chip is phantom powered and thus its power supply and signals are transmitted on the same cable. The transmit switch designed for this ASIC is powered by and controlled by an on-chip low-voltage supply and circuitry. The prototype ASIC has been designed in TSMC 180nm HV BCD Gen2 technology. This single-cable design has 16 elements for transmit and 64 elements in the receive mode and has been evaluated using simulations.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Friday, 30 August 2019
• 10:00-10:30
• Lecture Hall 10 in PULSE, building 33a

A low-noise amplifier for ultrasound imaging with continuous time-gain compensation

Qiyou Jiang

This work presents a low-noise amplifier (LNA) for ultrasound imaging with built-in continuous time-gain compensation (TGC), which compensates for the time-dependent attenuation of the received echo signal and thus significantly reduces its dynamic range (DR).

The proposed design combines the LNA and TGC functions in a single variable-gain current-to-current amplifier. Compared to conventional ultrasound front-ends, which implement the TGC function after an LNA that needs to handle the full DR of the echo signal, this approach can highly reduce the power consumption and the size. Compared to earlier programmable gain LNAs with discrete gain steps, the continuous gain control avoids switching transients that may lead to imaging artefacts.

The TGC function is realized by a novel feedback network consisting of a double differential pair that feeds a fraction of the output current back to the input. This fraction can be changed continuously using a control voltage that is applied to the gates of the differential pairs, to realize a gain range from -20 dB to +20 dB. To achieve an approximately constant closed-loop bandwidth in the presence of the changing feedback factor, a loop amplifier has been implemented whose gain is changed along with the feedback factor by dynamically changing its bias currents. This loop amplifier employs a current-reuse architecture to achieve high power-efficiency. In addition, a variable bias current source has been designed to appropriately bias the TGC feedback network. By employing a similar double differential pair topology as in the feedback network, this current source provides the required low noise at the highest gain setting and high current at the lowest gain setting within the available headroom.

The LNA with built-in TGC function has been realized in 180nm CMOS technology. It has been optimized to interface with a 7.5 MHz capacitive micro-machined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT). Simulation results show that it achieves a 3dB bandwidth higher than 40 MHz across the full gain range. At the highest gain setting, its input current noise is 0.96 pA/rt-Hz at 7.5 MHz. This leads to an input dynamic range of 93 dB, which is compressed into an output dynamic range of 53 dB by means of the 40 dB variable gain. The amplifier consumes 10.8 mW from a 1.8V supply, and occupies an estimated 320 x 320 um2 die area.

PRORISC and SAFE 2019

• Thursday, 4 -- Friday, 5 July 2019
• Aula Conference Centre of TUDelft

PRORISC and SAFE 2019

PRORISC is an annual conference on Integrated Circuit (IC) design and SAFE is an annual conference on Microsystems, Materials, Technology and RF-devices. Both conferences are organized together within the three technical Dutch universities Twente, Delft and Eindhoven. The conference is organized by PhD students and is intended for PhD candidates to expand their network and share their research ideas, which provides a unique opportunity for future collaborations. Each year, one of the technical universities will be responsible for the organization of the two conferences. In 2019 the PRORISC will be held at at the campus of Delft University of Technology.

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Microelectronics Colloquium

• Tuesday, 25 June 2019
• 11:00-12:00
• EWI-Lecture hall Chip

Quantum Computer on a Chip

Bogdan Staszewski
University College Dublin

Quantum computing is a new paradigm that exploits fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition and entanglement, to tackle problems in mathematics, chemistry and material science that are well beyond the reach of supercomputers. Despite the intensive worldwide race to build a useful quantum computer, it is projected to take decades before reaching the state of useful quantum supremacy. The main challenge is that qubits operate at the atomic level, thus are extremely fragile, and difficult to control and read out. The current state-of-art implements a few dozen magnetic-spin based qubits in a highly specialized technology and cools them down to a few tens of millikelvin. The high cost of cryogenic cooling prevents its widespread use. A companion classical electronic controller, needed to control and read out the qubits, is mostly realized with room-temperature laboratory instrumentation. This makes it bulky and nearly impossible to scale up to the thousands or millions of qubits needed for practical quantum algorithms.

As part of our startup company, we propose a new quantum computer paradigm that exploits the wonderful scaling achievements of mainstream integrated circuits (IC) technology which underpins personal computers and mobile phones. Just like with a small IC chip, where a single nanometer-sized CMOS transistor can be reliably replicated millions of times to build a digital processor, we propose a new structure of a qubit realized as a CMOS-compatible charge-based quantum dot that can be reliably replicated thousands of times to construct a quantum processor. Combined with an on-chip CMOS controller, it will realize a useful quantum computer which can operate at a much higher temperature of 4 kelvin.

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Micro electronics colloqiuim

• Thursday, 23 May 2019
• 15:30-17:00
• EEMCS faculty, restaurantzaal

Kamran Souri, Kofi Makinwa

Kamran Souri

MEMS Revolutionizing Timing Future

Abstract

SiTime Corporation, a market leader in MEMS timing offers MEMS-based silicon timing system solutions. With over 1 billion devices shipped, SiTime is revolutionizing the timing industry and supports expediting new technologies such as IoT and 5G networks. In this talk, Dr. Souri will present an overview of SiTime's MEMS technology and the basic architecture of typical products. This will be followed by a discussion of the various innovations that have been needed to achieve differentiated performances which outperform quartz. Lastly, there will be a discussion of the technical challenges involved with productizing MEMS timing devices.

Kofi Makinwa

Next Generation CMOS Temperature Sensors

Abstract

Today, CMOS Temperature sensors are predominantly based on parasitic bipolar junction transistors (BJTs). This is because such sensors can achieve high accuracy (< 0.1C error) after a single room-temperature calibration. Although resistor-based temperature sensors can achieve higher resolution and energy-efficiency, they usually require multi-point calibration to reach similar levels of accuracy. Recently, we have shown that temperature sensors based on silicided poly resistors are an exception to this rule. They can achieve excellent accuracy (< 0.2°C from -55°C to 125°C) after a one or two-point calibration, as well as state-of-the-art energy-efficiency and resolution.

Inauguration Earl McCune and Cicero Vaucher

• Friday, 17 -- Friday, 17 May 2019
• 15:00-18:00
• TU Delft Auditorium

Who's talking, who's listening?

Earl McCune, Cicero Vaucher
TU Delft

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Micro electronics colloquium

• Thursday, 28 March 2019
• 15:30-17:00
• EEMCS, Restaurantzaal

High performance data converters; Rethink analog IC design

Nan Sun, Muhammed Bolatkale

Nan Sun: Rethink Analog IC Design

I will present several unconventional data conversion architectures. First, I will talk about how we can make use of noise, which is usually deemed as an undesirable thing, to estimate the conversion residue and increase the SNR of a SAR ADC. It is an interesting example of stochastic resonance, in which the presence of noise can lead to not SNR degradation but SNR enhancement. Second, I will talk about how we can perform data conversion below the Nyquist rate by exploiting the sparsity of the input signal. I will show two example compressive sensing ADCs and how the effective ADC conversion rate can be reduced by 4 times but without losing information. Third, I will show how we can prevent the seemingly inevitable kT/C noise in a Nyquist-rate pipelined ADC by using a continuous-time SAR based 1st-stage. This can substantially reduce the requirement on the ADC input capacitance, greatly reducing the ADC driver power and reference buffer power

Biography of Nan Sun

Nan Sun is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He received the B.S. from Tsinghua in 2006 and Ph.D. degree from Harvard in 2010. Dr. Sun received the NSF Career Award in 2013. He serves on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference and the IEEE Asian Solid-State Circuit Conference. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems – I: Regular Papers, and a Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. He also serves as IEEE Circuits-and-Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer from 2019 to 2020.

Muhammed Bolatkale: High Performance Data Converters

A next generation automotive radio receiver, an all-digital Class-D amplifier, and an advanced Bluetooth transceiver have one thing in common: they rely on high-performance data converter architectures to enable best in class performance. This talk will give an overview of GHz-sampling data converters, especially focusing on wideband delta-sigma and hybrid data converter architectures. We will touch upon state-of-the-art systems and circuit level designs fabricated in advance CMOS nodes.

Bio Muhammed Bolatkale

Muhammed Bolatkale is Senior Principle Scientist at NXP Semiconductors and part-time Associate Professor in the Electronics Instrumentation Laboratory at Delft University of Technology. He received his B. Sc. (high honors) degree from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, in 2004 and the M. Sc. (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 2007 and 2013. Since 2007, Dr. Bolatkale has worked for NXP Semiconductors, specializing in wideband Delta-Sigma ADCs for wireless communications and automotive applications. Dr. Bolatkale received the ISSCC 2016 and 2011 Jan Van Vessem Award for Outstanding European Paper and the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 2016 and 2011 Best Paper Award.

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Microelectronics Colloquium

• Friday, 8 March 2019
• 16:00-17:15
• CiTG 0.98 (lecture room opposite PSOR)

Introducing new CAS professors

Andrew Webb, Borbála Hunyadi

Andrew Webb:

MRI is one of the most important clinical imaging modalities for diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Recent trends have been towards ever higher magnetic fields and operating frequencies. This talk outlines some of the technical challenges faced by very high field and conversely very low field MRI, and the roles that electromagnetics and signal processing can play in improving image quality

Borbala Hunyadi

Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) record a mixture of ongoing neural processes, physiological and non-physiological noise. The pattern of interest is often hidden within this noisy mixture. This talk gives an overview of signal processing and machine learning techniques to address this issue by capturing the spatiotemporal structure in the (multimodal) data. Special attention is given to tensor-based blind source separation techniques, with applications in epilepsy research.

PhD Thesis Defence

• Thursday, 10 January 2019
• 15:00-17:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

Aleksandar Jovic

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PhD Thesis Defence

• Monday, 26 November 2018
• 12:30-14:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

Surface Acoustic Mode Aluminium Nitride Transducer for micro-size liquid sensing applications

Thu Hang Bui

Additional information ...

PhD Thesis Defence

• Wednesday, 24 October 2018
• 12:30-14:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

Free standing interconnects for stretchable electronics

Shivani Joshi

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PhD Thesis Defence

• Tuesday, 23 October 2018
• 10:00
• Aula, Senaatszaal

The linearity research of a CMOS image sensor

Fei Wang

This thesis provides a thorough analysis of the linearity characteristics of a CMOS image sensor. Firstly, this thesis analyzes the factors that cause the nonlinearity of the image sensors. These factors are then verified by simulation results of a proposed behavioral model and the measurements in a prototype chip. Secondly, different techniques are presented to improve the linearity of the whole imaging system; and the effectiveness of these techniques is further confirmed by measurement results of several test chips.

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Microelectronics Colloquium

• Monday, 8 October 2018
• 10:00-10:45
• EKL Colloquiumroom

Material Engineering for Stability Improvement of Perovskite Solar Cells

C.P. Wong
Georgia Tech

Organolead halide perovskites have recently emerged as a fascinating light harvesting material that combines the advantages of simple fabrication process and excellent electronic properties. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has been rapidly improved from 3.8% to 23.3% within the past several years. In contrast to the stunning rise in efficiency, the instability of the PSCs is its Achilles’ heel. The instability issue of the whole device originates not only from the perovskite layer itself, but also from the use of doped organic charge transport materials, such as spiro-MeOTAD. This talk is to provide material strategies to improve the stability of the organolead halide perovskite materials as well as other functional layers in PSCs. To improve the air-stability of perovskite films prepared from two-step sequential deposition by simultaneously eliminating PbI2 residue and improving the crystallinity of the perovskite films. We developed PbI2 thin films with nano-pores and tunable crystal sizes, which enabled full conversion of PbI2 to MAPbI3. A large perovskite crystalline domains, and that the impurity-free, lead to reduced trap states and improved air-stability of the perovskite thin films. The second part of my talk is devoted to improve the stability of the entire PSC device by developing a solution-processed NiOx hole-transport layer, as the hygroscopic nature of the NiOx film suppresses the diffusion of water molecules to the perovskite, and it is also insusceptible to heat. As a result, the PSCs with a structure of FTO / TiO2 / Perovskite / NiOx / Au demonstrated remarkable air-stability and thermal stability. By further modifying of the NiOx / metal interface by CuSCN, we further realized high-efficiency PSCs with excellent air stability, exhibiting nearly no efficiency degradation after exposed to air for 4 months. Furthermore, the ion migration-induced instability issue through incorporating extrinsic alkali cations (i.e., Rb+, K+, Na+, or Li+) into the perovskite. The size-dependent interstitial occupancy of the extrinsic alkali cations in the perovskite lattice was proposed and verified for the first time through density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Such interstitial doping method suppressed I- ion migration in the bulk of perovskites, thus resulting in reduced I-V hysteresis of the PSCs, weakened poling effects and improved photo stability of wide-bandgap mixed-halide perovskites.

Microelectronics Colloquium

• Tuesday, 25 September 2018
• 03:00-05:00
• EWI, Snijderszaal

Tenure track colloquium

Sten Vollebregt, Massimo Mastrangeli, Daniele Cavallo

Wideband phased arrays for future wireless communication terminals, Daniele Cavallo (TS group)

Wireless data traffic will grow exponentially in the next years, due to the proliferation of user terminals and bandwidth-greedy applications. To address this demand, the next generations of mobile communication (5G and beyond) will have to shift the operation to higher frequencies, especially to millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum (30-300 GHz), that can provide extremely high-speed data links. To enable mm-wave wireless communication, mobile terminals such as smartphones will need phased arrays antennas, able to radiate or receive greater power in specific directions that can be dynamically steered electronically. However, to cover the different 5G mm-wave bands simultaneously (28, 39, 60 GHz, …) and to achieve total angular coverage, too many of such antennas should be on the same device: the main bottleneck is the insufficient space available to place all antenna modules. Therefore, I propose to investigate novel phased array antenna solutions with very large angular coverage and ultra-wide frequency bandwidth, to massively reduce the overall space occupation of handset antennas and overcome the current limitations of mobile terminal antenna development.

Towards smart organs-on-chip, Massimo Mastrangeli (ECTM Group)

Organs-on-chip are microfluidic systems that enable dynamic tissue co-cultures under physiologically realistic conditions. OOCs are helping innovating the drug screening process and gaining new fundamental insights in human physiology. In this talk, after a summary of my past research journey, I will describe how the ECTM group at TU Delft is envisioning the use microfabrication and materials science to embed real-time sensing and actuation in innovative and scalable OOC platforms.

Emerging electronic materials: from lab to fab, Sten Vollebregt (ECTM group)

Due to their nm-size features and often unique physical properties nanomaterials, like nanotubes and 2D materials, can potentially outperform classical materials or even provide functionality which cannot be obtained otherwise. Because of this, these nanomaterials hold many promises for the next generation of devices for sensing & communication and health & wellbeing.

Unfortunately, many promising applications of nanomaterials never reach sufficient maturity to be implemented in actual products. This is mostly because the interest in the academic community reduces once the initial properties have been demonstrated, while the risk for industrialization is still too high for most companies to start their own R&D activities. My goal is to bridge these two worlds by investigating the integration of novel nanomaterials in semiconductor technology and demonstrating the scalability of novel sensing devices. In this talk, I will give examples on how carbon nanotubes, graphene and other emerging nanomaterials can be used in the next generation of sensing devices.

Special EI Colloquium

• Monday, 25 June 2018
• 16:00
• Collegezaal D (Lecture Hall D@ta)

Low noise global shutter pixels and readout circuits for CMOS image sensors

Guy Meynants

The read noise of CMOS image sensors has been reduced by a factor 10 in the last 15 years. As a result, photon-counting applications are now in reach with CMOS image sensor technology. In the first part, the talk will address the most important measures that have led to this noise reduction, such as CMOS scaling, improved readout circuits and low-noise CMOS transistor process technology. In most cases, the low-noise image sensors use a rolling shutter to control the exposure. Today, we also see a large interest in global shutter image sensors for a variety of consumer, automotive and industrial applications. In global shutter image sensors, all pixels acquire the image at the same time. The more complex global shutter pixel structure poses some challenges for noise reduction techniques, which will be discussed. Small global shutter pixels also enable fast detection of photons in CMOS technology, which can be used in a variety of applications such as fluorescence lifetime measurements and time-of-flight 3D imaging.

Conferences

• Thursday, 7 -- Friday, 8 June 2018
• 10:30-17:30
• University of Twente, Eschede

PRORISC 2018 Conference

Annual conference on Integrated Circuit (IC) design, organized within the three technical Dutch universities Twente, Delft and Eindhoven

Additional information ...

Conferences

• Thursday, 7 -- Friday, 8 June 2018
• 10:30-17:30

SAFE 2018 Conference

Annual conference on Micro-systems, Materials, Technology and RF-devices, organized within the three technical Dutch universities of Twente, Delft and Eindhoven.

Additional information ...

Advances in Analog Circuit Design

• Monday, 14 -- Wednesday, 16 May 2018
• Edinburgh

27th Workshop on Advances in Analog Circuit Design

The AACD workshops are a high-quality series of events held all over the world. They have been held annually since 1992 with the aim of bringing together a large group of people working at the forefront of analog circuit design. The workshops offer the opportunity to discuss new possibilities and future developments whilst networking with key figures from across the analog design community.

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PhD Thesis Defence

• Monday, 30 April 2018
• 14:30-17:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Reducing Switching Artifacts in Chopper Amplifiers

Yoshinori Kusuda

Program:
14:30 - 14:45 Layman’s talk
15:00 - 16:00 Public defense
16:15 - 16:30 Diploma ceremony
16:30 - 17:30 Reception


The abstract and the dissertation can be found in the link below. abstract
dissertation

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Electronic Instrumentation Colloquium

• Monday, 30 April 2018
• 11:00-12:00
• Snijderszaal (LB01.010)

Reducing Switching Artifacts in Chopper Amplifiers

Yoshinori Kusuda

Abstract

Chopping is a technique with which amplifier offset can be reduced to sub-μV levels, at the expense of reduced signal bandwidth due to chopping artifacts such as up-modulated ripple and glitches. In this talk, some circuit techniques to reduce such artifacts are proposed.These circuit techniques have been used in three commercially-available operational amplifiers, whose design and measured performance will be discussed. Lastly, some of the challenges associated in testing low-offset amplifiers in mass-production will be discussed..

Biography

Yoshinori Kusuda received the B.S. degree in electrical and electronic engineering in 2002, and M.S. degree in PhysicalElectronics in 2004, both from Tokyo Institute of Technology. Upon his graduation in 2004, he joined the Japan DesignCenter of Analog Devices (ADI) as an IC design engineer. He is currently based in San Jose, CA, U.S.A., working for the Linear and Precision Technology Group of ADI. The focus of his work is on precision CMOS analog designs, including stand-alone amplifiers and application specific mixed-signal products. This has resulted in presentations and papers at IEEE conferences and journals, as well as nine issued U.S. patents. Since August2015, he has been a guest researcher at the ElectronicInstrumentation Laboratory of the TU Delft.

Active Implantable Biomedical Microsystems Course

• Tuesday, 24 April 2018
• 13:45-15:30
• DW IZ 1 (140 1verd)

Active Implantable Biomedical Microsystems Course

Vasiliki Giagka, Virgilio Valente, Christos Strydis, Wouter Serdijn
Delft University of Technology and Erasmus Medical Center

Course on the understanding, design and future developments of active implantable biomedical microsystems, such as cochlear implants, cardiac pacemakers, spinal cord implants, neurostimulators and bioelectronic medicine.

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Smart Sensor Systems 2018

• Monday, 16 -- Friday, 20 April 2018
• 09:00-12:30
• TU DELFT

Smart Sensor Systems 2018

This course addresses the design and development of smart sensor systems. After a general overview, various key aspects of sensor systems are discussed: measurement and calibration techniques, the design of precision sensor interfaces, analog-to-digital conversion techniques, and sensing principles for the measurement of magnetic fields, temperature, capacitance, acceleration and rotation. The state-of-the-art smart sensor systems covered by the course include smart magnetic-field sensors, smart temperature sensors, physical chemosensors, multi-electrode capacitive sensors, implantable smart sensors, DNA microarrays, smart inertial sensors, smart optical microsystems and CMOS image sensors. A systematic approach towards the design of smart sensor systems is presented. The lectures are augmented by case studies and hands-on demonstrations.

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Special EI Colloquium

• Tuesday, 3 April 2018
• 16:00-16:30
• EWI/Lecture Hall Chip

Capsule Endoscopy: Engineering for Preclinical Testing

Prof. Sandy Cochran, Univ. of Glasgow

Video capsule endoscopy is now a well-established clinical tool with an increasing number of diagnostic applications in the gastrointestinal tract. However, for anything other than visual diagnosis, conventional endoscopy is still required. This talk will explain progress towards more advanced capsule endoscopy devices for both diagnosis and therapy including pre-clinical testing. The diagnostic technologies explored include ultrasound and fluorescence imaging as well as pressure measurement. Ultrasound-mediated targeted drug delivery is the technique chosen for therapy; the rationale will be explained and early results will be presented. Finally, a blueprint for future progress will be proposed, including the key electronics to be implemented in application-specific integrated circuits.

Sandy Cochran holds BSc, MBA and PhD degrees. He is Professor of Ultrasound Materials and Systems with the School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, U.K., previously holding posts in Engineering, Physics, and Medicine at other Scottish universities. He is a co-author of more than 300 journal and conference papers, presentations, book chapters and patents. His research interests include devices and systems for ultrasound in medicine and life sciences, new piezoelectric materials and better utilization of existing materials, and microscale and miniature devices for new applications including microultrasound imaging. Prof. Cochran is VP Ultrasonics in the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society and a Fellow of the U.K. Institute of Physics.

Special EI Colloquium

• Tuesday, 3 April 2018
• 16:30-17:00
• EWI/Lecture Hall Chip

Implantable electronics : the shift from circuits to materials

Prof. Robert Puers, KU Leuven

One of the most important research topic done at MICAS is upon generic concepts for comfortable implants. Indeed human body has a strong tendency to reject foreign bodies. To create comfortable implants, the necessary steps are successively: selection of proper materials, manufacturing, in vivo testing (usually in rodents). The main problems with foreign material in the bloodstream are thrombosis and clogging. And finally the biggest challenge is properly packaging the sensors for invasion of the body. All this yields to the birth of a neologism: electroceuticals, i.e. treatment of diseases by electricity instead of drugs. One of the used methods would be electrical or optical stimulation. Of course the first thing to do is the study of the origin of the bio-potentials. Main focus is on novel materials, including polymers, and transducers, assembly in flexible and stretchable 3D interconnection matrices and packages, using biocompatible and/or bioresorbable carrier materials.

Robert (Bob) Puers received his Ph.D. in 1986 at the KU Leuven. He is a European pioneer in the research on micromachining, MEMS and packaging techniques, mainly for biomedical implantable systems. To this purpose, he installed a dedicated clean room, that now runs for more than 30 years under his guidance. In 2014, he was appointed the chair of the Leuven Nanocenter (LENA), a new research facility that merges different multidisciplinary teams in an up to date facility for nano- and bio-research. He took major efforts to increase the impact of MEMS and Microsystems in both the international research community as well as in industry. He helped to launch three spin-off companies, ICSense, Zenso and MinDCet. Dr. Puers is also an IEEE and IoP fellow.

PhD Thesis Defence

• Tuesday, 3 April 2018
• 12:00-14:00
• Aula Senaatszaal

Front-End ASICs for 3-D Ultrasound: From Beamforming to Digitization

Chao Chen

Program:
12:00 - 12:15 Introductory presentation
12:30 - 13:30 Public defense
13:45 - 14:00 Diploma ceremony
Address: Senaatszaal of the Aula Congress Center

SUMMARY
This thesis describes the analysis, design and evaluation of front-end application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for 3-D medical ultrasound imaging, with the focus on the receive electronics. They are specifically designed for next-generation miniature 3-D ultrasound devices, such as transesophageal echocardiography (TEE), intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) and intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) probes. These probes, equipped with 2-D array transducers and thus the capability of volumetric visualization, are crucial for both accurate diagnosis and therapy guidance of cardiovascular diseases. However, their stringent size constraints, as well as the limited power budget, increase the difficulty in integrating in-probe electronics. The mismatch between the increasing number of transducer elements and the limited cable count that can be accommodated, also makes it challenging to acquire data from these probes. Front-end ASICs that are optimized in both system architecture and circuit-level implementation are proposed in this thesis to tackle these problems.
The techniques described in this thesis have been applied in several prototype realizations, including one LNA test chip, one PVDF readout IC, two analog beamforming ASICs and one ASIC with on-chip digitization and datalinks. All prototypes have been evaluated both electrically and acoustically. The LNA test chip achieved a noise-efficiency factor (NEF) that is 2.5 × better than the state-of-the-art. One of the analog beamforming ASIC achieved a 0.27 mW/element power efficiency with a compact layout matched to a 150 µm element pitch. This is the highest power-efficiency and smallest pitch to date, in comparison with state-of-the-art ultrasound front-end ASICs. The ASIC with integrated beamforming ADC consumed only 0.91 mW/element within the same element area. A comparison with previous digitization solutions for 3-D ultrasound shows that this work achieved a 10 × improvement in power-efficiency, as well as a 3.3 × improvement in integration density.

The dissertation can be found in the TU Delft repository: http://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:a5002bb0-4701-4e33-aef6-3c78d0c9fd70

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Dutch Ultra Low Power Conference

• Wednesday, 7 March 2018
• 10:00-17:00
• Novio Tech Campus, Nijmegen, NL

The medicine of the future you’ll need to take only once, and it’s a bioelectronic one

Wouter Serdijn

The Dutch Ultra Low Power Conference brings together Belgian and Dutch professionals and companies involved in the development and application of devices with ultra low power technologies. It targets engineers, designers and technical managers in the advanced field of energy harvesting and ultra low power and energy-efficient designs. The keynote will be given by Wouter Serdijn, professor of bioelectronics at Delft University of Technology.

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MEST Symposium

• Friday, 16 February 2018
• Aula Lecture Hall C

Mini Symposium on Hardware Security

Three talks from leading companies in the industry: Brighsight, Intrinsic ID and Riscure with the following topics:

1.    “Past , Present and Future of Hardware Attacks on Smart Cards and SOCs” by Gerard van Battum, Sr. Security Evaluator at Brightsight;
2.     “Removing the barriers of securing a broad range of IoT devices” by Dr. Georgios Selimis, Senior Security Engineer, Intrinsic ID;
3.    “How to use Deep Learning for hardware security testing?” by Marc Witteman (MSc), Chief Executive Officer, Riscure.

Organized by the Micro-electronic Systems and Technology Association (MEST).

Free but required registration at the link below.

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Tuesday, 31 October 2017
• 14:00-14:30
• Lipkenszaal, LB01.150 (EWI)

A Dynamic Zoom ADC for Instrumentation Applications

Shoubhik Karmakar

Analog to digital converters (ADCs) are critical blocks in most signal processing chains. Especially in low bandwidth applications, there exists a need to digitize signals with high resolution and accuracy, while expending minimum energy. This thesis presents a dynamic zoom ADC for use in such applications. It takes advantage of a low power SAR ADC to maintain energy efficiency, while offering a high resolution with a ΔΣ Modulator. Fabricated in a 0.16-µm CMOS process, the prototype achieves state-of-the-art performance in a 1kHz bandwidth.

Bioelectronics Colloquium

• Monday, 16 October 2017
• 11:00-12:00
• EWI HB17.150

On the Relationship between Nyquist Rate and Healthcare: Silicon Systems to Close the Sub-Sampling Gap in Health Screening and Monitoring

Amin Arbabian, PhD (Stanford University)

Abstract
Advances in healthcare technologies have mainly focused on therapeutics, interventional procedures, and “late-stage” diagnostics. These steps have undergone significant improvements, leading to higher survival rates and enhancements in quality of life. Nevertheless, current trends are unsustainable due to the inadequate outcomes on specific critical diseases and skyrocketing national healthcare costs. An important example is cancer, where mortality rates have not seen major improvements, even with the tremendous technological advances in diagnostic imaging tools over the last four decades.

In this talk I will outline our efforts in better marrying technology and healthcare with new systems that 1) enable continuous “Nyquist” imaging and screening to enable preventive/predictive care, and 2) introduce smart implants for precision monitoring and closed-loop therapies. Preventive screening through continuous monitoring has the potential to fundamentally revamp our understanding of disease as well as targeted therapy. Today, the human body is monitored infrequently, perhaps on an annual basis and with a low “resolution”. This is in contrast with advanced electronic systems (many of which our community designs and ships), which are frequently monitored and calibrated. I will summarize a few example projects that aim to address these issues, including portable, semiconductor-based, “Tricorder” imaging systems, ultrasound-powered implantable devices that can measure, detect, and act upon local physiological changes through closed-loop neuromodulation or “electroceuticals”, and finally our new investigation of a noninvasive methods of neuromodulation based on ultrasonic excitation.

Biography
Amin Arbabian received his Ph.D. degree in EECS from UC Berkeley in 2011 and in 2012 joined Stanford University, as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in mm-wave and high-frequency circuits and systems, imaging technologies, and ultra-low power sensors and implantable devices. Prof. Arbabian currently serves on the steering committee of RFIC, the technical program committees of RFIC and ESSCIRC, and as associate editor of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters (SSC-L) and the IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology (J-ERM). He is the recipient or co-recipient of the 2016 Stanford University Tau Beta Pi Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2015 NSF CAREER award, 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) including the Director’s Fellowship in 2016, 2013 Hellman faculty scholarship, and best paper awards from several conferences including ISSCC (2010), VLSI Circuits (2014), RFIC symposium (2008 and 2011), ICUWB (2013), PIERS (2015), and the MTT-S BioWireless symposium (2016).

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Chip Design Workshop

• Tuesday, 23 May 2017
• 12:30
• Theatre, TU Delft unit Cultuur, Mekelweg 8-10

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society

Program: 12:30 Coffee, 12:50 Welcome, Kofi Makinwa, TU Delft, 13:00 Introduction, Patrick Reyanert, KU Leuven, 13:15 – 13:40 A Dynamic Zoom ADC with 109 dB DR for Audio Applications, Burak Gönen, TU Delft, 13:40 – 14:00 A 0.3-2.6 TOPS/W Precision-Scalable Processor for Real-Time Large-Scale ConvNets - Bert Moons, KU Leuven, 14:20 – 14:45 Coffee Break, Talks by Benelux Chip Design Contest Winners: 14:0 – 14:20 A 94.6%-Efficiency Fully Integrated Switched-Capacitor DC-DC Converter in 40nm - Nicholas Butse, KU Leuven, Talks by Invited Speakers: 14:45 – 15:15 Design mistakes you’d rather not talk about, Klaas Bult 15:15 – 15:45 Cryo-CMOS for Quantum Computing, Fabio Sebastiano, TU Delft,

Seminar autonomous driving

• Monday, 15 May 2017
• 11:00-14:00
• EEMCS, Snijderszaal

Autonomous driving

Leo de Vreede, Alexander Yarovoy, Cicero Vaucher, Riender Happee, Dariu Gravila, Rossiza Gourova, Joris Domhof

Program 11.00 - 11.05 Opening (by Alexander Yarovoy and Leo de Vreede 11.05 - 11.35 S4-Drive project (PhD’s Rossiza Gourova (EEMCS) and Joris Domhof (3ME)) 11.35 - 12.05 Dariu Gavrila,‘Autonomous driving' 12.05 – 13.35 Riender Happee,‘Human Factor on autonomous driving’ Lunch break Lipkenszaal 13.00 - 13.30 Cicero Vaucher,‘Automotive radars’ 13.30 -14.00 CRUISE project proposal (Cicero Vaucher, Masoud Babaie and Faruk Uysal)

Conferences

• Friday, 14 April 2017
• 10:00-12:00

Eurosensors dead-line

Professoren in de Arena

• Tuesday, 28 March 2017
• 20:00-21:30
• Theater de Veste

Professoren in de Arena: De bionische mens, van protheses naar upgrades

Wouter Serdijn, Just Herder, Harrie Weinans, Project March

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Microelectronics Colloquium

• Wednesday, 15 March 2017
• 15:00-17:00
• EWI: Snijderszaal

Microelectronics Department Colloquium

Daniele Cavallo, Vasiliki Giagka, Fabio Sebastiano, Rob Remis

On Wednesday March 15 the next Microelectronics colloquium wil take place, including four lectures by staff members.

Please register online by completing the form.

• Vasso Giagka
  Flexible bioelectronic medicines
  Abstract: Bioelectronic medicines are the next generation of neuromodulation devices: small active three-dimensional neural interfaces able to modulate nerve activity by targeting a specific neural region. They aim to treat a number of conditions, such as diabetes and asthma, in a tailored (per individual) and reversible fashion, avoiding the side effects of conventional drug-based interventions (pharmaceuticals). They achieve so by recording signals from the respective nerves, extracting information and using it as feedback to electrically stimulate the neural region in a closed-loop manner.
  
  Current technologies for active implants have not yet managed to achieve the miniaturisation and integration levels required for the development of bioelectronic medicines. For such breakthrough devices, novel concepts need to be explored, developed, and tested.
  
  In this talk I will present my current activities as well as my vision on realizing the first flexible three-dimensional graphene active implant, for safe chronic neural stimulation and recording from the peripheral nerves.
  
  
• Fabio Sebastiano
  Cryo-CMOS for Quantum Computing: does it work?
  Quantum computing holds the promise to change our lives by efficiently solving computing problems that are intractable today, such as simulation of quantum systems for synthesis of materials and drugs. A quantum computer comprises both a quantum processor and a classical electronic controller to operate and read out the quantum devices. The quantum processor must be cooled at cryogenic temperature in order to show quantum behavior, thus making it unfeasible to wire thousands of signals from the cryogenic quantum devices to a room-temperature controller.
  
  While this issue can be solved by placing also the electronic controller at cryogen¬ic temperature, which electronic technology is the best choice for its implementation? This talk will address the challenges of building such electronic controller, and answer whether a standard CMOS technology can be employed for the required analog and digital circuits operating at 4 K and below.
  
  
• Daniele Cavallo
  Advanced Antenna Arrays for Modern Radar and Communication Systems
  Abstract: Several of today’s radar and wireless communication applications are shifting their operation to higher frequency to fulfil more demanding requirements on resolution, compactness and data rates. For this reason, there is a growing need to develop low-cost integrated circuit transceivers working at millimeter and sub-millimeter waves.
  
  However, on-chip antennas are currently characterized by very poor radiation efficiency and extremely narrow bandwidth. My approach of combining the concepts of connected arrays with artificial dielectrics will solve the inefficiency problem and enable high-efficiency on-chip antenna designs.
  
  Similar concepts can be also realized at microwave frequencies in printed circuit board, allowing for low-cost phased array antennas with state-of-the-art performance in terms of scan range, bandwidth and polarization purity.
  
  
• Rob Remis
  Imaging with Waves
  We present an overview of our current wave field imaging and inversion research. Effective inversion strategies for important applications in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), nano-optics, and subsurface monitoring will be discussed. In particular, dielectric shimming (shaping of the radio frequency field in MRI) as well as inversion algorithms that determine the dielectric properties of various tissue types based on measured MRI data will be considered, and state-of-the-art model-order reduction techniques for large-scale wave propagation problems will be discussed as well.
  
  

MS3 seminar

• Wednesday, 15 February 2017
• 16:00-17:00
• EEMCS, Snijderszaal

Capabilities and Research Activities at the University of Oklahoma Advanced Radar Research Center

Prof. Nathan A. Goodman
The Advanced Radar Research Center (ARRC) at the University of Oklahoma

The Advanced Radar Research Center (ARRC) at the University of Oklahoma consists of a vibrant group of faculty and students from both engineering and meteorology, focused on solving challenging radar problems and preparing the next generation of students. Through the collaborative nature instilled in its members, the ARRC has proven effective at developing synergy between science and engineering in the field of radar. The ARRC resides in state-of-art Radar Innovations Laboratory, a one-of-a-kind and unrivalled facility for radar research, development, and education. This 35,000-sqft facility includes microwave labs, advanced fabrication capability, and two anechoic chambers.

Bio Prof. Goodman: Nathan A. Goodman received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, in 1995, 1997, and 2002, respectively. From 1996 to 1998, he was an RF systems engineer for Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX., and from 2002 to 2011, he was a faculty member in the ECE Department of the University of Arizona, Tucson. He is now a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of Research for the Advanced Radar Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, Norman.

MS3 seminar

• Monday, 13 February 2017
• 15:30-18:00
• EWI Snijderszaal

MS3 Master Event

Come to learn about our group and current Master Thesis Projects...

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Microelectronics Introduction Colloquium

• Monday, 12 December 2016
• Theatre - Culture Building 38, Mekelweg 10

Introduction 3 new Tenure Trackers

Masoud Babaie, Morteza Alavi, Faruk Uysal

On December 12 we organize the next Microelectronics Colloquium to introduce three new Assistant Professors (Tenure Trackers) of the Microelectronics department. They are happy to present a lecture about their research.

The colloquium start at 15.00 hrs. there will be a drink afterwards in the foyer.
Location: Theatre of Culture Builing (38) Mekelweg 10.
Please register online if you want to attend, latest December 5.

• Masoud Babaie: Pushing The Limits of CMOS Circuits for Emerging Technologies
  Within the next few years, quantum processors, Fifth Generation (5G) cellular systems and the wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) are expected to see significant deployment to realize more integration between the physical and digital worlds, promising enormous computation power, high data rate communications and enabling more objects to be remotely sensed and controlled.
  
  This talk will address some of the main challenges in the design and implementation of IoT devices, mm-wave 5G transceivers, and cryogenic CMOS controller for quantum computers. An overview of my past and ongoing research activities will be also presented, with emphasis on novel solutions to improve power efficiency and spectral purity of RF/mm-wave transceivers.
  
  
• Morteza Alavi: Universal Transmitters for 5G
  Today, our daily activities are intertwined with the Internet. The ever-growing demand to swiftly get access to the data-cloud systems leads to huge data traffic. In order to seamlessly transmit and receive these gigantic data, _ 40 GB, agile radio-frequency (RF) transceivers are inevitable.
  
  These radios must be capable of supporting the current and future communication standards such as 5th generation of wireless mobile communications. The ultimate goal is that they can be implemented as universal radios whose modes of operation can be defined by their clients. To address these demands, RF transmitters are currently reinvented and are directed towards digital-intensive architecture. In this short presentation, we will briefly describe the strengths,possibilities, and challenges that exist for these advanced transmitters. First and foremost, the concept of RF-DAC based transmitters will be introduced. Next, the talk will review various RF-DAC based transmitters that have already been implemented at ELCA. Eventually, the presentation will concisely unveil the future directions of the research of these software-defined transmitters at ELCA.
  
  
• Faruk Uysal: Distributed Radar Networks: Beyond a single radar
  The number of operational radar is rapidly increasing due to the growing demand of the remote sensing. Software defined radio and emerging single-chip radar technology make use of radars in every aspect of life such as autonomous driving, safety and security applications. With the increase of active transmitters, spectrum management and coexistence started to become a concern for some radar systems. In this talk, the previous applications of waveform, frequency agility will be reviewed to bring multi-functionality to the modern radar system. Finally, we will discuss the future research for distributed radar networks and how to fuse data from various radars to acquire different aspects of a target to be viewed simultaneously.

MSc BME Thesis Presentation

• Monday, 12 December 2016
• 11:00-12:00
• EWI LB01.010, Snijderszaal

Wireless Power Transfer and Optogenetic Stimulation of Freely Moving Rodents

Farnaz Nassiri Nia

Animal studies are commonly used to test the feasibility and effectiveness of promising novel neuroscience research ideas. One such new technique is optogenetic stimulation, which refers to stimulation of the brain by means of light. Current optogenetic stimulation methods use tethered setups and, typically, the animal-under-study is put into a fixed position. This introduces stress, an obvious reduction in animal welfare, and may thus influence the experimental results. Hence, an untethered setup is highly desirable. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose a complete wireless optogenetic stimulation setup, which allows for full freedom of movement for multiple rodents-under-study in a 40x40x20 cm environment.

This thesis includes a thorough design space exploration and the subsequent development of: an inductive wireless link, a wireless receiver module that resides on the animal, and novel micro-LED array implants.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Monday, 21 November 2016
• 14:00-15:00
• EWI HB17.150

A 0.6V Low Noise Current Generator for Bio-Impedance Measurements in 40nm CMOS

Yao Li

PhD Thesis Defence

• Friday, 4 November 2016
• 15:00-16:00
• Senaatszaal of the Auditorium, Mekelweg 5 in Delft

Energy-Efficient Smart Temperature Sensors in CMOS Technology

Kamran Souri

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Tuesday, 25 October 2016
• 14:00-15:00
• Lipkenszaal, EWI LB01.150

Structured electronic design of high-pass ΣΔ converters and its application to cardiac signal acquisition

Samprajani Rout

Abstract:

With the bandwidth of the ECG signal extending from sub-Hz to 200 Hz, a major challenge in developing the analog front-end responsible for digitizing the analog signal for an ECG readout system lies in implementing the large time-constants on chip due to area constraints. While techniques to obtain very large time constants exist, they are heavily limited by both linearity and accuracy, which clearly dictates the need for alternative structures.

In this thesis, a ΣΔ converter is used for its noise-shaping property to digitize the acquired signal. A structured electronic design methodology based on state-space forms is proposed to develop high-pass (HP) ΣΔ converter topologies. As opposed to conventional low-pass or band-pass ΣΔ, a generalized signal transfer function which includes the high-pass characteristic is used. The proposed HP ΣΔ topologies satisfy the signal transfer function, which is high-pass characteristic in this application and the noise transfer function, which is a 2-nd order noise shaping in this case. Furthermore, the noise contribution of each of the integrators is evaluated and the topologies are compared in terms of their total noise contribution. Finally, one of the structures is implemented in 0.18 um technology as a final step of verification.

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MSc BME Thesis Presentation

• Tuesday, 25 October 2016
• 10:00-11:00
• Lipkenszaal, EWI LB01.150

aEEG analog front-end IC for neonatal brain development monitoring

Maciej Kostalkowski

Abstract:

Every year number of prematurely born infants grows. Most underdeveloped organ after birth is brain. Therefore its monitoring is very important, especially as it can provide indications about health state in a future, both short and long term. Non invasive method of brain monitoring is aEEG recording.

Although aEEG is already well known and accepted in neonatology, it is still not used to monitor every patient. Problem is high price of a device starting from 30000 euro. In a result, hospital is not able to provide proper monitoring for each and every patient. For this reason, main task of this thesis is to propose cheaper version of a system.

In order to propose cheap design, minimal requirements have to be specified. Two tests were performed. First one was to identify interferences disturbing aEEG recording. Only registered interference was 50Hz spike coming from the mains. Noise floor peak to peak amplitude was measured on 1μV level, while magnitude of 50Hz spike was on the level of 9μV for devices turned off and 25μV for devices turned on.
Second performed test was resolution test. Test showed that in order to keep the number of bits low, amplification of the signal is required. Amplification by factor of 1000 allowed to reduced this value to 7bits.

Proposed system consists of amplifying stage realising 60dB gain with high pass cut off filtration and ADC. Amplifying stage is realised by amplifier providing 35dB gain with filtration below 2Hz and second amplifier realising 25dB gain. ADC is implemented by continuous time second order Sigma Delta Modulator. Proposed system was designed in CMOS 0.18μ and h18a6am technology. Tests of full system showed SNR no lower than 51dB, power consumption of 217.5μV. Input stage has CMRR of 113dB and input impedance above 2.25GΩ for the bandwidth 2-15Hz. System reliability was checked with corner analysis and wide range of temperatures. Results showed small variations of SNR.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Monday, 24 October 2016
• 14:00-15:00
• Van der Poel-zaal, EWI LB01.220

A 0.6V, 1uW, 0.95µVrms low-power low-noise instrumentation amplifier for ECG/BioZ in 40nm CMOS

Qiuyang Lin

Abstract:

This thesis presents a low-power low-noise instrumentation amplifier designed to be implemented in 40 nm CMOS technology and operating from a 0.6 V supply, intended for use in electrocardiogram (ECG) and bio-impedance (BioZ) signal acquisition. This instrumentation amplifier has one ECG channel, one BioZ channel and allows both signals to be measured at the same time.

The core of the system is an AC-coupled instrumentation amplifier. A DC servo-loop is applied to handle large differential electrode offset (>300 mV) and a positive feedback loop is used to boost the input impedance (>100 MOhms). This instrumentation amplifier achieves low noise (<1 uVrms over a bandwidth of 150 Hz), large CMRR (>100 dB) while only consuming 1 uW of power. The instrumentation amplifier has a noise efficiency factor (NEF) of 2.4 and it occupies only 0.1 mm^2 chip area.

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EI Colloquium

• Thursday, 29 September 2016

test

test

• Monday, 19 September 2016
• 15:00-17:30
• Aula, committee room A3

Special Celebrative Seminar: New model of Sino-Dutch R&D cooperation

Since the establishment of TU Delft's Beijing Research Centre (BRC) in 2012, 10 PhD researchers have been enrolled for this unique program in close cooperation with our Chinese Academic Partners. We are very pleased that the first two BRC PhD candidates will have their PhD thesis defence on September 19 2016, in the Aula of Delft University of Technology.

To celebrate this important milestone, we would like to invite you to join a special seminar after the defences, about the New model of Sino-Dutch R&D cooperation, to share the experiences, look to the future and raise the glass together.

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Friday, 26 August 2016
• 14:00
• t.b.d.

In-vivo multicell inferior olivary recordings: alternative design methods for creating cheap and flexible electrode structures

Joost Kerpels

In order to allow neuroscientists to do in-vivo recordings on hard to reach brain tissue, such as the Inferior Olivary Complex, specially designed electrodes are required. Although a variety of electrodes are commercially available, they are usually expensive and it is hard to rapid prototype new designs.

This thesis describes the design process of three electrode array designs, each improved based on the findings of the previous one. The first design was made using a FlexPCB production technique, on which gold spots were added to create conducting measuring sites. The second design combined this technique with commercial microwire electrodes. The third design used 3d-print technology combined with microwire electrodes to create an electrode array.

All designs were tested in in vivo measurements on mice. Although successful measurements were done, the robustness and reproducibility needs to improve in order for this technique to really be applicable in a laboratory environment. Furthermore, the peripherals need to be improved in order to minimize the system to create a wearable system and perform recordings on wake animals.

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Friday, 26 August 2016
• 10:00
• t.b.d.

A compact multi-electrode system to measure in vivo electrical activity in the olivocerebellar system -- measuring sub-threshold oscillations and action potentials spatially and over time

Matthijs Weskin

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MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Thursday, 26 November 2015
• 10:00
• HB17.150

Sensor Selection and Bit Allocation in WSNs with Realistic Digital Communication Channels

Hongrun Zhang

For energy management in wireless sensor networks, only the sensors with most informative measurements are activated to operate. How to select sensors that make good tradeoff between performance and energy consumption is what many researchers are focusing on. Existing solutions assume analog data model, i.e., the data from sensors collected by a center node, called fusion center, are analog measurements. In practical application, due to limitations of energy of sensors and bandwidth of wireless channel, original measurements are usually compressed before being transmitted to the fusion center. In addition, transmitted signals are usually distorted by wireless channel effects, therefore it is possible that the received data are corrupted with errors. In this thesis, we consider two compressive techniques: one-bit quantization and multi-bit quantization. In one-bit quantization, an indicator message is generated in a sensor according to whether the original measurement is larger than a threshold or not. In multi-bit quantization, the original measurements are quantized to multiple bits and only the most significant bits are reserved. The indicators or the most significant bits are then transmitted through realistic wireless channel to the fusion center for it to process. By these ways, the transmitted signals are digital, and they may flip into opposite values by the effects of wireless channels. For one-bit quantization case, we develop a sensor selection approach, based on convex programming. For multi-bit quantization, we extend the sensor selection to bit allocation and propose a novel algorithm to determine the number of bits to transmit for each sensors, which is also based on convex programming. In both cases we consider the effects of wireless channels, which are characterized as bit error rate. Particularly, for the multi-bit quantization, numerical results show that the bit allocation can further reduce the cost that we defined compared with existing solutions where transmitted data are assumed to be analog.

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Monday, 29 June 2015
• 13:30-14:15
• HB14.240

Low power digital baseband architecture for wireless sensor nodes

Yuteng Hao

This thesis presents a digital baseband design for an upcoming wireless standards: IEEE 802.11ah. It is a branch of Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) standards. Compared with the previous Wi-Fi standards, this new standard has larger coverage range and consumes less energy. It is particularly suited for energy-constrained sensor applications.? In contrast to the Digital Baseband (DBB)s of other Wi-Fi standards, this design consumes much less power. The basic modulation method of the system is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and the detailed algorithms are explored. To prove the robustness of the system, some error tests for the system are performed. A gate-level hardware design and the synthesis netlist are also presented to prove the low-power design. Based on the synthesis results, a series of optimization is done to lower the power consumption.? The DBB has been implemented in 40nm Low-power CMOS process to prove the concept.? It includes the key blocks of this system. Measurement results show that the DBB for IEEE 802.11ah is suitable for low power applications. The power consumption of this DBB is around 200 - 400 uW, which is hundreds times less than that of the traditional 802.11 baseband.

Thesis work performed at Holst Centre

Additional information ...

PhD thesis defence

• Friday, 24 April 2015
• 12:00-14:30
• Senaatszaal (tentative), Aula. Delft University of Technology

Design of efficient and safe neural stimulators - a multidisciplinary approach

Marijn van Dongen

Neural stimulation is an established treatment methodology for an increasing number of diseases. Electrical Stimulation injects a stimulation signal through electrodes that are implanted in the target area of the central or peripheral nervous system in order to evoke a specific neuronal response that suppresses or treats pathological activity. This thesis discusses the design of neural stimulators: the device that is responsible for generating the stimulation signal in a safe, efficient and controlled manner. The design of such a device requires a highly multidisciplinary approach which involves disciplines such as neuroscience, electrophysiology, electrochemistry and electrical engineering.
The first part of this thesis focuses on the processes associated with the neuronal recruitment. After describing the stimulation processes in detail at various levels, the discussion zooms in on the processes at the electrode-tissue interface and in particular the electrochemical behavior. Many neural stimulators include coupling capacitors between the stimulator and the electrodes to reduce the risk of potentially harmful electrochemical reactions. However, it is shown that coupling capacitors also have negative implications that need to be considered, such as a shift in the equilibrium potential of the electrode-tissue interface. Also, the reversibility of charge transfer processes at the electrode-tissue interface is analyzed. Most studies rely on monitoring the electrodetissue interface potential to determine the maximum reversible charge injection limits. By measuring the reversible charge in a more direct way, it was found that irreversible charge transfer processes already play a role for stimulation intensities that are well below the established charge injection limits.
The extensive description of the stimulation process is furthermore used to introduce a fundamentally different stimulation paradigm. Instead of using a constant current or voltage to stimulate the electrodes, a high frequency, switched-mode stimulation signal is applied. The advantage of such a stimulation pattern is that it can be generated in a power efficient way by the neurostimulator circuit using switched-mode operation that is common in energy efficient amplifiers (class-D operation) or power management circuits. The efficacy of the proposed stimulation pattern is verified both using modeling as well as using in vitro measurements by analyzing the response of patch-clamped Purkinje cells.
The second part of the thesis focuses on the electrical design of neural stimulators. The first system is designed to be used in a specific neuroscientific experiment and features arbitrary waveform stimulation. The user has full flexibility over the choice of stimulation waveform, while the stimulator circuit guarantees safety by ensuring charge balanced operation. The stimulator circuit is realized and included in a system implementation that is suitable for the in vivo experimental setup. The stimulation pulse (which uses a burst pattern) is synchronized with auditory stimulation in an attempt to recondition the neural pathways in a mouse that suffers from tinnitus.
The second design implements the high-frequency switched-mode stimulation pattern that was introduced in the first part of the thesis. The system features an unfiltered forward buck-boost converter at its core to directly stimulate the target tissue. It is possible to operate the system with multiple independent channels that connect to an arbitrary electrode configuration, making the system well suited for current steering techniques. Furthermore, comprehensive control was implemented using a dual clock configuration that allows both autonomic tonic stimulation, as well as single shot stimulation. Each channel can be configured individually with tailored stimulation parameters and multiple channels can operate in a synchronized fashion. The system is power efficient, especially when compared with state-of-the-art constant current stimulators with an adaptive power supply that operate in multichannel mode. Efficiency improvements up to 200% compared with state of the art constant current stimulators are demonstrated. Furthermore, the number of external components required is reduced to a single inductor.

Additional information ...

Sense of Contact

• Thursday, 2 April 2015
• 11:00-11:20
• Kontakt der Kontinenten, Soesterberg

Sensing and Stimulating the Body with Electroceuticals

Wouter Serdijn

The 21st century will be the century of unravelling the intricacies of the brain and in which we will explore the use of electricy to interact with our electro-chemical mainframe better. In this talk I will explain how electroceuticals, the electronic counterparts of pharmaceuticals, can help to successfully treat neurological disorders. Further, I will sketch a technological avenue of their future development by making electroceuticals smaller, more energy efficient and more intelligent.

Additional information ...

QuTech Seminar

• Tuesday, 24 March 2015
• 16:00-17:00
• EWI Snijderszaal (LB 01.010)

Designs for quantum information hybrid devices and systems

Prof. Kae Nemoto
National Institute of Informatics, Quantum Information Sciences, Tokyo, Japan

There have been many architectures for quantum computer and quantum information devices proposed, yet we face a gap between these proof-of-principle idea and feasible quantum devices. We focus on an integrated cavity device based on a single diamond NV center to identify the problems and obstacles by integrating necessary elements to perform computational tasks.

Additional information ...

MEST event

• Tuesday, 17 February 2015
• 09:00-13:15
• Room J, 3ME Faculty

TU Delft in ISSCC 2015

Program:

9:00	Prof. Kofi Makinwa	Welcome
9:10	A. Carimatto	A 67,392 SPAD PVTB-Compensated Multi-Channel Digital SiPMwith 432 column-Parallel 48ps 17b TDCs for Endoscopic Time-of-Flight PET
9:50	M. Shahmohammadi	A 1/f Noise Up-conversion Reduction Technique Applied to Class-D and Class-F Oscillators
10:15	R. Quan	A 4600um2 1.5oC (3s) 0.9kS/s Thermal-Diffusivity Temperature Sensor with VCO-Based Readout
10:40	Break
10:55	L. Xu	A 110dB SNR ADC with +/-30V Input Common-Mode Range and 8uV offset for Current Sensing Applications
11:35	Y. He	A 0.05-mm2 1-V Capacitance-to-Digital Converter Based on Period Modulation
12:00	H.Jiang	A 30-ppm <80-nJ Ring-Down-Based Readout Circuit for Resonant Sensors

There will be free pizza from 12:45 to 13:15

Dimes Colloquium

• Tuesday, 14 October 2014
• 11:30-12:15
• Dimes colloquium room ? DI 01.180

Linear and nonlinear springs in electrostatic micro-actuators

David Elata
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

In this presentation I will discuss the static and dynamic responses of mechanical springs that are used in electrostatic actuators. With respect to quasi-static applications, I will show how nonlinear mechanical springs can be used to counteract the nonlinear electrostatic attraction forces in gap-closing actuators. Instead of the pull-in instability, we may achieve an extended stable range with a linear voltage-displacement relation. Alternatively, beyond what would have been the pull-in point, we may achieve a constant voltage for any displacement. This effectively turns the transducer into a rechargeable mechanical battery, which is a neat design though mostly impractical. With respect to dynamic applications, I will show why the standard folded beam suspension, which is supposed to be linear by design, induces a nonlinear response in electrostatic comb-drive resonators. I will present a new suspension design which solves this problem.

International Radar Conference 2014, Lille, France

• Monday, 13 -- Friday, 17 October 2014
• Lille, France

Alexander Yarovoy, François Le Chevalier, Fotios Katsilieris, Nikita Petrov, Alexey Narykov, Oleg Krasnov

The French SEE Society (Soci?t? de l'Electricit?, de l'Electronique, et des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication) organises RADAR 2014 in Lille, from 13 to 17 of October 2014. The conference will be organized in the frame of the international relations set up between the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE), the Institution of Engineers Australia (IEAust) and the SEE.

Additional information ...

MSc thesis presentation Thanos Ramkaj

• Wednesday, 8 October 2014
• 10:00-11:00
• Snijderszaal, EWI LB01.010

Analysis and Design of High-Speed Successive Approximation Register ADCs

Thanos Ramkaj

HIGH performance Analog-to-DigitalConverters (ADCs) are highly demanded by modern instrumentation, data acquisition and wire-line/wireless communication systems. However, the need for high speed is always accompanied by high power consumption and large area since amplifiers with large bandwidth and analog devices with low noise and high linearity are mandatory to fulfill the stringent requirements of high speed operation. Benefits of technology scaling and the flexibility of digital circuits raise the design challenges towards high gain, low noise and high linearity amplifiers, increasing the difficulty of implementing various ADC architectures with traditional analog techniques. New applications that constantly demand better performance in terms of speed and accuracy, have created a need for energy-efficient ADCs in the GHz sampling frequency and low-to-moderate effective resolution range. The dominantly digital nature of Successive Approximation Register (SAR) ADCs makes them a good candidate for an energy-efficient and scalable design, overcoming the aforementioned challenges, but its sequential operation limits its applicability in the GHz sampling range. It is of great interest to systematically study and understand the trade-offs in realizing such multi-GS/s, low power ADCs.

This thesis work analyzes the trade-offs in realizing SAR ADCs in the GHz range in terms of speed, accuracy, power and area. First, basic ADC principles such as quantization and sampling are discussed and performance metrics are introduced. Then, the theory is summarized and the advantages and disadvantages of various types of ADC architectures for high speed operation are pointed out, while analysis and evaluation of system and circuit level techniques, in order to overcome the speed limitation of SAR ADCs, and extend their operation in the GHz sampling frequency with affordable power and area trade-offs follow. Based on the aforementioned analysis, a novel architecture is proposed to break the speed limit due to sequential operation, and realize an 8-bit single channel 2 GS/s SAR ADC. The proposed architecture combines optimally the multibit/ cycle approach with interleaving comparators. Furthermore, other techniques such as separating the sample and DAC functions, a segmentation switching capacitive DAC with sub-fF unit capacitors and a very lowpower reference generator contribute in speed enhancement and power reduction. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed architecture and techniques is verified through both behavioral modeling (MATLAB, Verilog-A) and transistor level circuit simulations. The sub-blocks composing the ADC such as comparators, DACs, T/H, reference buffers, preamplifiers, biasing blocks, clock drivers are designed in 40 nm digital LP CMOS process and simulation results both for individual blocks as well as for the whole ADC are presented. Simulation results indicate a sample rate of 2 GS/s with an SNDR of 41.8 dB at Nyquist input frequency (1 GHz) and above 35 dB until 10 GHz input frequency, while consuming a total power of 17.2mWat 1.2 V supply.

Receivers Topology Optimization of the Combined Active and WiFi-based Passive Radar Network

• Friday, 26 September 2014
• 10:00-10:30
• Snijderszaal (LB 01.010)

Presentation for the EuRAD?14 conference

Inna Ivashko

This paper focuses on the accuracy analysis of the combined active and WiFi-based passive radar network. The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound is used as an accuracy metric. It is shown that localization performance of the active radar network can be improved with exploitation of the signals from passive bistatic WiFi radars. This makes reasonable to use information from passive and active radars simultaneously in order to enhance system localization capability. Sparsity-based algorithm is applied to find optimum geometry of the WiFi receivers at the fixed positions of the WiFi access points and active radars.

Additional information ...

EI Colloquium

• Monday, 22 September 2014
• 11:00-12:00
• EWI Snijderszaal

Analog-to-digital converters

Jesper Steensgaard
Linear Technology, Milpitas, CA

Analog-to-digital converters have traditionally been a weak link in mixed-mode signal chains. As such, logarithmic and programmable-gain amplifiers have been used to effectively increase their overall dynamic range. In recent years, however, ADC performance has dramatically improved, making it difficult to design amplifiers and references capable of matching their performance. This talk will discuss the challenges of designing a circuit capable of driving a 20-bit SAR ADC with better than 1-part-per-million accuracy.

Biography

Jesper Steensgaard, obtained his MSEE and then his PhD from the Technical University of Denmark in 1999. He has 20+ years of experience in the design of high-resolution data converters. His early work focused on delta-sigma data converters, including mismatch-shaping binary-weighted-element DACs and continuous-time delta-sigma ADCs. Recently, Jesper developed a family of high-resolution low-power SAR ADCs, including the LTC2378-20, which combine the best features of delta-sigma ADCs (precision, low noise) and SAR ADCs (speed, low power, ease of use).

DIMES colloquium

• Wednesday, 10 September 2014
• 14:00-16:00
• Dimes colloquiumroom

Probabilistic Design for Reliability in Electronics and Photonics: Role, Attributes, Challenges

Prof.dr. Ephraim Suhir
Portland State University, USA

The recently suggested probabilistic design for reliability (PDfR) concept is based on:?1) highly focused and highly cost-effective failure oriented accelerated testing (FOAT),??aimed at understanding the physics of the anticipated failures and at quantifying, on the probabilistic basis, the outcome of FOATs conducted for the most vulnerable element(s) of the product of interest and the most likely and meaningful combination of possible stressors (the principle of superposition does not work in reliability engineering), and? 2) simple and physically meaningful predictive modeling (PM), both analytical and computer-aided, aimed at bridging the gap between what one "sees" as a result of FOAT and what he/she will supposedly "get" in the field. FOAT and PM based sensitivity analysis (SA) algorithms are developed as by-products.

The PDfR concept is based on the recognition of the fact that nobody and nothing is perfect, and that the difference between a highly reliable and insufficiently reliable product is ?merely? in the level of its probability of failure. If this probability (evaluated for the anticipated loading conditions and the given time in operation) is not acceptable, then such a SA can be effectively employed to determine what could be possibly changed, in terms of materials, geometries, application restrictions, etc., to improve the situation.

The PDfR analysis enables one also to check if the product is not "over-engineered", i.e., is not superfluously robust: if it is, it might be too costly: although the operational reliability cannot be low, it does not have to be higher than necessary either, but has to be adequate for the given product and application. This means that when both reliability and cost-effectiveness are imperative, ability to quantify reliability is a must. In this seminar the major PDfR concepts will be illustrated by case studies and practical examples. Although some advanced and subtle PDfR predictive modeling techniques have been recently developed for quantifying and assuring reliability of electronic and photonic products, especially those intended for aerospace applications, the practical examples addressed employ more or less elementary analytical models.

Biography

Prof. Dr. E. Suhir is Fellow of ASME, IEEE, American Physical Society (APS), Institute of Physics (UK), Society of Optical Engineers (SPIE), International Microelectronics and Packaging Society (IMAPS), Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), Foreign Full Member (Academician) of the NAE, Ukraine, and Fulbright Scholar in Information Technologies. He has authored above 300 publications (patents, books, book chapters, papers) and received numerous professional awards, including 2004 ASME Worcester Read Warner Medal for outstanding contributions to the permanent literature of engineering and laying a foundation of a new discipline ?Structural Analysis in Electronics and Photonics Systems?. Dr. Suhir is the third Russian American, after Steven Timoshenko and Igor Sikorsky, who received this prestigious award. Dr. Suhir is co-founder of the ASME Journal of Electronic Packaging and served as its Technical Editor for eight years (1994-2002).

Additional information ...

• Wednesday, 10 September 2014
• 17:00-19:00
• /pub (EWI basement)

MEST welcome drink

Meet and greet your friends and colleagues with a FREE Drink to say Hallo !!!

Organized by MEST student association

Additional information ...

MSc ME Thesis Presentation

• Friday, 29 August 2014
• 11:00-12:00
• HB 17.150

Long-range 3D Range Detector Based on Time-correlated Single-photon Counting

Dali Zhang

Three-dimensional (3D) range detectors enabling 3D computer vision is now popular in automotive industry. With their participation, automobile safety has been further enhanced, autonomous driving has become realizable. Time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technique utilizing complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) single photon detectors (SPDs) and time-to-digital converters (TDCs) embodies the proper participant of automotive 3D vision, with low power consumption, low cost, high speed, high robustness, small size, and portability.

In this thesis, a TCSPC 3D range detector for automotive application was studied and modeled. The model covered all main components of a TCSPC system, including the TCSPC range detection process, the signal, and the noise. It was designed to predict the behavior of TCSPC systems and help future designers optimize the performance in accordance with the targeted application.

To verify the model, a experimental setup was designed, implemented, and characterized. The setup consists of a data acquisition system, data processing procedures, and an optical-mechanical system. Measurements performed using the setup have confirmed that the model was designed correctly. For further exploration, range detection from 0.2 m to 60 m were carried out.

PhD Thesis Defence

• Tuesday, 1 July 2014
• 10:00-11:30
• Aula Senaatszaal

Multichannel Digital Silicon Photomultipliers for Time-of-Flight PET

Shingo Mandai

This thesis discusses the potential of CMOS based SiPMs, especially for TOF PET applications, in a systematic and comprehensive fashion. CMOS based SPADs are still need to be designed carefully to improve fill factor, TDCs be improved from the point of the area and power consumption, and the necessity of high voltage for SPADs be handled efficiently. Thus, this thesis also aims to design and integrate various circuits in the SiPM to realize the high integrations utilizing the biggest advantage of the CMOS technology.

Additional information ...

ISCAS 2014

• Sunday, 1 -- Thursday, 5 June 2014
• Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Melbourne, Australia

2014 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems

Welcome from the General Chairs of the Organising Committee

On behalf of the Organising Committee we welcome you to Melbourne, ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2011, 2012 and 2013 as the most liveable City in the world, to Australia, and to the 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

ISCAS?2014 is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE CASS), and generously supported by the State Government of Victoria and the Melbourne Convention Bureau.

As you all know, ISCAS is the flagship annual conference of IEEE CASS, and it is well established as the world?s premier networking forum in the fields of theory, design and implementation of circuits and systems. As a result of the release of its 2012 Vision and Mission (see ieee-cas.org), the CASS goal is to develop ISCAS also as the leading forum for pioneering circuits and systems contributions to humanity?s grand challenges.

Accordingly, the special theme of ISCAS 2014 is nano/bio circuits and systems applied to enhancing living and lifestyles, particularly in relation to the multidisciplinary grand challenges in healthcare and wellbeing, the environment and climate change.

Keynotes

ISCAS?2014 has four keynote presentations, two of which address crucial aspects of high priority grand challenges, in health and in sustainability, while the other two describe frontier work at the extreme ends, in terms of scale, of circuits and systems engineering ? new devices that promise to sustain the remarkable advances in semiconductors that we have enjoyed for over 60 years, and design methods for systems of systems, which are relevant to so many grand challenge problems:

Dr Donald E. Ingber from Harvard University on Monday will present Microengineered Human Organs On Chips, describing advances he and his team have made in the engineering of microfluidic ?Organs-on-Chips??microchips lined by living human cells created with microfabrication techniques that recapitulate organ-level structure and functions as a way to replace animal testing for drug development and mechanistic discovery.

Professor Iven Mareels from The University of Melbourne in his talk on Wednesday, titled Circuits and Systems for Modern Irrigation Management, describes work over 15 years on circuits and systems research, development and commercialisation of an internet-of-things dedicated to smart irrigation water management.

Professor Victor Zhirnov from the Semiconductor Research Corporation, in Scaling Limits of Nanoionic Devices, elaborates how recognition that crystal ?defects? could be used as controllable entities, rather than being seen as imperfections, leads to the possibility that nanoionic resistive switching devices may be scalable down to ~ 1nm and thus may offer a promising path to replace the foundation of today?s computing technologies.

Dr. Stephan C. Stilkerich from Airbus Group will present Model Based Engineering of Highly Mobile Systems of Systems: Safe Aeroplanes; Safer Automobiles, with an introduction and post-talk discussion moderated by Dr Graham Hellestrand from Embedded Systems Technology. This keynote deals with front-line approaches to engineering electronic systems and their software, that are required to perform real-time control critical for the safe operation of airplanes and cars, including while operating in dense traffic and simultaneously reducing environmental impact.

Technical Program Regular Sessions

The technical program consists of tutorials, lecture papers, poster papers and demonstrations accepted based on peer review of the submission from regular open calls. We have retained many of the ISCAS features that have evolved in recent years, and added new features, some in response to ISCAS feedback, to continue to improve attendees? experience of the event.

We are very pleased to report that ISCAS?2014 will be first time that the new CASS Conference App will be made available to all attendees, and we look forward to your feedback to improve it. The CAS Society has supported the development of the Conference App, through Conference4Me, to facilitate the navigation of the conference agenda and venues, secure access to proceedings, micro-blogging, live discussion and ranking of papers, providing feedback to organizers and general improvement of attendees? experience at CAS conferences.

Lecture papers follow the traditional ISCAS format. There are nine lecture sessions over three days, with session having 11 parallel streams. Sessions are 90 minutes with up to five papers, allowing 18 minute for each including introduction, presentation and discussion.

The Demonstration session and Poster sessions are held over 3 hours commencing at the 3pm coffee break on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The Demonstration session is Monday only. There are no competing parallel lecture sessions during the first 90 minutes of each day?s Posters/Demonstrations, allowing increased attention to them from all attendees.

We have increased the length of the lunch break to 90 minutes. This will allow more time for the CASS side meetings, particularly the annual meetings of the 15 CASS Technical Committees, which are playing an increasingly important role in leadership of the Society. The longer break will also provide a more relaxed walk to the nearby restaurants for the lunch break, and we hope it will facilitate a greater level of networking.

Following the ISCAS?2013 lead we continue the trial of offering free attendance at Tutorial and CAS-FEST sessions for all ISCAS?2014 registrants. We have also expanded both the tutorial program and CAS-FEST. CASS? goals in these moves are both to widen the reach of and to increase participation in the tutorial program and CAS-FEST. We will greatly appreciate feedback from attendees on the value you perceive in these offerings.

Tutorials

ISCAS?2014 commences on Sunday with 19 half-day and 1 full-day Tutorial sessions.

We have included two Tutorial sessions on Technology Management in response to feedback from CASS industry members:

T19 ? Interfacing Organisations: How to successfully manage organizational interfaces by Felix Lustenberger; and T20 - Managing Technology Professionals by Tuna B. Tarim: Transitioning from Individual Contributor to Management. Felix and Tuna are CASS members and also leaders of IEEE?s Technology Management Council, which was recently approved to transition to an IEEE Society.

Also in response to feedback, from the Women in CAS (WiCAS) and Young Professionals Program (formerly GoLD) groups, is a tutorial on career development, social skills, collaboration and networking:

T7 ? Engineering Networks that Work: Design Tools for Your Career by Dr Margaret Collins Margaret is a Cardiff-based research consultant, professional coach and trainer with extensive experience in helping people achieve their career goals. Come ready to get involved ? this is an active workshop session!

A third initiative in the Tutorials is a full day introduction to Memristive devices, circuits, systems and applications, the topic of this year?s CAS-FEST. This will cover all aspects of this emerging technology, namely: theory, practical nanodevices, physical switching mechanisms, circuits and emerging applications:

T21 ? If it?s Pinched it?s a memristor (AM), Professor Leon Chua T22 ? ReRAM Memristive Devices: Electrochemical Systems at the Atomic Scale (AM), Dr Ilia Valov T23 ? Analog and Mixed-Signal Applications of Memristive Devices (PM), Professor Dmitri Strukov T24 Integrating memristive devices in CMOS neuromorphic computing architectures (PM), Professor Giacomo Indiveri The aim of these sessions is to provide sufficient introduction to enable a typical ISCAS attendee to appreciate the state of the art material that will be presented in the CAS-FEST sessions.

CAS-FEST

Since its inception in 2010, the Circuits and Systems ? Forum on Emerging and Selected Topics has progressively become more closely integrated with ISCAS. This year?s topic was again selected from an open call and the winning proposal, from members of the Nonlinear Circuits and Systems (NCAS) Technical Committee, has taken still further this level of integration with ISCAS. This includes the presentation of invited introductory tutorials in the regular ISCAS Tutorials program (see above), the inclusion of three Special Sessions in the regular ISCAS Lecture Papers program, a full day of CAS-FEST Special Sessions on Wednesday, and the highlight full day of CAS-FEST Keynote talks on Thursday.

With this additional integration, CAS-FEST 2014 will bring together leading experts and provide a thorough coverage of the field of memristors, from an introduction to those unfamiliar with the field, through solidifying existing knowledge, to highlighting developments at the forefront of the field, and pointing to future challenges and promising directions for research. We hope that this coordinated approach will result in a landmark event in the development of the field.

Social Events and Awards Dinner

We are planning the now standard set of ISCAS evening events, with the Welcome Reception on Sunday evening soon after the conclusion of Tutorials, the WiCAS/YPP (formerly GoLD) event on early Monday evening, the Awards Dinner on Tuesday evening, and the Closing Reception immediately following the last session on Wednesday. Watch out for the Australian twists!

We hope that you will have a rewarding and enjoyable time in Melbourne at ISCAS?2014 and look forward to meeting as many of you as we can!

Professor Jugdutt (Jack) Singh & Dr David Skellern General Co-Chairs, ISCAS 2014

Additional information ...

Lecture on ExG signal acquisition and processing electronics

• Wednesday, 14 May 2014
• 13:45-15:30
• EWI Lecture Room G

Lecture on ExG signal acquisition and processing electronics

Wouter Serdijn

Wouter Serdijn will present the BELEM lecture on ExG signal acquisition and processing electronics

Additional information ...

EUCAP14 conference on antennas and propagation

• Sunday, 6 -- Tuesday, 8 April 2014
• The Hague

Abstract submission: 13 Oct 2013

Conference dates: 6-8 April 2014

Application areas:

• Fundamental research
• Satcom on-the-move terminal antennas
• Navigation, localisation, positioning and tracking
• Cellular mobile communications (includes: base station, handheld devices)
• Machine to machine, internet on devices
• Wireless networks (includes: WLAN, indoor communication)
• High data-rate transfer and backbone networks
• RFID and sensor networks
• Biomedical (includes: human body interaction, on-body antennas, electromagnetic exposure and interactions)
• Satellite communications
• Satellite passive and active remote sensing
• RADAR
• Radio astronomy
• Signal and image processing
• Defense and security
• Short-range Giga-bit communications
• Commercial software

Additional information ...