'Best Innovation Booth' award at the international Astronautical Congres

• Tuesday, 22 October 2024

The TU Delft team of Chris Verhoeven and Raj Rajan attended the International Astronautical Congress (2024) https://www.iac2024.org/ , and won the “Best Innovation Booth” award demonstrating  the  “Autonomous path planning of Lunar Zebro”, and further presented the Moonshot project. Congratulations!

Simon Hehenberger (MS3 group) wins student paper award

• Thursday, 17 October 2024

PhD student Simon Hehenberger won the student paper award at the IEEE International symposium on Phased Array Systems and Technology in Boston.

His main research interests are antenna and array miniaturization, as well as new design strategies and antenna concepts enabled by additive manufacturing.

Best Presentation Award at the EuMW 2024

• Monday, 7 October 2024

PhD ‘s Rob Bootsman, Diewert Mul and Mohammad Reza (a.o) won the Best Presentation Award at the EuMW 2024 in Paris with their presentation titled ‘A Switch-Bank Approach for High-Power, High-Resolution, Fully-Digital Transmitters’.

MS3 contribution to EURAD 2024 Paris

• Monday, 30 September 2024

Our group contributed 7 papers to the recent EURAD 2024 conference in Paris, part of the annual European Microwave Week.

Many congratulations to PhD candidate Aitor Correas Serrano for being 'runner-up' to the conference prize for his paper "Experimental Validation of NU-OTFS MIMO radar through Polarimetric Measurements", and PhD candidate Chengxu Zhao for being finalist with his paper "Calibration of Polarimetric Automotive Radar With Asymmetric MIMO Topology and Off-Broadside Beamforming".

We look forward to welcoming everyone to the next EUMW and EURAD 2025 in Septemberm in Utrecht, here in the Netherlands.

Geert Leus has been awarded the Dr. Ramkumar IISc Distinguished Visiting Chair Professorship

• Tuesday, 17 September 2024

Prof.dr.ir. Geert Leus has been awarded the Dr. Ramkumar IISc Distinguished Visiting Chair Professor position in the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, India

Have a look look at a burning galaxy with millions of stars forming!

• Tuesday, 3 September 2024

Ever wanted to have a look at a burning galaxy with millions of stars forming, roughly (and probably) 13 billion lightyears ago? This is your chance! Akira Endo is currently running observations in the main hall of building 36 (faculty of EEMCS), using the DESHIMA 2.0 spectrometer on the ASTE telescope in Chile. PhD student Leon Olde Scholtenhuis made a new chip in clean rooms including the Else Kooi Lab, that he wants to bring to the telescope next month.

Alle-Jan van der Veen wins EURASIP Technical Achievement Award

• Thursday, 29 August 2024

Alle-Jan has been awarded the prestigious Technical Achievement Award of EURASIP for his “contributions to subspace-based array signal processing”. EURASIP is the European Association for Signal Processing. The award was presented at EUSIPCO'2024 in August in Lyon.

The EURASIP Technical Achievement Award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact in this field.

Veni for Chang Gao

• Tuesday, 6 August 2024

In this innovative project, researchers are developing new software and hardware technology to make healthcare wearables, like eye movement trackers, hearing aids, and heart rate monitors, smarter and more efficient. By processing personal data and artificial intelligence algorithms for healthcare directly on these devices powered by specialised AI hardware accelerators, the project aims to enable instant wearable healthcare and enhance privacy. This approach also reduces energy use, promising longer battery life and more sustainable devices. The technology could transform how we monitor health conditions, making it quicker, more secure, and accessible to a wider audience.

More information

POEMM - a NASA stratospheric balloon mission with TU Delft/SRON detectors

• Thursday, 18 July 2024

Early July we received the news that the proposal for POEMM, The Planetary Origins and Evolution Multispectral Monochromator (POEMM), was granted. POEMM is a NASA-led long duration balloon mission, flying a 2 m diameter telescope at 45 km altitude above Antarctica using a giant He balloon. The two key new technologies that enable this mission are: 1: The Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) developed in the THz sensing group and SRON, operating in a 35-112 µm band,  and 2)  a so-called Virtual Image Phased Array (VIPA), developed at Cornell University in the USA. The VIPA is an optical element that allows spectroscopy with a resolving power of 100.000 with power detectors such as MKIDs. With this combination POEMM elegantly bypasses the Quantum Limit in sensitivity for radio receivers which are normally used for high resolution spectroscopy. POEMM promises to revolutionize our understanding of planet formation, the evolution of protoplanetary disks (PPDs) and the atmospheres of Solar System giant planets.

MARSS 2024 hosted in Delft, co-chaired by Massimo Mastrangeli

• Monday, 1 July 2024

MARSS, the annual International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales, is a non-profit conference run by the microrobotic community and technically supported by IEEE-RAS and IEEE-NTC. MARSS2024 will be held in-person on July 01-05, 2024, in Delft, Netherlands. The conference is the flagship forum to discuss cross-disciplinary activities on 1) manipulation, automation, measurement, and characterization at micro/nano scales, and 2) all kinds of small-scale robots (nm – cm) and their applications.

MARSS 2024 Delft, NL – International Conference on Manipulation, Automation and Robotics at Small Scales (marss-conference.org)

Swarming lab opened!

• Friday, 21 June 2024

The TU Delft Swarming Lab is an interfaculty facility between Delft Robotics Institute (DRI), Faculty of EEMCS, Faculty of AE and MAVLab, established to foster research collaboration and community building on swarms. 

Although the lab has been operational since 2023,  it was formally opened on 20 June 2024 by Guido de Croon and Raj Rajan (co-directors). It is housed in the TU Delft Science Centre, which also gives it large visibility to the general public.

The opening presented the facilities as well as some of the amazing students and researchers who have contributed to the lab thus far.

Dante Muratore gave an interview in La Republica

• Monday, 17 June 2024

Dante Muratore gave an interview in La Republica about his research and experience at the TU Delft.
Dante Muratore: I said no to Elon Musk to create a chip that will help those who have lost their sight "to see the stars again" - la Repubblica

Justin Dauwels appointed (co)director of TU Delft Safety & Security Institute

• Monday, 27 May 2024

Justin Dauwels is appointed as codirector of the TU Delft Safety & Security Institute, together with Eleonora Papadimitriou.

One of the first activities was the signing of a framework agreement with the Dutch police to work on safety & security issues, which led to the establishment of a joint Model-Driven Decisions Lab (MoDDL). Several PhD projects will be funded in the context of this Lab.

Graphene; twenty-year-old wonder material

• Wednesday, 22 May 2024

Fifteen years ago, the ultra-thin material graphene became a hype. Millions were invested and
thousands of scientific publications appeared every year. Where is the graphene research going now? Where are the promising applications, such as rollable screens and more efficient computer chips?

Full article (in Dutch), NRC

Professor P. M. Sarro elected as corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

• Friday, 17 May 2024

On May 16-17, 2024 emeritus professor Paqualina M. Sarro was elected in the Austrian Academy of Sciences as corresponding member abroad of the Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences.

The Learned Society, currently counting more than 770 renowned scientists from Austria and abroad, forms a cornerstone of the Academy and contributes significantly to the realisation of its mission to promote science in every respect.

We congratulate professor Sarro for the election, which also follows her prior election into the Royal Dutch Academy of Science (KNAW).

Double Prizes at IEEE Radar Conference 2024

• Monday, 13 May 2024

Last week brought excellent news for the MS3 group and microelectronics department from the IEEE Radar Conference 2024; Francesco Fioranelli and Ignacio Roldan got two prizes at the IEEE Radar Conference 2024: Francesco has received the IEEE AESS Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award and Ignacio got the best student paper Award for the joint paper "See Further Than CFAR: a Data-Driven Radar Detector Trained by Lidar" with the IV (Intelligent Vehicles) group.

Cum Laude for PhD student Huajun Zhang

• Wednesday, 24 April 2024

On April 15 PhD student Huajun Zhang (EI group) promoted Cum Laude.

High-performance multilevel Class-D audio amplifiers.

Abstract: Despite their high power efficiency, Class-D amplifiers (CDAs) suffer from greater EMI, inferior linearity, and lower DR than Class-AB amplifiers. This thesis describes the design and implementation of CDAs that aim to approach the performance of Class-AB amplifiers in terms of their application cost, dynamic range, and linearity while retaining the characteristic high power efficiency of the CDA, through the use of a multilevel output stage, feedback after the LC filter, and capacitive feedback. Measurement results from prototypes showed state-of-the-art performance.

Promotor; Prof. dr. Kofi Makinwa, co-promotor: Dr,Qinwen Fan

Biography Huajun Zhang

Huajun Zhang was born in Beijing, China. He obtained the B.E. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2015 and the B.S.E. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2015 and 2017, respectively. In the summer of 2016, he was an analog/mixed-signal design intern at Analog Devices, Inc., Wilmington, MA, USA. From May 2017 to February 2019, he was a Mixed Signal Design Engineer with Analog Devices, Inc., Norwood, MA, USA. Mr. Zhang joins the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory at TU Delft in March 2019 where he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Microelectronics. His technical interests include precision analog circuits and data converters.

Mr. Zhang has published three peer-reviewed journal papers on SAR and sigma-delta converters and has one US patent pending. He has been a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers and IEEE Sensors Journal.

GF12LP+ University Program awarded to Chang Gao

• Wednesday, 17 April 2024

The GF12LP+ University Program was awarded to Chang Gao in ELCA for his research on Low-Power AI Hardware Accelerators using cutting-edge 12 nm technology to enable energy-efficient signal processing in transmitters for future wireless communication technologies. We look forward to revolutionizing signal processing in Wi-Fi and cellular wireless systems to significantly improve energy efficiency.

Join one of the meetings and share your ideas for the improvement of social safety at TU Delft

• Tuesday, 9 April 2024

As TU Delft, we are faced with the task of making the campus a more socially safe place. Following the Education Inspectorate's report, we are drawing up an improvement plan to provide everyone with a socially safe working and learning environment where we treat each other with respect.

To help us develop this plan, we are currently looking for ideas in a number of ways. We are interested in your views on what should change and how best to go about doing this. All staff, students and alumni are welcome to attend one or more of the sessions on 10, 15 and 16 April in the Aula’s auditorium.

The aim of the meetings is to gather ideas and engage in dialogue on the following questions: what needs to change to create a socially safer working and learning environment, and how should we change it? What steps do we need to take to achieve this? All the plans and ideas will be taken into consideration and taken into account when the improvement plan is drawn up.

The sessions will be led by external experts from Berenschot. The programme is the same for each session. First, there will be an opening plenary session. Then your plans and ideas will be collected using Mentimeter. Next, there will be time to discuss these plans and ideas in smaller groups. Finally, the meeting will be concluded in plenary.

Dates

​​​​​​1. Wednesday 10 April 10.00-12.00 (doors open 09.45) This meeting will be held entirely in English.

2. Monday 15 April 12.30-14.30 (doors open 12.15). This meeting will be entirely in Dutch.

3. Monday 15 April 16.00-18.00 (with the Supervisory Board; doors open 15.45). The Supervisory Board will be present at this meeting. This meeting will be held in English. The plenary sessions will be translated into Dutch. The language of the breakout groups will depend on the language of the group participants.

​​​​​​4. Tuesday 16 April 12.30 – 14.30 (with the Executive Board; doors open 12.15). The Executive Board will be present at this meeting. The meeting will be held in Dutch. The plenary sessions will be translated into English. The language of the breakout groups will depend on the language of the group participants.

All meetings will take place in the auditorium.

Suggestion Box
You will not be attending a meeting but would like to share your ideas with us? You can do so via the digital suggestion box.

Read more on Social Safety

Best Paper Award at EuCAP 2024

• Monday, 25 March 2024

Caspar Coco Martin, Weiya Hu and Daniele Cavallo were awarded with the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation 2024 for Best Antenna Theory Paper. The winning paper is

“Analysis and Design of mmWave Wideband Artificial Dielectric Flat Lens Antenna”, Caspar M. Coco Martin, Weiya Hu and Daniele Cavallo (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands). 

The conference hosted 1500 attendees and included more than 1100 papers. This award adds to the many awards won by the TS group at international conferences, emphasizing the outstanding contributions of the group to the field of antennas.

STOI incorporated in Matlab

• Friday, 22 March 2024

STOI is a widely used measure for "short-time objective intelligibility" in (compressed) speech. It was developed by Cees Taal, Richard Hendriks (SPS), Richard Heusdens, and Jesper Jensen in 2010.

It allows to assess the performance of speech compression algorithms, without using listening panels. It is currently popular as a target feature in machine learning algorithms.

STOI already won best paper awards, and has now been incorporated in the 2024 edition of Matlab.

• C.H.Taal, R.C.Hendriks, R.Heusdens, J.Jensen, "An Algorithm for Intelligibility Prediction of Time-Frequency Weighted Noisy Speech," IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 2011.

Microchips in a connected world

• Thursday, 14 March 2024

Discover in this video how microelectronics is bridging connections worldwide while tackling the energy transition.

TU Delft - Microelectronics, Connected World (youtube.com)

EKL in the spotlight

• Monday, 11 March 2024

The Delft University of Technology harbours two of the main cleanroom infrastructures of the Netherlands: The Kavli Nanolab (KNL) and The Else Kooi Laboratory (EKL). Both laboratories provide access to high-end, state-of-the-art process and inspection equipment for academic and industrial users.

The cleanroom infrastructure of the Delft University of Technology is a partner in NanoLabNL, which is the Dutch national facility for nanotechnology research. It offers the use of facilities and expertise to universities, research institutes, start-ups, and industry. The NanoLabNL facilities are an important link in the innovation process from basic idea to product. In this role NanoLabNL supports fundamental research, process and product development and small-scale production.

EKL is one of the biggest cleanrooms in The Netherlands with over 600 m² of cleanroom class 100 (ISO 5) and 400 m² of cleanroom class 10'000 (ISO 7). It is located in Building 36, EWI Faculty, and allows full fabrication and characterisation of any active or passive nanostructure starting from a silicon wafer. The laboratory offers sub-micrometer resolution lithography, thin film deposition and etching, bulk and surface micromachining, packaging, and assembly of the final device. Moreover, polymer based, biocompatible and biodegradable devices can be fully fabricated and synthesized in EKL.

EKL is collaborating with many research groups such as Bioelectronics, ECTM, EI, PME, PVMD, QuTech, Terahertz Sensing. Moreover, EKL offers foundry and joint development services, allowing the collaboration with different companies in the many disparate fields. The EKL team can assist you in design and provide fabrication and characterization of your device. In Applications, you can find some of the of the devices that have been fully fabricated in the EKL and KN facilities.

Startup Innatera in the news

• Thursday, 7 March 2024

Innatera is a startup that originated in 2019 in the SPS group and has now grown to 65 employees. Recently they completed a neural network-based microcontroller, based on spiking neural networks. This enables highly power efficient processing (e.g. real-time image recognition) for Internet-of-Things applications.

The chip was demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Alle-Jan van der Veen wins EURASIP Technical Achievement Award

• Friday, 1 March 2024

Alle-Jan has been awarded the prestigious Technical Achievement Award of EURASIP for his “contributions to subspace-based array signal processing”.

The EURASIP Technical Achievement Award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact in this field.

EURASIP is the European Association for Signal Processing. The award will be presented at EUSIPCO'2024 in August in Lyon.

Outstanding TU Delft score at ISSCC 2024

• Monday, 19 February 2024

At this year’s International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC), the world’s top conference on IC design, the TU Delft will be contributing to a record number of papers.
In total, 13 papers will be presented in the following areas:

-       Sensors and precision analog circuits (Makinwa)

·       Ultrasound and biomedical circuits (Pertijs, Serdijn, Liu)

·       Power management (Du)

·       Cryogenic CMOS (Babaie, Sebastiano)

·       Class-D amplifiers (Fan)

·       RF amplifiers (de Vreede, Alavi)

Congratulations to all the authors and PIs for this great collective achievement.

Click here for full list of the contributed papers

Portrait of Medical Delta Professor Johan Frijns (appointed at EEMCS, Bioelectronics group)

• Friday, 16 February 2024

Portrait of Medical Delta Professor Johan Frijns 

More than 800,000 people in the Netherlands are hard of hearing. They suffer so much from hearing loss that it limits their daily lives. Prof. Dr. ir. Johan Frijns treats people with hearing loss, conducts research on hearing implants, and gladly shares his knowledge about electrical stimulation of the nervous system. "We shouldn't want to reinvent everything in every little corner. What we learn in one place, we can also use in another."

Johan Frijns is a professor of Otology and Physics of Hearing in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at LUMC. He heads the Center for Audiology and Hearing Implants Leiden (CAHIL) and the Cochlear Implant Rehabilitation Centre Leiden (CIRCLE). He was recently appointed as a Medical Delta professor with a position at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science at TU Delft.

Read more: Portrait and video Johan Frijns: “When a deaf child suddenly hears and learns to talk, this also has a huge impact on the people around him.” | Medical Delta

Lunch Seminar Tom Coughlin, IEEE president

• Tuesday, 6 February 2024

Tom Coughlin, IEEE president, will give a lunch seminar at the TU Delft.

12.30-12.45, walk in. Lecture hall D@ta, EEMCS
12.45-13.15, presentation by Ilke Ercan (EEE) and Tom Coughlin (IEEE)

Register HERE

New book with contribution of Geert Leus

• Wednesday, 24 January 2024

Sparse Arrays for Radar, Sonar, and Communications

Artikel AD tinnitus

• Thursday, 11 January 2024

Onze hersencellen werken als elektronische netwerken en daar kan ik veel mee”, aldus professor Wouter Serdijn van de Sectie Bio-elektronica van de TU Delft. Serdijn zoekt naar een oplossing voor tinnitus. © Thierry Schut

Source (paywall): https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/elektrotechnisch-ingenieur-en-neurochirurg-denken-oplossing-voor-tinnitus-gevonden-te-hebben~abb033f4/

Read the full story here: Tinnitus.

Thomas Michalica wins Best Bioengineering MSc Graduate of 2023

• Tuesday, 19 December 2023

Ex-ECTM Master student Thomas Michalica was awarded for Best MSc Graduate by Delft Bioengineering Institute (BEI) with a prize of 1000 EUR. Thomas' graduation project titled "Two-photon polymerization-based 3D-multi-electrode arrays for electrical monitoring of neuronal cells" was conducted under supervision of Massimo Mastrangeli (ECTM) and Angelo Accardo (3mE/PME/MNE).

Congratulations (again), Thomas!

See also: Best Bioengineering MSc Graduate of the Year: Thomas Michalica! (tudelft.nl)

Mario Coutino wins best PhD thesis award

• Tuesday, 12 December 2023

Mario Coutino has won the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best PhD Dissertation Award. Mario received his PhD in Apr 2021 with a dissertation titled "Advances in graph signal processing: Graph filtering and network identification" (promotor: Geert Leus (SPS)).

Congratulations!

New NWO-TTW project for Geethu and Justin (SPS)

• Monday, 27 November 2023

Laser satellite communications is a promising technology to support worldwide access to telecommunications services. A major technological challenge is atmospheric turbulence impacting the propagation of the laser beams. Its effect can be mitigated by adaptive optics and geographic diversity. The DAILSCOM project aims to provide a map of the effective optical channel performance over Europe. This map is needed to design ground network technology and estimate communications service availability. Since our current understanding and ability to estimate the channel performance are limited, we will develop novel physics-informed machine learning algorithms to formulate the optical link performance map.

Project PIs are: Rudolf Saathof (AE), Justin Dauwels, Geethu Joseph, Sukanta Basu (CiTG)

Justin Dauwels IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Area Editor

• Monday, 27 November 2023

Justin Dauwels has been appointed Columns & Forums Area Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. Congratuations!

Organ-on-chip: Creating a home for human cells outside of the body

• Monday, 20 November 2023

Associate professor Massimo Mastrangeli is the embodiment of enthusiasm for scientific research. He specifically exudes passion for his own field, namely that of organs-on-chip. “What I would like people to know about this field of research? That it’s amazing!”, exclaims Massimo.

Read the full story: Organ-on-chip: Creating a home for human cells outside of the body

GuoQi Zhang, section ECTM receives prestigious NAE fellow appointment

• Friday, 10 November 2023

Four researchers (QuoQi Zhang, Arie van Deursen, Catholijn Jonker and Inald Lagendijk) from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EWI) have been named leading experts and are appointed as fellows by the Netherlands Academy of Engineering (NAE). A total of 62 fellows have been appointed, originating from the fields of technological sciences, applied research and innovation. The fellows focus on fostering an innovation climate that generates societal and economic value by providing engineering-based solutions to major societal issues while offering new business and export opportunities.

GuoQi Zhang is chair professor for the "Micro/Nanoelectronics System Integration and Reliability" at the EEMCS faculty, a member of Netherlands Academy of Engineering, and IEEE Fellow. His research interests cover multi-level heterogeneous system integration and packaging; multi-physics and multiscale modelling and optimization of micro/nanoelectronics; digital twin and designing for reliability; wide-bandgap semiconductors sensors and components; SSL technology; and their applications mainly in healthcare, energy and mobility.

Thomas Michalica wins the KWHM Young Talent graduation award for Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

• Monday, 6 November 2023

Thomas Michalica, who graduated cum laude earlier this year in the Biomedical Engineering Master at TU Delft, has been selected as the winner of the the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW) Young Talent graduation award (€ 5000) in the field of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science for his Master thesis titled "Two-photon polymerization-based 3D-multi-electrode arrays for electrical monitoring of neuronal cells". Thomas developed his work as part of the collaboration between 3mE/PME/MNE (Dr. Accardo) and EWI/ME/ECTM groups (Dr. Mastrangeli) to develop three-dimensional scaffolds supporting arrays of microelectrodes to monitor in-vitro neuronal cell cultures.

The award and diploma will be presented during a festive ceremony in the Hodshon House, Spaarne 17, Haarlem, on November 27, 2023.

Congratulations, Thomas!

Best Paper Award at the IEEE Sensors Conference 2023 in Vienna

• Friday, 3 November 2023

The MS3 group  has received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Sensors Conference 2023 in Vienna. The paper is entitled “Radar-based Continuous Human Activity Recognition with Multi-Label Classification” and is a collaboration between our MS3 group in TU Delft and the Institute of Microwaves and Photonics of the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nurnberg.

This work comes from the visit of Dr Ingrid Ullmann to the MS3 group a few months ago, where an interesting collaboration has started on the topics of radar sensing for healthcare applications and indoor monitoring. Special thanks to Ingrid for representing the team at the conference and we look forward to new outcomes from this exciting collaboration.

Andrew Webb wins Huibregtsen Award for Affordable MRI Scanners

• Tuesday, 31 October 2023

High field MRI expert, Professor Andrew Webb of the Microelectronics department, and his Ugandan collaborator, Johnes Obungoloch, have been awarded the 2023 Huibregtsen Prize. Their notable achievement is the creation of an affordable, portable, and long-lasting MRI device tailored for brain imaging in developing nations.

Webb's team introduced a 'low-field MRI scanner' that boasts ease of transportation, maintenance, and ecological sustainability. Ever better, Webb’s new device is priced at just 1% of the typical MRI system. The brain scans generated by their MRI are instrumental in diagnosing curable diseases in underdeveloped regions, with the first model already operational in Uganda.

Highlighting its distinctive nature, the jury commended the initiative for merging top-tier technology development with suitability for developing regions. They also lauded the emphasis on knowledge dissemination and instruction.

The Huibregtsen Prize, founded in 2005 by The Evening of Science & Society Foundation board, is an annual award recognizing pioneering research projects with profound societal implications.
The accolade was handed over by the departing Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, Robbert Dijkgraaf, on 9 October at Pieterskerk, Leiden. Professor Webb was granted a €25,000 check and a bronze artwork from Wil van der Laan. Meanwhile, Obungoloch tuned into the event via a live stream from Uganda. In addition to the monetary prize and artwork, the duo also earned a workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden.

Model-Driven Decisions Lab initiated

• Friday, 29 September 2023

On 28 September, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the TU Delft and the national police, to collaborate on research around safety and security, and forensic research. Part of this initiative will be a new research lab, the "Model-Driven Decisions Lab". This lab will start up with 5 PhD positions. Scientific director is Justin Dauwels (SPS).

Open technology platforms for organ-on-chip: Moore4Medical reaches a successful conclusion

• Thursday, 28 September 2023

After the successful final review in Maastricht (NL) on September 28, 2023, the 3-year KDT-JU European project Moore4Medical has reached its very successful conclusion. Under the expert leadership of Sieger Swaving, Ronald Dekker and Erik van den Zeijden (Philips), the 68 consortium partners of Moore4Medical have convincingly showed how open technology platforms can be beneficially deployed to advance multiple biomedical domains, including implantable devices, ultrasound monitoring, drug attrition, surgical devices, and not least organ-on-chip.

With the contribution of 24 European partners – including TU Delft (WP leader), Micronit, BI/OND, Besi, TNO/Holst Centre, TU Eindhoven and Philips from the Netherlands – the second work package of Moore4Medical led by Massimo Mastrangeli (ECTM) specifically developed three open technology platforms for organs-on-chip: the Smart Multi-Well Plate (SMWP), the High-Definition electro-Physiology Plate (HD e-Phys) and the Smart (multi-well plate) Lid. The platforms were developed from design and architecture through implementation, fabrication and assembly, to biological validation in relevant settings. They embody recommendations from the European organ-on-chip roadmap for ease of use, standardization and industrially-scalable manufacturing. The SMWP in particular captures the power of organ-on-chip devices under the familiar aspect of a multi-well plate (see illustration). It combines end user-defined configurability of OoC devices with fluidic autonomy afforded by onboard piezoelectric micropumps and compatibility with established laboratory workflows.

Moore4Medical has also prepared the ground for follow-up projects that can capitalize on its many achievements and insight, such as the NEXTGEN HIGH-TECH program for Biomedical technology in the Netherlands and the KDT-JU UNLOOC European project (under evaluation).

The 2022 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant awarded to dr. Karen Dowling

• Monday, 18 September 2023

Dr. Karen Dowling’s MSCA-PF was granted for her project titled “Precise X-Y-Z Readout with a micro-Magnetometer Inverted-pyramid Design (PYRAMID), ” in collaboration with Prof. dr. Kofi Mankinwa. Chip-scale magnetometers come in several flavors, the most common being silicon Hall-effect plates that integrate easily with electronics. However, these devices only detect 1D fields, are asymmetric between X-Y and Z directions, and cannot work in extreme temperatures. Karen’s goal is to leverage micromachining  to realize magnetometers with a unique "3D" microstructure that reduces the footprint and improves accuracy. This project will involve the development of the inverted pyramid device through crystallographic etching of <100> CMOS silicon to expose the <111> crystal plane at 54.7°. This enables higher angular accuracy and avoids fabrication misalignment or packaging errors. In parallel, Kofi’s group at TU Delft will develop the CMOS integrated circuit for front-end amplification and switching scheme of the sensor to detect all three components of the field from a singular device. The final year of the project will focus on combining the sensor together with the circuit in an integrated system. This enables new products for 3D navigation in autonomous microsystems such as biomedical implants, power monitoring, and nanosatellites.

EU project TeraGreen and targets Tbps energy-efficient wireless links for future 6G networks

• Friday, 15 September 2023

Nuria Llombart Juan (TSz group) got a 4-year EU project, called ‘TeraGreen and targets Tbps energy-efficient wireless links for future 6G networks’ (5 mln. Euro in total) granted. The TUD is the administrative and scientific coordinator of the project. The other partners are Ericsson, Infineon, Chalmers, Technische Universität Dresden and Cosmote.
For this purpose, TeraGreen will develop ultra wideband and low-power consumption BiCMOS transmitters and receivers integrated with lens array architectures at 300GHz, combined with baseband algorithms suitable for energy-efficient analog-to-digital conversion.  

Clementine Boutry receives ERC starting grant

• Wednesday, 6 September 2023

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the ERC Starting Grants for young researchers. Five of them are scientists from TU Delft, and one of them is Clémentine Boutry from our department (ECTM group). This European grant of €1.5 million for a five-year research programme is intended to enable individual scientists to build their own teams and conduct groundbreaking research.

Nerve-Repair2.0 - Biodegradable MEMS implants for nerve repair

Biodegradable technologies offer many advantages for the development of future medical implants, particularly in applications where they are only needed temporarily. Fabricating such devices from biodegradable materials avoids the need for a second surgery to remove the implants after their period of use.

Clementine Boutry has received an ERC Starting Grant for her project Nerve-Repair2.0, in which her team will develop biodegradable MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) implants for nerve repair, a new class of microsystems made entirely of biodegradable materials, including sensors, actuators (mechanisms that cause movement), and electrical circuits.

Each year, an estimated 300,000 cases of trauma-related peripheral nerve lesions occur in Europe. These injuries result in partial or total loss of motor, sensory and autonomic functions. For large injuries, less than 25% of patients recover proper motor function and less than 3% regain sensation. Accelerating nerve regrowth is a key factor, as the disconnected part of the nerve dies quickly after the injury. Therefore, it is truly a race against time. Dr. Boutry’s research will focus on a new therapeutic approach based on her previous Marie Curie research and on recent clinical findings: the mechanical stimulation of peripheral nerves to accelerate their regrowth. The Nerve-Repair2.0 project will focus on two different medical implants: 1) a first implant providing wireless cyclic mechanical stimulation to the severed nerve, 2) a second implant with an implantable biodegradable MEMS micropump applying constant traction, with the corresponding biodegradable sensors.

There are high expectations of clinical therapies for damaged nerves. The development of new functional biodegradable materials (with tailored magnetic, electrical, mechanical, and chemical properties), and customized fabrication processes in clean rooms will enable the realization of fully biodegradable microsystems, while retaining the established advantages of MEMS (small size, high precision, fast response time, low energy consumption, reliable large-scale production). Beyond neurosciences, Nerve-Repair2.0 will pave the way for other medical applications including cardiac diseases, with the objective to address crucial societal challenges that could not be solved otherwise.

Jointly-organized conference, University Bulgaria en TU Delft

• Tuesday, 29 August 2023

From September 13-15 2023, the XXXII International Conference on Electronics will be organised in Bulgaria, Sozopol. Prof. Gerard Meijer (TUD, EI group)) is one of the honorary co-chairs, Assoc. Prof. Stoyan Nihtianov (TUD, group) is one of the honorary co-chairs.

For more information; 
2023 XXXII International Scientific Conference "Electronics ET2023" (tu-sofia.bg)

Charlotte Frenkel (EI group) receives Veni grant

• Monday, 14 August 2023

Brain-inspired smart devices that can continuously learn from their environment

While smart devices outline strong promises ranging from productivity gains in industry to smart cities and health-monitoring wearables, there is still one major hurdle hindering their successful deployment: long-term robustness. Indeed, once deployed, smart devices are currently unable to autonomously adapt to changes in their environments, new user features, and evolving task requirements. This implies either electronic waste through device replacement, or increased battery drain and maintenance cost for frequent over-the-air device updates. This project will overcome this hurdle by merging the latest neuroscience and machine-learning research in continual learning to endow smart devices with low-power long-term autonomous adaptation.

Six promising young EEMCS researchers receive Veni grant (tudelft.nl)

Second place Best Student Paper Award at IMS-2023 for Lennart de Jong

• Tuesday, 27 June 2023

At the 2023 International Microwave Symposium (IMS), former EWI/QuTech student Lennart de Jong won second place for the Best Student Paper Award. His paper is the main result of Lennart’s MSc graduation project, which was supported in part by Intel Corporation and in part by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research under a Veni Program.

This paper describes a clock data recovery (CDR) architecture demonstrating a low recovered clock jitter and high jitter tolerance thanks to incorporating a complementary charge sampling phase detector and clock alignment loop. As the first cryo-CMOS CDR, it enables the required data communication between classical and quantum processors in future large-scale quantum computers. The other co-authors are Joachim I. Bas, Jiang Gong, Fabio Sebastiano, and Masoud Babaie. The paper can be found here.

About the conference:

Since 1952, the IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) has been the world’s foremost conference for technologists involved in all aspects of microwave theory and practice, encompassing everything from advances in CAD, modeling, EM simulation, to systems, including the latest RFIC, MIC, MEMS, and filter technologies. The IMS includes technical and interactive sessions, exhibits, student competitions, panels, workshops, tutorials, and networking events, with more than 3000 yearly attendees.

Our Paper Awarded at the IEEE MetroAeroSpace 2023

• Wednesday, 21 June 2023

We are proud to announce that our paper, "Experimental Evaluation of Radar Waveforms for Spectral Coexistence Using the PARSAX Radar", the result of our research collaboration with the team from the University of Naples “Federico II”, has been recognized as the most outstanding paper of the Special Session on Metrology for Radar Systems presented at IEEE MetroAeroSpace 2023 (the award has been sponsored by MDPI Remote Sensing Journal). The paper was acknowledged for its experimental demonstration of radar operability in spectrally dense environments through innovative waveform design.

The award recognition will soon be posted on the official conference website.

IEEE SPS Best Thesis Award for Geethu Joseph

• Wednesday, 14 June 2023

Geethu Joseph received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best PhD Thesis Award at ICASSP'23. Annually, there are 2 such awards. The 2nd award went to Elvin Isufi, former PhD student of Geert Leus. Congratulations to both!

These awards were installed 3 years ago; until now, there have been 3 recipients.

Best ESSCIRC Paper Award for EI student

• Friday, 19 May 2023

At the 2023 European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC), former EI student Shubham Mehrotra will receive the 2022 Best ESSCIRC Paper Award for the paper entitled “A 590 µW, 106.6 dB SNDR, 24 kHz BW Continuous-Time Zoom ADC with a Noise-Shaping 4-Bit SAR ADC”. The paper describes the design of a high-performance analog-to-digital converter for audio applications. This was the main result of his M.Sc. graduation project, which was done in collaboration with NXP Semiconductors. The other co-authors are E. Eland, S. Karmakar, A. Liu, B. Gonen, M. Bolatkale, R. van Veldhoven and K. Makinwa. The paper can be found at https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.tudelft.idm.oclc.org/document/9911295

Opening ceremony of the EmC XG Labs

• Monday, 15 May 2023

Barbara McCune, wife of late Earl McCune, and Lucas van Vliet, Dean of the EEMCS Faculty, inaugurated the Earl McCune XG Labs on April 17th, 2023. Many people attended the ceremony, both from the Microelectronics department as well as external partners such as TNO, Nokia, Rohde&Schwarz, BSW...

The EmC XG Labs receives its name from Prof. Earl McCune (EmC), who enabled the neXt Generation (XG) communication and sensing efforts at TU Delft thanks to his great enthusiasm, his vast amount of knowledge and his warm personality.

The EmC XG Labs consist of a cluster of state-of-the-art microwave laboratories, covering the frequency spectrum from 30 kHz to 500 GHz, able to perform measurements on packaged, on-wafer and over-the-air devices and systems, providing an excellent frame for students, scholars and faculty members to carry out their research.

TU Delta: Millions for TU Delft-led radar project

• Monday, 15 May 2023

The TU Delft-led PHARA consortium will receive millions of euros in funding from NWO. The researchers are developing a new type of radar that can observe the entire sky in a few seconds, to study how particles grow in clouds and rainfall, and to observe large movements of weather fronts. The transportable radar should contribute to climate and atmospheric research, more accurate weather forecasts, and further innovations in radar technology.

NWO is putting a total of EUR 22.7 million into seven projects in which scientists from all over the Netherlands are developing high-quality research equipment, data collection, and software. The contribution ranges from 2.3 to 4.7 million euros per project.

With the money, the research funder wants to encourage scientists to work together to keep the Netherlands‘ scientific infrastructure up to date. According to NWO president Marcel Levi, the seven awarded projects enable new research that has great added value for society. As recently as February, NWO together with the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science awarded 140 million euros from the 'national roadmap’ for exceptionally large research equipment and databases. (HOP, HC)

Additional information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVORUxABiQ

SAFE/ProRISC conference 2023 in Delft

• Monday, 1 May 2023

On 10-11 July 2023 we have the SAFE/ProRISC conference in Delft. This is an annual conference rotating around the TU's in The Netherlands.

SAFE is dedicated to devices and technology, and ProRISC to circuits and systems. You can find more information on the website:

https://www.tudelft.nl/prorisc-safe

For PhD students, this is a great opportunity to meet colleagues from the other TU's, and also have fun. We only require an abstract and poster, so there is no problem with prior publication if you want to present the work at an international conference.

CMOS Temperature Sensor highlighted in Nature Electronics

• Wednesday, 26 April 2023

A CMOS temperature sensor developed by Nandor Toth and colleagues at the Electronic Instrumentation lab was featured as a Research Highlight in the March issue of Nature Electronics. As described in a paper published at the top-ranked International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the sensor is based on the Continuous-Time readout of BJTs in the current domain, as well as a novel resistor-mismatch calibration scheme. As a result of these techniques, the sensor simultaneously achieves high energy-efficiency and high accuracy (less than 0.1°C error) over a wide temperature range (-55°C to 125°C). These features make it well suited for use in applications ranging from automotive to biomedical.

Nandor Toth is a PhD student at the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory, led by Professor Kofi Makinwa. His research focuses are the high-precision readout of both BJT- and Thermal-Diffusivity based temperature sensors. The co-authors, Sining Pan, Zhong Tang, and Teruki Someya, are previous Postdocs at the same Laboratory, currently working in China and Japan.

Assistant professor Raj Rajan appointed secretary of "De Nederlandse Vereniging voor Ruimtevaart" (Netherlands Space Society)

• Wednesday, 19 April 2023

NVR has approximately 1200 members. They include aerospace professionals, students, and people with a personal interest. As of today, the association has been around for over 70 years. Yet, it remains in touch with the newest Dutch and international developments surrounding space and astronautics. The NVR aims to be an association for all ages, and the network for anyone excited by modern aerospace and space travel.

Raj Rajan has joined the Board of NVR as Secretary, starting Feb 2023.

Dr. Chang Gao Honored as an MIT Innovator Under 35 Europe 2023

• Thursday, 6 April 2023

We are delighted to share that Dr. Chang Gao, a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Department of Microelectronics, has been distinguished as an MIT Innovator Under 35. This eminent acknowledgment highlights Gao's extraordinary accomplishments in creating energy-conserving artificial intelligence (AI) computation that retains accuracy. His inventive work has empowered wearable and portable devices and enduring robotic prosthesis control to offer round-the-clock monitoring for better health results and an improved patient experience.

Dr. Gao's methodology strays from conventional neural network models, which may be biologically precise but also expensive and less efficient for real-world applications. Instead, he employs neuromorphic principles, sparse neuron firing, and connectivity to reshape deep recurrent neural networks into more budget-friendly versions. His research effectively connects artificial neural networks with spiking neural networks, speeding up computation while preserving competitive accuracy for real-world tasks.

Dr. Gao's exceptional work has garnered him numerous awards, such as the Best Paper Award at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems, co-recipient of the 2020 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering; the 2022 Mahowald Early Career Award for Neuromorphic Engineering; and the 2022 Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship for his project on portable radar systems driven by energy-conscious AI accelerators.

Graphene electrodes developed by ME researchers on Neurotech reports

• Wednesday, 5 April 2023

The article "Multilayer CVD graphene electrodes using a transfer-free process for the next generation of optically transparent and MRI-compatible neural interfaces", published in Microsystems & Nanoengineering (Nature), is featured in the February 2023 issue of Neurotech Reports. 

The electrodes in the study were fabricated at the Else Kooi Lab and are the product of a longstanding collaboration between the groups of Sten Vollebregt and Vasso Giagka. The article was selected to be featured on the journal's webpage in October 2022.

Webinar with Dr. Vasso Giagka "Translational Research for Neural Implants"

• Tuesday, 4 April 2023

This webinar will be hosted live and available on-demand

Monday, May 8, 2023, at 17:00

Implantable neurotechnologies already treat various disorders, including epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, depression, and pain. As researchers develop new materials and technologies, the therapeutic potential of neural implants for other diseases and conditions grows. 

In this webinar brought to you by The Scientist, John Donoghue and Vasiliki (Vasso) Giagka will present their latest findings on applying clinical and technical developments to create new implantable devices for treating neurological disorders. 

Topics to be covered 

• Successes, challenges, and opportunities for brain computer interfaces (BCIs)
  • Accomplishments in human implantable BCIs over the last decades
  • Current capabilities for movement and communication
  • Challenges for clinically useful BCIs as medical devices
• Miniaturized and selective active neural interfaces
  • Active neural implants for bioelectronic medicine
  • Miniaturization of active neural implants
  • Multimodal neural interfaces

Register through the link

Andrea Neto wins Best Paper Award at EuCAP 2023

• Monday, 3 April 2023

Andrea Neto was awarded with the Best Electromagnetics Award at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation 2023, with the Paper:

“A Classical Electromagnetic Model for Thermal Emission from Ohmic Materials”, Andrea Neto (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands). 

The conference hosted 1700 attendees and included 1100 papers.

Second Sensor Interfaces Meeting (SIM) on May 8-9, 2023, at ASML

• Monday, 3 April 2023

After the very successful inaugural SIM’22 we are thrilled to present to you again the opportunity to listen to and interact with top experts in the field of sensor interfaces. This time you shall have one more opportunity: to discuss the achievement of your colleagues. Next to the keynote talks, panel sessions and exhibitors, SIM’23 will host poster sessions from both academia and industry. SIM’23 is sponsored by the IEEE Sensors Council and will take place on 8 and 9 May 2023, in the same modern venue used by SIM’22, generously offered by the hi-tech company ASML in Veldhoven, the Netherlands.

Please, reserve the dates 8 and 9 May 2023 in your calendar.

Maybe you are already asking yourself why a meeting on sensors is hosted for a second time in industrial environment, by a machine builder like ASML? This is a great question, the answer of which you will find if you join us and take a closer look at one of the leading hi-tech companies in Europe and the world, and interact with your colleagues from ASML attending SIM’23.

https://2023.ieee-sim.org

Yannick Hopf receives SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award

• Monday, 6 March 2023

At the 2023 International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC), Yannick Hopf was awarded a Predoctoral Achievement Award from the IEEE Solid-State Circuit Society (SSCS). ISSCC is the leading conference for solid-state circuits and took place on 19 – 23 February. The Predoctoral Achievement Award is the highest honor the society bestows upon student members and awarded to promising graduate students based on their academic record.

In the course of his PhD, Yannick has worked on ASICs for 3D ultrasound imaging of the heart. Two prototypes have been successfully developed and evaluated for the use in intra-cardiac catheters. The work has led to innovations in several circuit blocks as well as on the system level. The final design is the first to combine high-voltage transmitters, analog front-ends, micro-beamforming, digitization, datalinks and transducers, enabling high-frame-rate 3D imaging.

Yannick works at the Smart Ultrasound group at the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory, under supervision of Dr. Ir. Michiel Pertijs, in close collaboration with the Acoustical Wavefield Imaging group at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, and the Biomedical Engineering group at Erasmus MC. Yannick's work is part of the 3D-ICE project.

IEEE SPS Student Scholarship Program

• Thursday, 2 March 2023

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) awards scholarships of up to a total of US$7,000 for up to three years of consecutive support to students who have expressed interest and commitment to pursuing signal processing education and real-world career experiences.

Students and graduate students from all 10 IEEE Regions are encouraged to apply!

This is not a full scholarship but rather a supplementary fund in order to support the signal processing field.  Apply before 30 June 2023.

Prof. Kofi Makinwa top contributor ' chip olympics', ISSCC

• Tuesday, 21 February 2023

At the 70^th anniversary of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), often known as the “chip Olympics”, Prof. Kofi Makinwa is recognized as its top contributor. Since 2002, he has had a total of 77 papers accepted, and this year, he and his students contributed 8 papers – the best result ever for the TU Delft.

About ISCC

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference is the foremost global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip. The Conference offers a unique opportunity for engineers working at the cutting edge of IC design and application to maintain technical currency, and to network with leading experts.

Squeaking, humming, buzzing. The discomfort of tinnitus

• Wednesday, 8 February 2023

A few years ago, the Bioelectronics group (Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science) joined an international project on tinnitus called Tinnitus House. Delta phoned TU Delft principal investigator Professor Wouter Serdijn to hear about the progress.

Sensors and CMOS Interface Electronics (SCIE) Course

• Wednesday, 8 February 2023

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. See: Sensors and CMOS Interface Electronics

The course will take place online, on 8 days between March 27 and April 6, 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, and implantable medical devices.

MSc Market

• Wednesday, 8 February 2023

Dear MSc Students,

We hope that you have enjoyed your first semester in the Microelectronics Track. But time goes fast when you are having fun, and before you know it you will have to choose a thesis topic!

To help you choose, on February 13^th the Electronic Instrumentation Lab will be organizing an MSc Market with pizza and drinks! Our staff will be present to discuss a number of available master thesis projects, as well as a brand new scholarship opportunity!

You will be able to meet with EI staff and discover projects that match your interests.

Our team of 10 PI’s have activities ranging from analog integrated circuits, power management, neuromorphic computing, and all the way to microfabrication of novel sensors. To give you an idea about the possibilities, an overview of Master thesis topics from the 2021-2022 academic year can be found online https://ei.et.tudelft.nl/Education/mscprojects.php

For detailed questions on your study program please contact dr. Kofi Makinwa. [email protected]

If you want to join the MSc Market, please send an email to [email protected]

We are looking forward to meeting you on February 13^th from 16:00-18:00 in the social room on the 15^th floor.

Sincerely yours,

The Staff of Electronic Instrumentation

Kick-off AGRARSENSE project

• Wednesday, 1 February 2023

A new project takes agricultural and forestry related productivity to the next level. The consortium, which includes TUDelft, will develop European state-of-the-art technologies in electronic components and systems for future needs, building European resilience in critical sectors and strongly contribute to sustainability targets and climate change mitigation.

Adequate food and its security is a global challenge, impacted by rapidly compounding effects of climate change, supply chains, human labour shortage and political and military aggression to name a few. We need transparent and improved productivity of agriculture and forestry and easy access to state-of-the-art technological innovation and automation. Also, more sustainable fertilizers and irrigation use is additionally key to saving the climate. Hence, European resilience calls for efficient technological solutions ranging from hardware to holistic data management.

Focus on food security, improved productivity of agriculture and forestry

The AGRARSENSE project, launched in January 2023, responds to these needs by developing technologies for seven different use cases that represent seven different angles on today’s European agriculture and forestry: Greenhouses, vertical farming, precision viticulture, agriculture robotics, forestry machinery and optimal soil management and fertilization as well as agriculture related water management. The electronics components and systems related technology R&D includes e.g., plant, soil, and water sensors and related integration, as well as software, connectivity, and data management solutions. Safety, security, and reliability R&D as well as autonomous movement and robotics platforms pave the way to full commercial utilization of the project outcomes.
 

AGRARSENSE brings together a total of 52 partners from 15 EU countries

Within the Dutch-led Greenhouse use case and with the other European partners, the TUDelft will focus on two technology development activities. One is the development of a 2D material-based VOC sensor that aims at sniffing out plant diseases to enable better prediction of crop health. This research, led by Sten Vollebregt, will focus both on the development of the sensor platform and the packaging of the sensor to result in a reliable demonstrator. The second activity, led by Qinwen Fan, will focus on developing power-efficient electronic drivers that will be used in, among others, greenhouse robotics.

Chang Gao receives the Mahowald Early Career Award for Neuromorphic Engineering

• Monday, 16 January 2023

The MECA jury has awarded the 2022 Mahowald Early Career Award to Chang Gao (Assistant Professor in ELCA) for the project "Accelerating Recurrent Neural Networks with Neuromorphic Principles." The project introduces efficient computing using the neuromorphic principles of spatial and temporal sparsity, leading to an energy-efficient accelerator for edge RNN computing. Gao's accomplishments have the potential to revolutionize applications in healthcare, wearables, and intelligent biomedical implants.

The Mahowald Early Career Award (MECA) recognizes an exceptionally talented student, as Misha Mahowald was. The Award is made for an innovative project that addresses a significant problem in neuromorphic engineering or related problems in neuroscience and neural computation. In their submission, candidates must make a convincing case for why their project fulfills this criterion.

Gao developed this work during his Ph.D. with the Sensors Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. He is now a tenure-track assistant professor at TU Delft, where he has started a lab entitled "Efficient circuits & systems for Machine Intelligence" (EMI). Gao's Google scholar profile provides links to his work.

CAS becomes SPS

• Wednesday, 28 December 2022

The Circuits and Systems (CAS) group was formed over 20 years ago out of a merger of the Electronic Techiques and the Network Theory group. The resulting group had a focus on system theory and digital VLSI design, in particular design and verification tools.

Over these years, the signal processing part of the group has grown, to a point where now it is time to change our name. Starting from 1 January 2023, the group is called Signal Processing Systems (SPS). Happy New Year!

NWO OTP Award SMARTER: Strategic Monitoring of Atmospheric Threats using Enhanced Radar

• Thursday, 15 December 2022

TU Delft researchers dr. Francesco Fioranelli (ME-MS3) and dr. Marc Schleiss (CITG-GRS) receive NWO OTP funding for a four year research on strategic monitoring of atmospheric threats.
Atmospheric threats such as heavy rain and hail, are responsible for millions of damages in the Netherlands every year. Weather radars are essential tools to study the atmosphere, monitor threats, and issue early warnings for high impact events. The frequency of a radar and its configuration determine what type of weather phenomena can be measured, at which resolution and accuracy. To maximize coverage while simultaneously gathering lots of details about the small-scale structure and dynamics of local rain/hail events, different types of radars can be combined into larger networks. The crucial piece that is missing is a ‘central control unit’ for coordinating the efforts of each radar in the network.

In the project SMARTER Francesco and Marc with their teams will develop a new AI-based control unit for maximizing the collaboration between individual radars in a network and improve the detection/prediction of localized, rapidly developing atmospheric threats while keeping the large-scale overview of the situation. For a first proof of concept, the focus will be on detecting heavy rain and hail in the Greater Rotterdam area, which is of major interest for the horticultural industry and the Dutch economy in general. However, the novel adaptation and decision-making tool will be sufficiently general to be transferable to other networks outside the Netherlands and other targets such as insects, birds and aircrafts.

This project is executed in collaboration with the following partners: Glastuinbouw Nederland, Achmea Agro, KNMI, SkyEcho, Leonardo, RPG and HKV.

Nature paper for Gerard Janssen

• Thursday, 17 November 2022

GPS signals are not available everywhere. Especially in urban environments, the satellites may be blocked or the signals experience multipath, leading to timing errors and inaccurate positions in areas where accuracy matters most.

In the SuperGPS project of Gerard Janssen e.a., it is shown how relatively inaccurate wireless transceivers can be networked; the use of wideband signals and carrier phase recovery techniques results in a localization accuracy at decimeter-scale or better; two orders of magnitude better than GPS in certain situations. The perspective is that such transceivers can be embedded in 4G/5G mobile communication networks (the employed protocols are compatible), such that it is relatively inexpensive to roll out this solution.

In the Nov issue of Nature, the project partners describe experimental results acquired on a testbed at The Green Village at TU Delft. An associated article provides an introduction and a perspective. The topic was also covered by IEEE Spectrum.

Best Student Paper Award at 2022 IEEE (ICECS) for Xinling Yue (EI group)

• Tuesday, 1 November 2022

This paper "A 2-Mode Reconfigurable SSHI Rectifier with 3.2X Lower Cold-Start Requirement for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting", by Xinling Yue and Sijun Du, proposes a 2-mode reconfigurable rectifier with low input open circuit (V_OC) for piezoelectric energy harvesting. The rectifier works as a voltage multiplier in cold state, while switches to synchronous switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) rectifier combined with a full bridge rectifier after the cold state ends, which lowers the requirement for the start-up voltage by 3.2X. This enables the energy harvester start harvesting energy at much lower excitation levels.

2022 4TU.NIRICT Community Day, November 14

• Thursday, 20 October 2022

Identified are 3 themes around which we would like to bring NIRICT researchers together to discuss and to explore per theme the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. The themes are related to the societal challenges we are currently facing and require interdisciplinary effort in order to be addressed effectively. We believe that productive discussions during the event could be instrumental in forming new research lines, but also project consortia around various national R&D investment programs addressing the knowledge and innovation agenda’s (KIAs) of the Netherlands (https://www.topsectoren.nl/missiesvoordetoekomst).

Themes of the day:
• Health and ICT People live longer, more healthcare is needed. Work pressure in healthcare is rapidly increasing. More data is collected by smart devices. How can the ICT community contribute solutions to keep our society healthy?
• Energy and ICT The current explosion of the energy prices shows that we are facing an unstable situation with respect to energy production and consumption. We produce more solar energy on one hand and consume more energy due to air conditioners and electric cars. We need smart solutions both in production and consumption. Moreover, due to its significant share in energy consumption, ICT systems from the end user devices to power-hungry data centers need to become more energy efficient.
• Agriculture and ICT We just had another summer with extreme heat waves and droughts. The climate changes we are facing have tremendous consequences for agriculture. The population is growing and the pressure on nature is increasing. What smart solutions do we see to deal with the challenges to keep our planet healthy and at the same time to keep the food production in line with the population growth?
The Community Day starts at 12:30hrs with a walk-in lunch. At 13:30hrs the official part will start with a number of short presentations, followed by several parallel sessions regarding the three themes of the day. You can indicate your preference on the registration form. Afterwards there will be a networking drink from 17:00-18:00hrs.

It would be great to welcome many of you on November 14th, because together we strengthen the ICT community of The Netherlands, so join us for the 4TU.NIRICT Community Day 2022, November 14, in Van der Valk Hotel Utrecht and register here by November 6, 2022.
Your data will only be used for registration and will be discarded within one week after the 4TU.NIRICT Community Day. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us: [email protected]

Sten Vollebregt wins the 2022 Micro and Nanoengineering Young Investigator Award and Lectureship

• Thursday, 29 September 2022

Honoring and Promoting a Young researcher active in the fields of Nanofabrication and Nanotechnology for Life Sciences, Physics, Chemistry and Environmental Sciences.

Micro and Nano Engineering (MNE) is an open access, multidisciplinary journal which crosses boundaries from nano to micro to bio, and from science to technologies. The journal focuses on micro-/nano engineering, fabrication and integration of functional nanostructures and surfaces towards intelligent nanomanufacturing; devices and bio-microsystems for medicine, life sciences, chemistry, environmental sciences, and agro-food; and devices and microsystems for physical applications. 

After detailed evaluation of the high level of achievements of all candidates, the committee decided to present the award to: Dr. Sten Vollebregt from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

“for outstanding contributions to reproducible wafer-scale microfabrication with carbon-based materials”.

The Lectureship was presented at MNE2022 Conference at the 23rd pf September 2022 in Leuven, Belgium (www.mne2022.org).

First Prize in Young Scientists Contest at the 2022 International Radar Symposium in Gdansk, Poland

• Friday, 16 September 2022

The MS3 group is glad to inform you that during the 10th MICROWAVE & RADAR WEEK in Gdansk, Poland our former MSc student Detmer Bosma won the First Prize in the Young Scientists Contest at the 2022 International Radar Symposium with the article "Polarimetric Signatures on Moving Automotive Vehicles Based on the H/A/α-Decomposition" and an excellent presentation about the main results of his MSc thesis project, which were done under the supervision of dr. O. Krasnov and prof. A. Yarovoy, and successfully defended in November 2021 !!!

Congratulations, Detmer!

Sounds good: treating depression with ultrasound

• Wednesday, 14 September 2022

Physicians are desperate to find new and effective treatment options for chronic pain and depression. Tiago Costa is developing a novel targeted neuro-modulation treatment for depression, using focused ultrasound. His goal is to treat only brain areas that need attention, leaving other parts of the brain undisturbed.

Vasso Giagka on the Neural Implant Podcast

• Wednesday, 14 September 2022

Neural Implant podcast - the people behind Brain-Machine Interface revolutions: Vasiliki Giagka on Neural Interface Packaging and why it's the most important

Interview Jochem Baselmans

• Thursday, 1 September 2022

Link to the interview

Researchers have succeeded in making a far-infrared detector so sensitive that we will soon be able to look back even further than we can with current telescopes.

Jochem Baselmans, professor at TU Delft and senior researcher at SRON, explains why the interdisciplinary project took 17 years, what exactly they want to look at with the detector and why they are now waiting for a super-cold telescope.

Read more: Far infrared detector KID achieves highest possible sensitivity .

NL-JP Joint Seminar in Radar Sensing for Human Health Monitoring

• Friday, 26 August 2022

A joint seminar is organised on September 1-2 in our faculty by researchers in the MS3 group with colleagues from the Kyoto University and Osaka University.

This joint seminar, entitled the Nederland-Japan Joint Initiative for the Innovation in Radar Sensing for Human Health Monitoring, is supported by NWO and the JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science) under the joint Cooperation Seminars Scheme, with a grant awarded to Dr Francesco Fioranelli (TUD) and Prof Takuya Sakamoto (Kyoto University), and is also supported by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS).

The purpose of the joint seminar is to bring together researchers from Dutch and Japanese institutions and foster cooperation around the broad topic of contactless sensing and monitoring technologies for human healthcare. Specifically, contactless sensing and monitoring technologies of our interest are based on radar systems employing radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic (EM) waves to measure physiological phenomena of interest related to human healthcare, including but not limited to patterns of activities of daily living, quality of walking gait, tremors in limbs, and vital signs such as respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure and arterial pulse.

The seminar will be held at the EWI faculty, with speakers from TU Delft (MS3 and CAS groups of our department), Kyoto and Osaka Universities, KU Leuven, as well as contributions from IMEC, Infineon and NXP Semiconductors, amongst others.

A detailed programme of the seminar can be found here: https://surfdrive.surf.nl/files/index.php/s/zPFaO4aXrq0WwT3

Anyone is welcome to attend and hybrid participation via Zoom is also possible, using the following link: https://tudelft.zoom.us/j/94885113261?pwd=VFFxRGFDak40eEdkcXR3cTloR0dBQT09

New colleaugues

• Monday, 8 August 2022

Charlotte Frenkel

Charlotte joined the Electronic Instrumentation group as an assistant professor in July.
Before that, she was a postdoctoral researcher in UZH/ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and she received her PhD from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium, in January 2020.
She merges insight from neuroscience and machine learning into neuromorphic digital integrated circuits for smart sensors and adaptive edge computing.

Room HB 15.310; [email protected].

Chang Gao

Dr. Chang Gao obtained his Ph.D. degree with distinction from the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI), University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, in December 2021. His Ph.D. thesis was about designing energy-efficient accelerators of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for real-time inference. In August 2022, he joined TU Delft as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Electronic Circuits and Architectures (ELCA) group, Department of Microelectronics. His research interest is designing energy-efficient digital AI hardware for edge computing, emphasizing ultrahigh-speed communication, video/audio processing, robotics, and biomedical applications. He is also an enthusiast of neuromorphic computing. He is spending efforts to bridge the gap between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and spiking neural networks (SNNs) by applying brain-inspired neuromorphic principles to massively accelerate the computation of state-of-the-art deep neural network (DNN) architectures while maintaining competitive accuracy on real-world tasks. In the future, these highly optimized AI algorithms and energy-efficient hardware could be implemented in miniaturized smart Internet-of-things (IoT) devices with the always-on capability to make our life more convenient.

HB 19.280, [email protected] 

Karen Dowling

Dr. Karen Dowling grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and obtained her PhD in EE from Stanford University in California, USA. Her PhD focused on creating high quality magnetometers for extreme environments using Gallium Nitride, as well as some micromachining techniques in Silicon Carbide, both wide bandgap semiconductors. Before joining TU Delft, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), expanding her work to RF opto-electronic power devices known as photo-semiconductor switches. In the Department of Microelectronics at TU Delft, Dr. Dowling is excited to combine both her love of sensors for harsh environments with optically coupled conduction mechanisms to open new avenues for high performing microsensors across the spectrum from fundamental research to device development and (someday) deployment.

HB 15.290, [email protected] 

Nicolas Chauvaux

Nicolas joined the Department of Microelectronics in July, section Electronic Instrumentation. His work, under the supervision of Dr. Frenkel, will focus on in-memory computing (IMC) and its integration at the system level. Achieving an ultra-low-latency architecture for spiking neural network (SNN) inference will be one goal of the research.

Nicolas obtained his  M.Sc degree from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium, in 2021, during which he already worked on IMC applied to SNNs for my M.Sc thesis. He also has a strong interest in system-level performance analysis, asynchronous circuits, and integrated circuit design.

[email protected] room HB 15.240.

New NWO project: GRASPA

• Friday, 17 June 2022

Six research projects receive funding within the Open Technology Programme (OTP) this month. The projects receive a total of about 4 million euros from NWO; organisations involved in the research projects invest a total of 1.3 million euros. Among these 6 projects is a project from prof. Geert Leus from the CAS group; Graph Signal Processing in Action (GraSPA).

Graph signal processing (GSP) is the exciting research field that extends concepts from traditional signal processing to signals living in an irregular domain that can be characterized through a graph. GSP is extremely promising for applications in transportation networks, smart grid, wireless communications, social networks, brain science and recommender systems, to name a few. This project focuses on the non-trivial extension of GSP to time-varying or dynamic networks, where either the connections or the nodes can change. We will develop innovative tools to estimate such time-varying graphs from data and devise new graph filtering schemes for denoising, interpolation, and prediction. The developed techniques will be applied to brain activity monitoring, which is crucial to understand the working of the brain, as well as recommender systems, which are omnipresent in our daily lives.

More information: Four million euro for six technological research projects | NWO

Gravity grant awarded to research on brain interactions

• Tuesday, 3 May 2022

The goal of this research is to develop principles, devices and methods to take these interactions into account and thus understand more about brain disorders, as well as moods, emotions and compulsions.

The research project is called 'The Dutch Brain Interfaces Initiative' and is led by researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen. TU Delft will contribute to the development of computer models, and microfabrication technology for the development and validation of closed-loop control for neural prostheses. These prostheses can give us back lost senses and control, enabling us to bypass injuries and treat an unprecedented range of brain disorders, restoring a better quality of life for deaf, blind, paralyzed and mentally ill people. 

Ultimate applications of the multi-year research include the use of Deep Brain Stimulation on patients with motor and psychiatric disorders, the development of Brain-Computer interfaces that enable communication for people who cannot speak and the deployment of visual implants for the visually impaired and blind. Frans van der Helm and Wouter Serdijn are the leaders of the Delft research project. Frans van der Helm: 'The human brain is the ultimate technical challenge for engineers. It is great to be able to use our technical background and technical capabilities to contribute to a better understanding of, and better interaction with, the human brain.'

The Dutch Brain Interfaces Initiative is the combination of a platform with computer, software and hardware elements, aimed at facilitating closed-loop manipulations in the long term, and brain monitoring in a naturalistic environment, with a neuroscience research program with 3 main objectives: to increase the understanding of the general principles of brain dynamics, to develop strategies to influence, restore or improve those dynamics and the cognitive function they support, and to understand the neural basis of behavior under naturalistic conditions.

VENI granted for Miniature and Sustainable Internet-of-Things

• Friday, 29 April 2022

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a Veni grant worth 280,000 euros to Sijun Du, who is at the first place in ranking out of 169 pre-proposal applicants and 71 full-proposal applicants at the Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES) domain. Sijun Du is an assistant professor at the Electronic Instrumentation division, Department of Microelectronics. The grant provides him with the opportunity to further elaborate his own research idea on making future Internet-of-Things miniature and sustainable.

Project abstract

Making wireless sensor devices self-sustainable and small, with energy harvesting solutions and sub-mm dimensions, will be critical in future Internet-of-Things applications, e.g., in healthcare and smart-farming systems. However, current self-sustained devices are larger, with dimensions dominated by off-chip inductors. Removing these inductors can potentially decrease the system size by 99%, and pave the way to real-world implementations and commercialisation. This project proposes a new inductor-less architecture for energy harvesting systems. It achieves higher energy efficiency than conventional inductor-based systems, breaks the miniaturisation barrier, and enables fully silicon-integrated self-sustained wireless sensing devices for future Internet-of-Things.

Veni Talent Programme

Veni, together with Vidi and Vici, is part of the NWO Talent Programme (formerly: the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme). The Veni grant is one of the most prestigious grants for early-career researchers, and to be awarded is considered an important step in an academic career. NWO selects researchers on the basis of the quality of the researcher, the innovative character of the research, the expected scientific impact of the research proposal and possibilities for knowledge utilisation.

Project proposal UPSIDE, successful in the EU call EIC Pathfinder challenge

• Friday, 22 April 2022

The multi-disciplinary and international consortium led by Dr. Tiago Costa, includes ME department PIs Dr. Dante Muratore and Prof. Dr. Ir. Wouter Serdijn, and partners from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the USA. With a total budget of 4.2 M€, the consortium will use the combined expertise in bioelectronics, brain-machine interfaces, focused ultrasound, neurobiology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry to achieve a technological breakthrough towards a personalized treatment for depression.

Project description:

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading cause of disability worldwide, affecting 300 million people with a lifetime prevalence of 15%. Approximately one third of all MDD patients fail to respond to currently established treatments based on medication and psychotherapy, thus falling into the category of Treatment-Resistant Depression (TRD) patients. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (tRMS), Vagus nerve stimulation, deep brain stimulation (DBS) and transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) still show poor spatial resolution (ECT, tRMS, tFUS) or low network coverage (VNS, DBS), with average remission rates in clinical trials still lower than 30 %. Apart from the existing stimulation hurdles, reliable biomarkers for depression are needed as a diagnostic tool, and, in the case of neuromodulation-based treatments, to determine the stimulation efficacy and allow for personalized treatment. The UPSIDE project aims to overcome the limitations above by developing a hybrid epidural brain interface (EBI) for high-precision ultrasound neuromodulation (eFUS) and high-fidelity neural recording (eREC) for the personalized treatment of depression.

Happy Secretaries Day!!!

• Thursday, 21 April 2022

Our congratulations and best wishes!

Travel awards to IEEE Radar & EURAD Conferences, for MS3 PhD's

• Tuesday, 12 April 2022

With the end of the COVID-19 related restrictions, it has been a pleasure to travel again to attend three top scientific conferences in the area of radar, microwave, & antenna research, specifically the EUCAP 2022 (European Conference on Antennas and Propagation) in Madrid, the IEEE Radar Conference 2022 in New York City, and the EuRAD 2021 (European Radar Conference) in London.

Members of the MS3 group presented a total of 18 papers across these 3 conferences, with topics ranging from antenna design to healthcare applications of radar, from radar signal processing to innovative techniques for automotive radar. Special congratulations to PhD candidates Ronny Gündel and Sen Yuan for being awarded Student Travel Awards to attend the IEEE Radar Conference and EuRAD, respectively, and to PhD candidate Ignacio Roldan for runner-up placement in the best paper award at EuRAD (among the best 3 papers at the conference) for his work on enhancing angular resolution of automotive radar via neural networks. Onwards and upwards to the next conference!

EuCAP 2022 best paper awarded to TS & ELCA Group

• Tuesday, 12 April 2022

At the recent European Conference on Antennas and Propagation, authors Nick van Rooijen, Maria Alonso-delPino, Marco Spirito and Nuria Llombart have received the Best Theory and Design Antenna Paper award for their work entitled; Core-Shell Leaky-Wave Lens Antenna for 150GHz Fly’s Eye Communication Systems’

Their contribution describes a scalable novel antenna architecture suitable for high frequency wireless links. This antenna has an outer ‘shell’ lens for large gain, and an inner ‘core’ lens for improved Front-End integration and increased degrees of freedom. EuCAP is Europe’s largest and most significant antennas and propagation conference, attracting more than 1400 participants from academia and industry from all over the world.

Board of Delft Space institute awarded Matus Rybak a DSI Seed Grant

• Wednesday, 30 March 2022

Research

Observing the Universe at sub-mm wavelengths (0.1-1.0 mm) opens doors to a wide range of phenomena: from the leftover radiation from the Big Bang to distant galaxies, formation of stars and planets, to supermassive black holes. Unfortunately, spectroscopy at sub-mm wavelengths is still severely limited by narrow bandwidths of heterodyne receivers. This makes spectroscopic observations very time-consuming.

With the Delft Space Institute Seed Grant, a new ultra-wideband spectrometer DESHIMA on the ASTE telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile is installed. Developed at EEMCS, DESHIMA uses ground-breaking superconducting technology to measure the spectra between 220 and 440 GHz. Though based on the Earth, DESHIMA is a key technology demonstrator for instruments for future space missions. Matus will also set up a station to remotely control the telescope from the EEMCS and process the DESHIMA data in-house: an excellent opportunity for students from EEMCS to get involved in astrophysical observations!

Link to DESHIMA webpage: http://deshima.ewi.tudelft.nl/

2021-2022 IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award

• Wednesday, 23 March 2022

A small number of promising graduate students receive the IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award each year. Masoud Pashaeifar, our 4th-year Ph.D. student, is awarded this prestigious SSCC recognition in this year's edition. At ELCA, we are delighted and proud of Masoud. We wish him the best of luck for the rest of his Ph.D. journey. 

New project granted to the ELCA and MS3 groups

• Wednesday, 23 March 2022

A new project sponsored by NXP and TKI entitled "Distributed High-Resolution Automotive Radar for Autonomous and Secure Mobility (DiRAc)" is granted to the ELCA and MS3 groups of our department.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are transforming cars into securely-connected, highly-autonomous vehicles with the capability of sensing the environment, thinking, and taking adequate decisions in a huge number of traffic conditions. Enabling components of ADAS are radar transceivers permanently measuring the range, angle, and velocity of objects around the vehicle. The penetration of radars into urban scenarios requires extremely high angular resolution to separate pedestrians, bicycles, pets and even smaller targets.

Angular resolution is a challenge for single mmWave radars of limited aperture size. That is why in this new joint project with NXP Semiconductors we will therefore pursue a distributed, synchronized network of small aperture radar sensors in this research project.  It deals with high-resolution imaging of the environment using a moving platform, wideband mmWave signals, and multiple distributed MIMO radars with a small number of antennas. Solutions for four critical radar architectural and signal processing challenges will be pursued: Imaging topology, waveform and radar synchronization, 360 degrees image focusing, and bistatic signaling. Two PhD students (one at ELCA, another one at MS3) will work for this project.

NWA-ORC project "OBSeRVeD" with co-applicant Sten Vollebregt and Frans Widdershoven granted

• Wednesday, 23 March 2022

A total of 28 consortia will work in interdisciplinary teams on research that will bring both scientific and societal breakthroughs within reach. The entire knowledge chain and societal organisations, including public as well as private parties, will work closely together in these projects. The projects have received funding in the third round of the Dutch Research Agenda programme Research along Routes by Consortia (NWA-ORC).

The ME department plays a lead role in one of the funded consortia:

OBSeRVeD - Odour Based Selective Recognition of Veterinary Diseases

Coordinator: dr. ir. C.A.J. (Cas) Damen - Saxion Hogeschool
Affiliated TU Delft researchers:  dr. ir. Sten Vollebregt (WP-lead) and prof. dr. ir. Frans Widdershoven, EEMCS faculty,  dr. Monique van der Veen – AS faculty

When chickens in a farm become infected or have parasites, specific odours are produced. A cross-disciplinary team will combine innovative sensors, affinity layers, and machine learning to develop and test an electronic nose. This sensitive system can recognize a fingerprint of Volatile Organic Compounds and thus recognise specific diseases at an early stage, when (preventive) measures are most effective. In this project, veterinary health, industry, science professionals and societal organisations will collaborate towards developing a practically applicable poultry health monitoring system to improve chicken and public health, general welfare and reduce antibiotics/chemicals use and the environmental impact of livestock farming.

Lees meer: TU Delft news

Or in English on the NWO website: NWO news

An ERC for Akira Endo; a 3D vision on the universe’s structure

• Friday, 18 March 2022

To look back in time, you need to look far, far away in the universe. Conventional techniques for this are limited: they either create a flat 2D image, or focus too much on the details. Neither paint a full picture of our universe, but that is about to change. Akira Endo has received an ERC Consolidator grant for his TIFUUN project, which will create 3D maps of vast volumes of the universe. These will cover both distant places and times – more than 10 billion years to be exact! The better imagery that Akira Endo will generate could revolutionize our insights into the history of galaxies, and the formation and evolution of the so-called ‘cosmic web’.

The universe as a forest

The universe is not the same everywhere: some places such as galaxies have a higher density of matter and energy, while other places are almost void. Akira Endo: “In a sense, you can imagine the universe as a forest. Long and intricate clusters of galaxies form the trees – galaxies themselves might be the size of leaves in this metaphor – but outside of the trunk and branches, there is nothing.” Another word for this forest is the ‘cosmic web’, a visualisation of the universe where all matter hangs together in a web. Akira said that like a forest, the cosmic web is still evolving: “We want to understand its development, by looking at how it started. I hope to uncover the history of all matter, going back to the first billion years of the universe – to help us understand the evolution of galaxies and the emergence of the cosmic large-scale structure.”

Read more: An ERC for a 3D vision on the universe’s structure

Raj Thilak Rajan elected to the IAF-SCAN committee

• Wednesday, 16 March 2022

Raj Thilak Rajan was elected to the Space Communications and Navigation Committee (SCAN) of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF).

The SCAN committee is responsible, within the IAF, for all aspects of satellite-based communication and navigation systems and technology. The committee will organise the SCAN symposium at each IAC and, when appropriate, will organise specialised plenary sessions and Highlight Lectures. It will provide annual inputs to the IAF report to the United Nations.

For more information: see link.

Heart rhythm expert Natasja de Groot: ‘Every heart is different’

• Friday, 4 February 2022

The electrodes in the display cabinet show the technical developments over the last 20 years. The oldest one looks like a kind of small shower head from which four cables emerge, ending in computer mouse-sized plugs. Natasja de Groot used it during her PhD research on heart rhythm disorders in Leiden. The newest electrode is a wafer-thin strip to which three metres of multilayer flat cable are attached to read out the 192 channels simultaneously. The cable was made at TU Delft in the Bioelectronics group of Prof. Wouter Serdijn (Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science).

Full article;  Heart rhythm expert Natasja de Groot: 'Every heart is different’ (tudelft.nl)

Justin Dauwels wins the Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award

• Wednesday, 2 February 2022

A paper by Justin Dauwels (from the time he was in Singapore) has won the Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award.

The paper is “An Optimal Controller Synthesis for Longitudinal Control of Platoons with Communication Scenarios in Urban Environments and Highways”.

SAE is a foundation for automotive engineers, founded in 1904 by Henri Ford, and with 100,000+ members.

Alle-Jan van der Veen appointed IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President

• Wednesday, 26 January 2022

Alle-Jan van der Veen has been appointed IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President for Technical Directions, for the term 2022-2024.  In this capacity, he is member of ExCom and chairs the Technical Directions Board (comprising the 12 Technical Committees of the SP Society).

Minister of Education "meets" Jorge

• Friday, 21 January 2022

On 20 January, our new Minister of Education Robbert Dijkgraaf interviewed a few young scientists. Jorge Martinez was one of them.

On twitter: "Jonge wetenschappers inspireren mij enorm. Ik sprak ze over hun ideeën voor de toekomst van de wetenschap en hun werkdruk en de werkcultuur. Daarnaast vertelden zij over interne en externe stressfactoren en het pad dat zij voor zich zien, ook buiten de wetenschap. Wordt vervolgd!"

ELCA @ 2021 Huawei Student Design Contest

• Thursday, 13 January 2022

On the 15th of December 2021, the Huawei Belgium Research Center (BERC) held its yearly Analog/RF Student design contest. In this competition, ten students from the entire Benelux presented their previously published research to an audience consisting of Huawei managers and engineers.
Our Ph.D. candidate, Mohammadreza Beikmirza, proudly represented the ELCA research group and received the first-place award of the contest. Mohammadreza Beikmirza highlighted his innovative 4-way Doherty digital-intensive transmitter. In his breakthrough RFIC chip, a 12-bit 4-way Doherty I/Q digital transmitter featuring a 50% LO signed I/Q interleaved upconverter in 40nm CMOS was presented. His chip achieves 27.5dBm RF peak power at 5.5GHz, while its drain efficiencies at peak and 10-dB back-off are 47% and 40%, respectively. Its intrinsic I/Q image and LO leakage of a 200MHz single-tone signal are better than -62 & -67dBc, respectively, over a 4.5-to-6GHz band. Using a simple DPD when applying a 320MHz 512-QAM OFDM signal, the measured ACLR & EVM are -40dBc & -32dB, respectively. 

EI @ 2021 Huawei Student Design Contest

• Monday, 27 December 2021

The Electronic Instrumentation (EI) lab wins two awards at the Huawei 2021 Analog/RF IC Student Design Contest.

Last December 15th the Huawei Belgium Research Center (BERC) held its yearly Analog/RF Student design contest. In the contest, ten students from the entire Benelux presented their previously published research to an audience consisting of Huawei managers and engineers.

Our PhD candidates proudly represented the Electronic Instrumentation Lab and received two awards. Thije Rooijers highlighted his novel technique to reduce intermodulation distortion (IMD) in chopper-stabilized amplifiers which received the Silver Prize (3rd award), while Arthur C. de Oliveira showed how the MEMS Coriolis sensors can be a promising alternative to MEMS Thermal flow sensors in microfluidic applications and got the Golden Prize (2nd award).

Altijd geld bij de hand, met een betaalchip onder je huid

• Friday, 17 December 2021

In de onstuitbare opmars van het contactloos betalen zet een Pools bedrijf de volgende stap: een betaalchip onder de huid, geen apparaat meer nodig. Wie wil dat? Brigitte heeft er al een. De technologie is echter niet wereldschokkend, zegt Wouter Serdijn, hoogleraar bio-elektronica in Delft. Artikel in de Volkskrant, d. 17 december 2021, door Enith Vlooswijk.

Jan Angevare and Kofi Makinwa, co- recipients of the ISSCC 2021 Takuo Sugano Award for Outstanding Far-East paper

• Monday, 13 December 2021

For a paper presented at the 2021 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the world’s top conference in chip design, members of the Electronic Instrumentation (EI) lab became co-recipients of the Takuo Sugano award for best Far-East paper. During a pre-Covid visit to the TU Delft, Ph.D. candidate Woojun Choi (Yonsei University, Korea) and his counterpart Jan Angevare (TU Delft) came up with the architecture of an integrated frequency reference with high accuracy and low energy consumption, making it well suited for battery-less IoT applications (link to the paper). The resulting chip is just one example of the long and fruitful cooperation between the groups of Youngcheol Chae (Yonsei) and Kofi Makinwa (TU Delft).

Portret series new Medical Delta professors - Wouter Serdijn

• Thursday, 9 December 2021

For people with heart, nerve and brain disorders, bioelectronic medicine can make a significant difference. Professor Wouter Serdijn works on these tiny devices. He is a professor at TU Delft and, thanks to Medical Delta, now at Erasmus MC as well. "Technical disciplines often use objective measures, while no two people are the same. It is therefore important to include the subjective side in the design."

In the video below, Wouter Serdijn tells about his Medical Delta professorship:

"I have always worked together a lot, but with my appointment in Rotterdam this has become more formalised," says Serdijn. "I now also have the 'right' to walk around there and am part of the information flow. This structure fits in well with how I am used to working. Not starting from existing pigeonholes, but working together at an umbrella level. Medical Delta is a bundle of great people, both technical, medical and clinical-academic. The engineer, medical scientist and therapist form a triangle. Together they can develop what is best for a patient."

How did your interest in the medical field emerge?

"For my graduation project, I worked on hearing aids together with a technology company. I experienced that something that met the technical specifications perfectly, could be totally unpleasant to listen to, and thus collided with the boundaries of the technical domain. Technical disciplines often assume objective measures, while no two people are the same and an individual person will be different tomorrow. It is therefore important to include the subjective side in the design.

How do you contribute to medical science with your knowledge of bioelectronics?

"I do not know exactly how the body works, but I can help measure, examine and control it. I can read and write nerve tracts. One example we are working on is helping people with paralysis regain their posture when sitting or standing and a rudimentary form of walking. This can now be done mainly with a wheelchair or other aids. But I want to know how we can re-energize their own muscles that are still intact but no longer controlled. How can we restore the connection between the brain and muscles? We are about to start clinical trials for this.

I also want to contribute to implantable technology that someone can wear invisibly as much as possible. For example, the so-called cochlear implant. This device enables a deaf person to hear and therefore to develop speech. But these implants still have an external part. You have to take it off when you go swimming or take a shower, for example, and then you don't hear anything anymore. I want to improve that. Though you can engage in conversations with this implant, you cannot listen to music. That can even be a very unpleasant experience. I think that is a shame; not being able to enjoy music is truly a loss. I want to tackle that as well."

How do you see Medical Delta in the future?

"In ten years, Medical Delta will be a scientific plateau. With connections and prestige in The Netherlands, Europe and perhaps the rest of the world. It will be the nerve centre of a lot of activities. The educational component also plays an important role, for example, with the clinical technology degree programme. Very good things and people are already coming out of this and I have high expectations of them. Because science is one part, but training new talent in the combined disciplines, that is the multiplier. Each year, we now have almost a hundred new graduates. They will soon have a greater impact than the Medical Delta professors of today. They are the future."

What is your advice for successful collaboration?

"Stay connected with where you originate from. That is where your value and your strength lies. You have to build a bridge, but stay true to what you are good at. Also, in collaboration, there must be a genuine mutual interest and you must both benefit from it. If you go up to someone and say 'I need this piece of technology from you' or 'this technology needs to go into a patient', it doesn't work. It takes time to understand what is happening on the other side and what the problems are. You also have to find a common language. With me, for example, everything is straight. The components, my diagrams. In biology, everything is curved, for example, cells, tissues and organs. You have to find a way of dealing with it. It is in the shared fascination with the problem that we find each other."

Which other researcher surprised you?

"Multiple researchers, but Chris de Zeeuw of Erasmus MC keeps surprising me. It is an important reason for choosing his department for my second appointment as a professor. He is an inspiring leader. He has great scientific knowledge and knows how to create a group and offer opportunities. He sees the importance of other disciplines for his own and was perhaps generation zero of Medical Delta."

This article is part of a series in which we highlight the nine new Medical Delta professors. Click here for the other portraits that have been published so far. Wouter Serdijn's research contributes to scientific programs, including, including Medical NeuroDelta: Ambulant Neuromonitoring for Prevention and Treatment of Brain Disease and Medical Delta Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab.

ISOCC 2021 ISE President Best Paper Award

• Wednesday, 8 December 2021

At this year's edition of ISOCC 2021, our former excellent bachelor and master student, Jun Feng, obtained the "2021 ISE President Best Paper Award" for his paper: "A Versatile and Efficient 01.-to-11 Gb/s CML Transmitter in 40-nm CMOS."

Ph.D. candidates Mohammadreza Beikmirza and Milad Mehrpoo contributed to Jun's outstanding work. Jun is now a Ph.D. candidate at KU-Leuven. We congratulate Jun, Mohammadreza, and Milad for this award and send our best wishes for their future research.

Best Student Paper Award at ESSCIRC for EI students

• Monday, 6 December 2021

The paper “A −109.1 dB/−98 dB THD/THD+N Chopper Class-D Amplifier with >83.7 dB PSRR Over the Entire Audio Band” was selected for the Best Student Paper Award at ESSCIRC 2021 and will be awarded during the 2022 ESSCIRC-ESSDERC Conference in Milan in September 2022. The paper was co-authored by Huajun Zhang, Nuriel Rozsa, Marco Berkhout, and Qinwen Fan, and the work is done in collaboration with Goodix Technology. The paper can be found at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9567786 

TU Delft and ITEC BV launch X.AL, the first Dutch Lab for Extreme Chip Assembly Technology

• Thursday, 11 November 2021

The next generation of chip assembly machines must meet the growing demand for chips in a more efficient way. Therefore, Technische Universiteit Delft and the Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ITEC Nexperia have launched X.AL: the first Dutch Lab for Extreme Chip Assembly Technology, where research is conducted into the next generation of green chip assembly processes and equipment concepts.

The team of Technische Universiteit Delft researchers, led by Marcel Tichem, Peter Steeneken and Massimo Mastrangeli, provides the knowledge and expertise to develop the breakthrough technologies for these new equipment concepts.

Read the full press release here: X.AL press release

New DAI Labs for Raj Rajan

• Thursday, 11 November 2021

Raj was awarded a DAI Labs, with 3ME (Manon Kok). This will fund 2 PhD positions for CAS, and generate some TU-wide publicity.

The awarded proposal is "Sensor AI" and investigates sensor networks, sensor fusion, distributed learning, sensor swarms. The 3ME part also looks at human motion estimation and including physical knowledge into learning systems.

New Medical Delta professors

• Friday, 5 November 2021

Congratulations Wouter Serdijn, Natasja de Groot and Andrew Webb on your inauguration as Medical Delta Professor

Three Medical Delta professors in micro electronics department

• Wednesday, 3 November 2021

On November 2, nine professors were simultaneously inaugurated as 'Medical Delta professor' at Leiden University, LUMC, TU Delft, Erasmus University and/or Erasmus MC. Among which ME professor Wouter Serdijn and part time professors Natasja Groot and Andrew Webb. With an appointment at at least two of these five academic institutions, they combine technology and healthcare in their professorship.

The nine professors have each earned their spurs in research at the intersection of health and technology. Examples include the use of new techniques to determine the cause of cardiac arrhythmia, how cartilage can be repaired using technology, and how e-health can help with rehabilitation or prevention of illness. The official inauguration follows their earlier appointment as Medical Delta professors. During the inauguration, the professors presented their research and answered questions from young researchers.

See more: https://www.medicaldelta.nl/en

Lunch lecture: Superconducting On-chip Fabry–Pérot Resonators at Sub-millimeter Wavelengths

• Friday, 29 October 2021

Date: Friday November 5

Time: 12.00-13.00

Place; Faculty EEMCS, B.36, Snijderszaal

Register before November 3 via [email protected]

Abstract

Superconducting On-chip Fabry–Pérot Resonators at Sub-millimeter Wavelengths

Superconducting integrated circuits play a central role in the development of next-generation astronomical instruments at sub-millimeter wavelength.In order to reach the necessary efficiency for these instruments, a quantitative understanding of the losses within the circuit is required. Superconducting on-chip Fabry–Pérot resonators provide a sensitive and flexible way to measure transmission line losses at sub-Kelvin temperatures and sub-millimeter wavelengths.In this talk, we will discuss the development and application of on-chip Fabry–Pérot resonators for loss measurements of co-planar waveguides and microstrips at 350 GHz. We obtain very low losses for both types of transmission lines, reaching internal quality factors of close to 20,000 for a NbTiN co-planar waveguide.

RainGuRU , AI-based rainfall nowcaster

• Thursday, 7 October 2021

RainGuRU is an AI-based rainfall nowcaster for The Netherlands. It predict rainfall intensities up to 100 minutes ahead based on real-time radar data provided by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

RainGuRU has been developed by TU Delft MSc student Eva van der Kooij for her thesis and it is an adaptation of the TrajGRU recurrent convolutional neural network.

This work was supervised by M. Schleiss and R. Taormina (CiTG faculty), and F. Fioranelli (EWI faculty), and the website https://rainguru.hkvservices.nl/ was developed by HKV with the support of the TU Delft Safety and Security Institute.

Innatera: Spiking neural network architecture

• Wednesday, 6 October 2021

A short video about the Spiking Neural Hardware Architecture Innatera is working on. (Innatera is a startup originating in the CAS group.)

Convergence Open Mind Grant for ME Department

• Friday, 1 October 2021

Francesco Fioranelli, Assistant Professor at the MS3 group, has received an Open Mind Grant as part of the Convergence Initiative between TU Delft, Erasmus MC and Erasmus University. The co-applicants were Caitlin Ramsey, PhD candidate at Erasmus MC (and former alumna of this department), and Lytske Bakker, PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

The proposal is entitled “Contactless monitoring of neonates in the intensive care unit”. The objective is to explore contactless measurements based on FMCW radar for monitoring key vital signs of neonates, by investigating technical feasibility, clinical reliability and cost effectiveness of the proposed techniques. It is a nice example of “convergence”, bringing together key expertise from all applicants to perform research that would be unfeasible in isolation. The ambition of the project is to start with a small pilot showing the feasibility and potential of the idea, to then build evidence and momentum to develop a new medical device.

Additional information can be found on the Symposium webpage which showcased the other funded Open Mind projects (https://convergencealliance.nl/open-mind-symposium-2021/).

Chao Chen receives Open Mind Grant

• Tuesday, 28 September 2021

On Friday Sept. 17, 2021, Chao Chen pitched his research proposal

ULTRAPROBE: Ultrasensitive digital probe for transcranial ultrasound imaging of the brain

during the first Open Mind Symposium. Chao is working as a postdoc in Michiel Pertijs' Ultrasound ASICs group at the Electronic Instumentation Lab.

Chao’s proposal, written together with Dr. Pieter Kruizinga of Erasmus MC, is among the 17% winning proposals of the Open Mind Call 2021, and is a nice example of convergence between Erasmus MC and TU Delft. It aims to make a breakthrough in functional ultrasound imaging of the brain, by developing novel instrumentation to deal with the attenuation and aberrations introduced by the skull.

More information can be found on the Open Mind Symposium webpage: https://convergencealliance.nl/open-mind-symposium-2021/

Item on chip manufacturing on national television

• Thursday, 2 September 2021

On the 1st of September, Sten Vollebregt explained in the program NTR Atlas on national television how chips are made and why it is difficult to produce many of them on short notice to resolve the current chip shortage. The item was filmed inside the Else Kooi Laboratory.

The program can be viewed back here (in Dutch): link to NPO start.

Online conference Neural Interfaces and Artificial Senses (NIAS)

• Wednesday, 1 September 2021

Since 1958 when the first pacemaker was implanted in humans, bioelectronics devices have been increasingly used to interface with different types of tissue, monitor and interact with biological activity. During our continuous endeavors to better study sophisticated neuronal systems we have become more capable of diagnosing and treating various disorders. We are currently emerging in an era where bioelectronic devices are becoming smaller, less invasive and safer, which in turn is being paralleled with new therapies for a vast range of neurological and auto-immune diseases. This opens exciting possibilities for the future, from cutting-edge technology for brain-machine-interfaces with unprecedented functionality, artificial organs and augmented senses that can change the way we perceive the world, to a more human way of interactions with robots.

Topics to be covered by the conference: • Bioelectronic devices • Electroceuticals/Bioelectronic medicine • Neuronal interfaces and implantable electronics • Materials at the interface with biology • Neuronal mechanisms and clinical applications • Artificial visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile sensory systems.

Asli Yelkenci wins CadenceLIVE Europe 2021 award

• Friday, 27 August 2021

Asli Yelkenci is the winner of the CadenceLIVE Europe 2021 under the category of “Master Thesis Award for the Best Design using Cadence tools” with her master thesis done at Delft University of Technology under the supervision of Virgilio Valente, Section Bioelectronics.

Her thesis title is “A 16-Channel CMOS Reconfigurable Unit for Simultaneous In-Vitro Microelectrode Array (MEA) and Current-Clamp Measurements” which aims to gain insight into the correlation between electrical activities of a population of cells and single-cell activity. She will present her work during the online event CadenceLIVE Europe 2021 on 19th October.

You can register for the event and see the celebratory video via the link below.

Welcome Geethu Joseph

• Monday, 16 August 2021

The Department of Microelectronics and CAS are welcoming dr. Geethu Joseph, who starts in August 2021 as a new Assistant Professor. Her expertise is in signal processing for communications, in particular machine learning, compressed sensing and sparse recovery on graphs and networks, as well as dynamical systems theory.

Three awards for the Electronic Instrumentation (EI) group at PRORISC and SAFE 2021

• Thursday, 22 July 2021

The Electronic Instrumentation (EI) lab receives three awards at PRORISC and SAFE 2021

Last July 8-9 PRORISC and SAFE made a successful re-start after a one-year hiatus. This time the event was held online and, as we are proud to report, PhD candidates of the Electronic Instrumentation Lab received three awards. Roger Zamparette and Thije Rooijers won Best Poster Awards in the sessions on Sensing & Low Power and ADC & Analog, respectively, while Efraim Eland won the Best Presentation Award in the ADC & Analog session.

https://prorisc-safe.nl/

Rising star: Justin Dauwels

• Thursday, 1 July 2021

As associate professor within the Circuits and Systems group at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, rising star Justin Dauwels is fascinated by how data-driven intelligent systems can tackle many of society’s problems. Neural networks and graphical models are his hammer, and he applies it to topics ranging from autonomous cars to digital health and beyond. But neuroscience has always been a main theme ever since his Erasmus exchange to the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zürich. ‘I apply the models that I studied as an engineer to help unravel and understand human behaviour,’ he says.

Healthcare for the underprivileged

We want to be able to answer what-if questions prior to the operation; if I remove some tissue here, what will that accomplish?

Planning epilepsy operations

Next generation deep learning

But it is not all about applications. He will also delve into the fundamentals of deep learning. ‘People start to realise that neural networks, on their own, won’t be able to address all problems. I have been working on graphical models for more than twenty years and these are a promising path towards next generation deep learning systems. It’s about building a better hammer, one that combines the fast, instinctive thinking of neural networks with the slow thinking of graphical and logical models. Just like in humans, it makes sense to verify an intuitive answer and to correct it if necessary.’

New TTW project for Richard Hendriks and Jorge Martinez

• Thursday, 24 June 2021

This week Richard Hendriks received the news that his project proposal 'Personalized Auditory Scene Modification to Assist Hearing Impaired People' was granted funding from NWO TTW. Co-applicant is Jorge Martinez. The project will fund 2 PhD students. Congratulations!

Hearing impairment has become a serious problem for a large and increasing portion of the population as is shown by its prevalence: 11 % of the Dutch population suffers from severe hearing loss. These numbers show that hearing impairments form an important societal problem. It comes with many daily life problems in both private situations and working environments. Moreover, hearing-impaired people are often less confident in practical situations, need more assistance and have a worse quality of life. The underlying reasons are that hearing-impaired people suffer from a) the inability to understand speech in acoustic challenging situations, and, b) the inability to correctly localize sound sources. The goal of this project is to make the hearing impaired user fully benefit from an improved intelligibility and sound localization. To do so, we will develop an algorithm to personalize the presented auditory scene for improved speech intelligibility and sound localization for hearing impaired users.

"Pearl" for research on the heart as a defibrillator

• Friday, 18 June 2021

Researchers from LUMC and the ECTM lab of TU Delft have developed an optogenetic method for resetting a disturbed heart rhythm. On 10 June 2021 the project stood out among all the projects that ZonMw finances, and was awarded the ‘ZonMw Parel’.

The Vidi project was originally granted to dr. Daniël Pijnappels (LUMC) in 2014 by ZonMw, and the ECTM lab of TU Delft joined the collaborative research by end of 2017. A study of a new method on effectively and safely preventing and terminating human cardiac arrhythmia by gene therapy and LED illumination was jointly undertaken. Compared to traditional electroshock-based methods, this novel method is superior in overcoming severe shock pain, and therefore increases the quality-of-life of the patients.

A series of advanced LED illuminating devices for in-vivo, ex-vivo and in-vitro cardiac experiments were custom developed by researchers from TU Delft. The full-loop technical development was carried out by TU Delft researchers by tackling challenges such as multi-physics modeling, advanced electronics packaging, and smart system integration.

The joint research has not only produced high-quality scientific outcome, but also drawn general public’s attention via various successful media exposures. The "Pearl" award not only proves excellence in breakthrough scientific outcome, it also provides great encouragement for multi-disciplinary collaborations.

The TUD team includes Dr. Rene Poelma (currently at Nexperia), PhD candidate Tianyi Jin (holding the "Pearl" in the photo) and MSc student Shanliang Deng, under supervision of Prof. Kouchi Zhang.

The rising stars of the TU Delft, featuring Dante Muratore

• Tuesday, 8 June 2021

After his PhD in what he calls “hardcore analogue microelectronics”, rising star Dante Muratore knew he wanted to continue his career working on systems that are closer to an actual application. A postdoc position at Stanford University, in which he worked on the electronics for an artificial retina to treat medical conditions leading to the loss of vision, brought him just that. Then, wanting to come back to Europe and to continue doing bioelectronics at the highest level possible, an opening at TU Delft crossed his path. ‘It was the easiest choice I ever made,’ he says.

Read more about Dante in the link below!

Winnaar Kooy Prijs 2021: Keith Klein

• Thursday, 3 June 2021

Op 3 juni – de dag waarop het Kooy Symposium online plaatsvond – is de winnaar van de Kooy Prijs bekend gemaakt. De voorzitter van de afdeling Defensie en Veiligheid van het Koninklijk Instituut Van Ingenieurs (KIVI) Jan Wind, reikte samen met de voorzitter van de Kooyprijs jury Bart Koene, de prijs van 2.000 euro uit aan Ir. Keith T.J. Klein. Hij won de prijs met zijn afstudeerscriptie: ‘Estimating 3D motion from radar data: Exploiting an omnidirectional radar array for motion estimation in the context of SAR imaging on agile platform.’

Eind 2020 heeft de Kooyprijs jury een negental inzendingen – gericht defensie- en veiligheidstechnologie - ontvangen met voordrachten voor de Kooyprijs 2021. Alle inzendingen waren van uitzonderlijk goede kwaliteit. De jury heeft de verslagen met waardering gelezen, complimenteert de opstellers met de kwaliteit ervan en waardeert deze bijdragen aan de Defensie & Veiligheid onderzoeksgebieden.

Na rijp beraad is besloten om de Kooyprijs 2021 uit te reiken aan Keith Klein. Keith Klein is afgestudeerd aan de TU Delft bij de Faculteit Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde & Informatica en heeft zijn onderzoek bij TNO uitgevoerd van maart 2020 tot november 2020. Hij werd begeleid vanuit de TU-afdeling Microwave Sensing, Signals and Systems. Zijn afstudeerbegeleiders waren Dr. F. Uysal (TU Delft), Prof. dr. A. Yarovoy (TU Delft), Dr. M. Caro Cuenca (TNO), Ir. M.P.G. Otten (TNO) en Dr. ir. J.J.M. de Wit (TNO). Het verslag is met het cijfer 9.0 gehonoreerd.

Inhoud van de afstudeerscriptie

Keith heeft gewerkt aan 3D-snelheidsbepaling van onbemande vliegtuigen met behulp van radargegevens. Het verkrijgen van een nauwkeurige positiebepaling is een uitdagend probleem bij coherente radarverwerkingstechnieken zoals Synthetisch Apertuur Radar (SAR). Dit geldt des te meer voor lichte en wendbare platforms zoals multi-copters/drones. Hun moeilijk voorspelbare bewegingen moeten nauwkeurig worden bepaald tijdens het verzamelen van gegevens en worden gecompenseerd tijdens de verwerking.

Om een gefocust SAR-beeld te krijgen, moet elke pulslocatie nauwkeurig bekend zijn, opdat elke puls coherent is toe te voegen aan het beeldraster. Traditioneel wordt dit bereikt met een traagheidsnavigatiesysteem (Inertial Navigation System, INS) en GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) ontvanger. Hoewel deze combinatie redelijke prestaties kan leveren, vormen gewicht en grootte vaak een beperking voor lichte platforms, waardoor voor de INS de beschikbare mogelijkheden en de haalbare nauwkeurigheid beperkt zijn.

Toepasbaarheid van omnidirectionele radararry

Keith Klein heeft expliciet een analyse gedaan naar de toepasbaarheid van een omnidirectionele radararray voor het schatten van de beweging van een drone platform en het verbeteren van de positioneringsnauwkeurigheid. Voortbouwend op bestaande 1D-SAR-bewegingscompensatietechnieken, heeft hij nieuwe methoden ontwikkeld voor het goed benaderen van de 3D-beweging van het radarplatform door schatting van de hoogte en snelheid.

Daarnaast wordt ook een nieuwe 3D-autofocustechniek gepresenteerd die multi-beam-autofocus wordt genoemd. Deze techniek zorgt voor de correctie van 3D-trajectfouten van puls tot puls door gebruik te maken van de bundelvormende mogelijkheden van de array om meerdere gebieden scherp te stellen terwijl de afbeelding wordt gecreëerd. Door gebruik te maken van een Extended Kalman-filter (EKF) worden positieschattingen verkregen op basis van de radarsnelheidsmetingen. Dit maakt beeldvorming zonder INS mogelijk, wat relevant is in gebieden waar GNSS signalen niet/nauwelijks beschikbaar zijn.

Het fuseren van de schattingen verkregen uit deze methode met de bestaande INS-output levert ook prestatieverbetering op in termen van SAR-beeldfocus. Hierdoor wordt de oplosbaarheid en detecteerbaarheid van zwakke doelen verbeterd. De gepresenteerde resultaten creëren ook nieuwe onderzoeksmogelijkheden, niet alleen voor snelle SAR-beeldvorming, maar ook voor autonome navigatie op basis van radargegevens.

Het systeem van de drone-mounted radar --waar Keith onderzoek naar heeft gedaan—is door TNO ontwikkeld voor het Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare Department van de U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR). Het systeem is van belang voor verkenningsmissies en hiermee bij uitstek relevant voor Defensie.

Toekomst

Keith Klein was blij verrast met zijn prijs. ‘Mijn begeleiders hebben mijn verslag ingediend zonder dat ik het wist. Toen ik een telefoontje kreeg dat ik de Kooyprijs had gewonnen heb ik even gewacht om het aan mijn omgeving te vertellen tot ik zéker wist dat het geen grap was. En natuurlijk ben ik er erg blij mee! Dank aan mijn begeleiders.’

Keith Klein is na zijn afstuderen gaan werken bij TNO. ‘Ik werk hier niet verder aan mijn afstudeerproject. Dat is nu overgenomen door stagiaire en het plan is om daar later ook weer nieuwe afstudeerders op te zetten. Het betekent dat het geen rapport is dat in de spreekwoordelijke la verdwijnt. Goed om te weten dat de materie voldoende potentieel heeft om verder aan te werken.’

Jury

De jury bestond uit de heren Dr. L. Koene (Juryvoorzitter en bestuurslid KIVI DV, NLDA/FMW), Ing. L.F. Galle (Ministerie van Defensie, Directie Materieel), Prof.dr.ir. P.H.A.J.M. van Gelder (TU Delft), Prof. dr. B.R.H.M. Haverkort (Universiteit Twente), Prof. dr. ir. F.E. van Vliet (TNO, Universiteit Twente) en Prof. dr. ir. P.J. Oonincx (NLDA/FMW).

Watch the ceremony at youtube

Abstract of the thesis

Acquiring an accurate estimate of position is a challenging problem in coherent radar processing techniques such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Even more so, for light and agile platforms such as multi-copters. Due to their unpredictable flight path, their motion must be accurately measured during data acquisition, and compensated for during processing. To obtain a focused SAR image, each pulse location must be accurately known to ensure that each pulse is added coherently to the imaging grid. Traditionally, this is achieved with an Inertial Navigation System (INS). While an INS can provide reasonable performance, its weight and size are often a constraint for agile platforms, limiting the available options and attainable accuracy. In this study, we perform an analysis on the applicability of an omnidirectional radar array for explicitly estimating the motion of a multi-copter platform, and improving on the positioning accuracy achieved by the on board INS. Building on existing 1D SAR motion compensation techniques, we develop new methods for estimating the 3D motion of the radar platform by estimating its height and velocity. In addition, we also present a novel 3D autofocus technique termed multi-beam autofocus. This technique allows for the correction of 3D trajectory errors from pulse to pulse by exploiting the beamforming capabilities of the array, and focusing multiple regions as the image is created. Using an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), we obtain position estimates from the radar velocity measurements based on the last known INS position. We experimentally verify that using our velocity estimation method alone, the positioning performance is already improved compared to that of a state-of-the-art INS, allowing for INS-free imaging using arbitrary flight paths. This enables imaging in GNSS-denied environments, and has the potential to further reduce the weight of the platform. We also show that fusing the estimates obtained from our method with the existing INS output yields an additional performance increase in terms of SAR image focus, improving the resolvability and detectability of weak targets. The presented results open further avenues of research, not only in agile SAR imaging but also in autonomous GNSS-denied navigation.

Ultrasound for microimplants – enabling personalized medicine with wireless charging

• Thursday, 27 May 2021

Treatment of chronic autoimmune diseases is no longer limited by the expensive drugs and undesirable side effects. Neuromodulation has been shown to be effective in treating diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, chronic headaches, asthma or Parkinson's disease. To enable the technology for widespread clinical application, researchers at Fraunhofer IZM are developing a new generation of microimplants as part of the EU Moore4Medical project. These highly miniaturized devices have a special feature: the implants can be charged entirely wirelessly using ultrasound waves.

(Em.) Professor Dr. Gerard Meijer Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion

• Monday, 3 May 2021

He was knighted for 40 years of full and passionate commitment to the TU Delft, his students and research. As a loyal colleague he volunteered at the university for another 10 years. His research was of big social value and he as he was aware of the importance of the connection between science and business, he always tried to focus on strengthening this collaboration.

SSCS Webinar April 21

• Monday, 19 April 2021

Register : https://ieee.webex.com/ieee/onstage/g.php?MTID=ef00b06de6cd2e96de0dd2955e047234e

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.

Biography of Speakers

Shih-Lien (Linus) Lu is currently serving as the Chief Solutions Officer of PieceMakers Technology. He was a Director at TSMC Research and Development from 2016 to 2021. From 1999 to 2016, he was with Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, Oregon, where he was a research scientist, a research group manager, and later the Director of Memory Architecture Lab. He served on the faculty of the ECE Department at the Oregon State University as an Assistant Professor from 1991 to 1995 and as a tenured Associate Professor until 2001 (on leave the last two years). From 1984 to 1991, he worked on the MOSIS project at USC/ISI which provides research and education community VLSI fabrication services. His research interests include computer architecture, memory system and circuits, low power VLSI design, and hardware security. An IEEE Fellow, Shih-Lien received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and M.S. and Ph.D. both in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA. He and his wife raised four adult sons.

Kofi Makinwa is a Professor at Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. From 1989 to 1999, he was a research scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees (1985, 1988) from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria, an M.E.E. degree (1989) from the Philips International Institute, Eindhoven, The Netherlands and a Ph.D. degree (2004) from Delft University of Technology. His main research interests are the design of precision analog circuits and sensor interfaces. This has resulted in 16 books, over 250 technical papers, and over 30 patents. He is the co-recipient of 16 best paper awards, from the JSSC, ISSCC, VLSI, ESSCIRC and Transducers among others, and is an ISSCC top-10 contributor. Prof. Makinwa has been on the program committees of several IEEE conferences, and has served the Solid-State Circuits Society as a distinguished lecturer and as a member of the AdCom. He is currently the Analog Subcom chair of the ISSCC, a member of the editorial board of the Proceedings of the IEEE, and a co-organizer of the Advances in Analog Circuit Design workshop and the Sensor Interfaces Meeting. He is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Assistant professor Tiago Lopes da Costa (Bio electronics) receives the ‘early career HFSP research grant’

• Thursday, 1 April 2021

Abstract

Cellular communication is mediated by voltage-gated, ligand-gated and mechanosensitive ion channels. Tools for modulating neuronal communication based on focused ultrasound (FUS) were developed to overcome fundamental limitations in optogenetics, combining non-invasive approaches and high spatial resolution without the need for genetic modification of neurons. Yet, little is known about the fundamental mechanisms of how focused ultrasound waves influence the finely tuned interplay of ion channels and lipid bilayers. How does the frequency and intensity of the ultrasound wave affects the lipid bilayer and different types of ion channels? What is the physical mechanism that governs the triggering of ion channel activity? These questions remain unanswered, with existing hypothesis limited by the spatio-temporal resolution of traditional optical, electrophysiology and ultrasound tools, which prohibit observations at the single ion channel level. To answer these questions we hypothesize that, if there would be a way to monitor effects of the FUS on the lipid bilayer and single ion channels with high temporal resolution, one should be able to monitor ultrasound-evoked oscillating current responses informing on ultrasound neuromodulation mechanisms. Hence, the aim of this proposal is to develop a concurrent experimental and computational approach, where state-of-the-art ultrasound and current read-out devices enabling high-bandwidth electrophysiology are matched with computational electrophysiology simulations. This will allow us for the first time to match the frequency of the focused ultrasound with the bandwidth of single ion channel recordings and the length of the computer-based simulations. We will focus our efforts in three aims, where Aim1 will establish the recording systems and simulations using model membranes alone and a mechanosensitive model channel. In Aim2 we will develop a recording platform integrating US-stimulation and high bandwidth recordings in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, extending our efforts on non-mechanosensitive channels. In Aim3, we will combine the gained knowledge from Aims 1 and 2 to focus on mechanosensitive channel that are hypothesized to be involved in neuromodulation.

"Tech for Health" featuring Natasja de Groot

• Sunday, 28 March 2021

Please donate to our research on better understanding of cardiac arrhythmia

Van auto tot smartphone: het chiptekort grijpt om zich heen

• Friday, 19 March 2021

Chips worden gebruikt in talloze apparaten, onder meer smartphones, laptops en spelcomputers. Ook auto's hebben er honderden, zo niet duizenden aan boord. Maar nu er een groot tekort aan is, komen steeds meer bedrijven in de knel met hun productie. Wat is er precies aan de hand? Er is op dit moment een dusdanig hoge vraag naar chips dat de fabrikanten het niet kunnen bijbenen. Er is daardoor een schreeuwend tekort ontstaan. Dat heeft volgens Makinwa een aantal oorzaken. Hij wijst allereerst op het thuiswerken. Velen gaan sinds de uitbraak van de pandemie niet meer naar kantoor, waardoor meer vraag is naar apparaten om te kunnen thuiswerken, bijvoorbeeld laptops. "Ook zoeken veel mensen vanwege de lockdown naar extra vertier binnenshuis, waardoor meer spelcomputers worden verkocht. In al die producten zitten chips."

Een andere grootverbruiker van chips, namelijk de auto-industrie, zit nu ook met de handen in het haar. "In het voorjaar van 2020 moesten veel autobouwers hun fabrieken tijdelijk sluiten vanwege de corona-uitbraak", legt Makinwa uit. "Tegelijkertijd besloten ze om dan ook maar de bestellingen voor chips te annuleren. Omdat chipfabrieken een beperkte capaciteit hebben, hebben ze de vraag vanuit elektronicabedrijven, zoals smartphonemakers en de laptopbouwers, voorrang gegeven."

Toen de autofabrieken na de eerste coronagolf weer opengingen en de vraag naar auto's sneller opveerde dan gedacht, wilden de autoproducenten weer chips bestellen. Maar daar hadden de chipmakers nu minder capaciteit voor, waardoor de wachttijden flink zijn opgelopen.

Lees meer op Nu.nl, https://www.nu.nl/economie/6122699/van-auto-tot-smartphone-het-chiptekort-grijpt-om-zich-heen.html

Profcast with Prof. Wouter Serdijn

• Thursday, 18 March 2021

Or visit this link

Organ-on-chip project receives huge grant to make the leap from lab to fab

• Wednesday, 10 March 2021

Scientists are pushing ahead building organ-on-chips, small chips with human cells, which are useful, for example, for studying cancerous metastases in the bloodstream or the development of scar tissue, or for testing the effect of drugs or food outside a human body. To make the step to industry, a collective of dozens of research groups, companies and knowledge institutions, brought together by the organ-on-chip consortium hDMT, are building a universal standard, supported by a NWO Perspective grant of nearly five million euros. The ultimate goal in the future: to link multiple organ chips together to simulate a whole body.

Check the official announcement (in Dutch).
Check the press release video summary at this link.

Those who think of chips only in terms of computers are nowadays deceived. An organ-on-chip usually consists of a plastic plate with integrated microchannels and chambers. Inside grow the complex tissues of human cells, in an environment that mimics the human body, but is barely visible to the naked eye.
A minute amount of liquid flows along the living cells to supply them with nutrients, and a pump delivers and removes them. Sensors in the chip measure how the cells respond and actuators make changes. For example, a different pressure, mechanical force, oxygen level or flow velocity.
By then adding a drug, food or cosmetic product to be tested, the researchers can see how the tissues react. The chip fits perfectly under a light microscope, so that the process can be followed easily and live.

Scaling up stalled by lack of universal standard

At the moment, the chips are mainly used by researchers to better understand how cells behave in their micro-environment or how diseases develop and spread through the body. In TU Delft, for example, the organ-on-chip group at the ECTM lab is working on microelectromechanical devices for brain-, heart- and gut-on-chip.
However, large-scale use by the pharma is not yet on the agenda due to the lack of a universal standard. There are many kinds of chips, each with its own design, dimensions and material. Moreover, the chips are difficult to fit into the workflow of the pharmaceutical industry and scaling up to larger numbers is very difficult. In short, they are designed for research, not for industry.
This is what the 10 research groups of 8 universities, united in the Dutch ‘organ-on-chip’ consortium hDMT, want to change, together with 21 companies, 3 knowledge institutions and 2 foundations. Led by researcher Jaap den Toonder of TU Eindhoven, they are now going to develop a standardized and modular platform for organs-on-chips, the SMART Organ-on-Chip. On March 10, they were awarded the NWO Perspective grant of 3.4 million EUR. The industrial partners are investing another 1.4 million EUR in the project.

TU Delft features among the SMART Organ-on-Chip consortium with the organ-on-chip research group led by Dr. Massimo Mastrangeli at ECTM.

Harmful drugs can be eliminated earlier

Pharmaceutical companies have a lot to gain from the standardized platform. Developing a new drug takes at least 10 years and billions of euros. This lengthy and expensive process is due to the different phases that the new drug has to go through. And 80% of promising drugs still drop out in the final phase.
Den Toonder: “If you can test the drugs directly on a realistic human organ-on-chip model, incorporating the complexity of the body right away, then you can eliminate harmful or ineffective drugs much earlier in the process, thereby saving a lot of money.”

Connecting Chips

To standardize the chips, the researchers are building a standard-sized "docking" plate that accommodates the fluid channels and electronics. Then the chips can be clicked onto it like modules.
The researchers develop tissue chips in which the cells are in the right microenvironment and technical chips with innovative fluid pumps and physical and chemical sensors. Den Toonder: "That's what makes the system so flexible; you can click the chips onto it in any combination you want, depending on the type of organ you want to examine and the question you want to answer."
The whole system is aligned with industrial workflows and biomedical R&D, for example, to work with pipetting robots and complex microscopic techniques. Moreover, it will be an accessible open technology, so that other companies can develop their own applications and add them to the existing platform.
Den Toonder: "By linking the various organ-on-chip models, we can ultimately also simulate the interactions between organs. That is really important, because organs never function in a body on their own. We hope that in time we will be able to develop, link and study chips for all the organs in the human body. Our ultimate dream is therefore a 'body-on-chip', with which you can study the effect of a new drug in all the organs, for example, so that you can simultaneously see whether the liver is not breaking down the drug, whether the intestines are not damaged, and whether heart problems develop.”

Studying scars

In the Perspective program, the researchers are focusing in particular on the development of scar tissue: fibrosis. Besides nicely healed scars, fibrosis of organs sometimes progresses into proliferating connective tissue. The area around the organ then plays a major role. It is therefore crucial to include that environment when studying this process in organ-on-chip models. It is precisely this complexity that has so far prevented a good model for studying fibrosis. The team is therefore now building tissue chips from intestines, skin and joints to study the processes at the system level.
Den Toonder: "The NWO Perspective grant gives us the opportunity to bring together the broad multidisciplinary group of scientists you need for such a development with industrial partners, from manufacturing to end users." Den Toonder is a mechanical engineer within the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) at TU Eindhoven.

The right drug for that one patient

In addition to the pharmaceutical industry, the emerging research field of personalized medicine can also benefit greatly from standardized organ-on-chip technology. Drugs are now developed for the average person, and only work for one in four people if you are lucky. There are even drugs on the market that only work for one in twenty people. If you can pre-screen a few potential drugs on cells from the specific patient for whom you are seeking treatment, you can administer the right drug for that specific person immediately.
The new chips are also finding industrial applications outside of pharma. For example, a skin-on-chip to test the side-effects of cosmetics or an intestine-on-chip to test allergies to a new food product. A bonus of organ-on-chip technology will be a considerable reduction in the number of animal tests.

The Dutch organ-on-chip consortium hDMT brought the following partners together for this NWO Perspective program: Amsterdam UMC/VUmc, Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, UMC Utrecht, Leiden University, Maastricht University, Twente University, Wageningen University & Research, 300MICRONS, Applikon, BioLamina, Convergence, Demcon, dsRAT Stichting Proefdiervrij, Galapagos, Genmab, Hy2Care, IBA Lifesciences, ibidi, Life Science Methods, LipoCoat, Micronit Microtechnologies, OnePlanet Research Center/imec, Poietis, PolyVation, provio, Qurin Diagnostics, ReumaNederland, RIVM, Spektrax, TissUse, TNO, Unilever Safety & Environmental Assurance Centre, Ushio INC.

Webinar with dr. Vasso Giagka: "Lowering the Barrier for Customized Micro Systems in Medical Applications"

• Tuesday, 9 March 2021

Webinar: "Lowering the Barrier for Customized Micro Systems in Medical Applications" Dear EUROPRACTICE member, We are delighted to invite you to a webinar organized by EUROPRACTICE together with flanders.health dedicated to lowering the barrier for customized micro systems in medical applications, which will take place online on March 24, 2021, from 14:00 to 16:00 CET. If you have been following the trends in medical innovations in recent years, you know that microelectronic solutions are revolutionizing the MedTech industry and improving the quality of delivered healthcare and thus patient life tremendously. Whether it is artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), or sensing, microelectronic systems play a key role in accelerating these trends in the medical world. For MedTech companies, it is important that microelectronic systems can be customized, but typically this comes at a high cost.

This is where EUROPRACTICE comes in. The consortium lowers the barrier for customized microsystems by providing affordable access to design tools, fabrication services, and training. If you are interested in learning more about how customized microsystems can make the difference for your medical application, then invest 2 hours of your time to learn about EUROPRACTICE and its affordable services. In this webinar, we will particularly zoom in on Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Photonic Integrated Circuits, and how those can be fabricated and integrated in microsystems for medical applications. The latter will be illustrated by several testimonials/case studies presented by both academia and industry.

Webinar Agenda

1. Introduction by flanders.health

2. “Overview of Micro Systems in Medical Applications and how EUROPRACTICE can lower the barrier to technology access” - Romano Hoofman (imec)

3. Case Studies

Steve Stoffels (Pulsify Medical) – “Pulsify’s ultrasound monitoring patch: future medical grade wearables enabled by custom components.”

Jan-Willem Hoste (Antelope Dx) – “Antelope Diagnostics: Bringing photonic chip technology to a consumer market”

Pieter Harpe (TU Eindhoven) – “Custom microelectronics for ambulatory pregnancy monitoring and ultrasound catheters”

Vasiliki Giagka (TU Delft) – “Microelectronic chips for bio-electronic medicine: Engineering long-lasting and spatially selective active neural implants”

Bob Puers (KU Leuven) – “Concept for a high resolution neural interface with polymer-CMOS hybrid interconnects”

4. Q&A

Register https://share.hsforms.com/1sMh30WWDQzi-2-_qMcq9OQ42q9f?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=114173729&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_J0UTBpWNtB6-mAe-UvA_dkxZRlerg6ZC5tgyAS8t3UFTXI7bZqdR5oHS-50jKN_SVQoHXjUVVGCmXsr2KSch9lKtT6g&utm_content=114173729&utm_source=hs_email

INESC MN 2021 Seminar Series - Dr. Tiago Costa, March 5, 16.00 PM

• Thursday, 4 March 2021

Neurological disorders are the leading cause of disability and the second leading cause of death, worldwide. Still, a paradigm exists in the available therapies: while pharmaceutical drugs are non-invasive but have poor precision and low effectiveness in the long term, therapies based on implantable electrical stimulators have high precision but are also highly invasive, which reduces patient eligibility. For the first time, a minimally invasive and precise neuromodulation modality is emerging through low intensity focused ultrasound (LIFU). However, the hand-held form-factors of existing ultrasound technology, together with its spatial resolution still being 10x lower than implantable electrodes, are hampering advances in both fundamental neuroscience research and the translation to the clinic. In this talk, I will describe my research on stand-alone ultrasonic microchips, by exploring the co-design and integration of CMOS circuits and piezoelectric materials. With massive miniaturization, focused ultrasound can be delivered through more efficient methods (wearable, injectable) while supporting higher ultrasound frequencies towards higher spatial resolution. These advances will contribute to a new generation of ultrasound technology to bring LIFU neuromodulation to the forefront of neuroscience and neurology.

To register see link below:

https://sites.google.com/site/inescmn/home/news

Geert Leus wins EURASIP Technical Achievement Award

• Friday, 26 February 2021

Geert Leus will be this year's recipient of the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP)'s Technical Achievement Award.
The award will be presented at EUSIPCO 2021 Dublin, Ireland.

As noted in the announcement by Maria Sabrina Greco, EURASIP Director for Awards,
The Technical Achievement Award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact in this field.

This year’s recipient is Geert Leus, “For contributions to signal processing for communications and sensing".

TU Delft scores at Olympic Games for chip designers

• Wednesday, 10 February 2021

Kofi Makinwa, professor at TU Delft, explains it as follows: ‘The number of papers accepted prior to the conference is an important measure of the success, as is the number of guest speakers you supply as a university. The total for TU Delft in 2021 is fifteen.’ An achievement that shows that Delft holds a position in the upper echelons of the chip world.

Imaging sensors

Possibly one of the most striking contributions is from Albert Theuwissen. In his keynote speech he takes us into the future of imaging sensors. For the not-so-technical readers: almost all cameras and mobile phones contain an imaging sensor. The quality of this sensor determines the quality of your pictures and how much you can enlarge them. Albert: ‘The CMOS imaging sensors that you see in today's mobile phones are approaching perfection. But this doesn't mean that we won't be needing any more field development. On the contrary, new technologies and materials open new dimensions and new applications that will only supplement and improve the classic imaging functionality of the sensors. Ultimately this trend will transform the landscape of the imaging sensor from imaging to smart vision.’

A computer that goes faster, a phone that gets smarter and smarter – you can't think of anything or Kofi Makinwa has something to do with it. Listen via this link to the (Dutch) podcast episode recently made with him.

Precision amplifiers

This year TU Delft is also scoring highly in the field of analogue electronics. Of the twelve papers accepted on this topic, seven come from TU Delft. Makinwa: ‘When a digital electronic device needs to communicate with the real world, it always needs an analogue interface. An example of such an analogue circuit is an amplifier. An amplifier takes a small signal and converts it into something that is strong enough to power speakers, for example.’

One of the TU Delft researchers specialised in this subject is Qinwen Fan. She has spent several years studying precision amplifiers. These are amplifiers that are capable of accurately processing very small signals. During the ISSCC, Fan will explain the development of precision amplifiers in recent decades. Fan: ‘I will also look at a number of applications, such as measuring battery power or amplifying biomedical signals, for instance from the heart. Finally I will use the many Delft publications of recent years to sketch the development trends. What has happened? And what can we expect?’

Wireless

Leo de Vreede's team is working on the new generation of wireless telecommunications. One of the goals we are chasing here is to reduce energy consumption. Because the higher the frequency, data speed and coverage of a 5G network, for example, the more energy it uses. Together with Morteza Alavi – Assistant Professor of Electronic Circuits and Architectures – they are working on a revolutionary concept for a digital transmitter that will drastically reduce this energy consumption. A fine example of this is the paper by Mohammad Reza Beikmirza. In his paper, Mohammad demonstrates that this entirely new approach makes it possible to comply with the most stringent 5G requirements using a single integrated circuit, even in the case of considerably lower energy consumption. De Vreede: ‘What we are also seeing is that there is an increasing need for receivers that can flexibly receive different frequencies without being troubled by interference from all kinds of other incoming signals via the aerial.’ Masoud Babaie and Mohammad Ali have developed a tunable receiver for this, that filters all the unwanted signals itself without the need for external filters to pick up all the interference.

Qubits

And then there is the pioneering work by Fabio Sebastiano and Masoud Babaie (again). Together they are trying to figure out the best way to build and use a quantum computer – a powerful computer that processes information in a totally new way. It is expected that such a quantum computer will eventually open up the doors to all kinds of radical applications, for example being able to find out the best way to use medicines far more quickly. For a quantum computer to work well, qubits need to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures, up to four degrees above zero (Kelvin). Handy to know: quantum bits – also known as qubits – are the building blocks of a quantum computer. Their role can be compared to that of standard bits in a conventional computer. Right now the cooling of these qubits only takes place at room temperature.

According to Sebastiano and Babaie, it should be easy to close this temperature gap with just a couple of wires. This is fine for the small number of qubits now in use, but impractical for the millions of qubits needed for the future quantum computer. During the previous edition of the ISSCC, Sebastiano showed that a CMOS integrated circuit can control qubits, even at -270 degrees Celsius. ‘But,’ explains Sebastiano, ‘controlling qubits is just the beginning. Ultimately you also want to be able to read out the qubits. One of the things we will be showing during this edition of the ISSCC is that the readout circuits can also function at cryogenic temperatures.’

Doing incredibly fast calculations to develop even better new medicines. That is just one of the things that will be possible in the future thanks to a quantum computer. It’s the dream of Fabio Sebastiano. Read more about his dream here: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/dreaming-of-the-quantum-computer

Proud

What can TU Delft be most proud of during this edition of the ISSCC? Makinwa: ‘Of the successful combination of old guard and young talent. Albert Theuwissen, for example, has been working in this field for years, while Bishnu Patra and Bagas Prabowo are still carrying out their PhD research. There is enormous strength in this match of young and old. The entire conference this year is taking place online, from 13 to 22 February. Normally you would spend the week attending various presentations of papers, but this time you can read the papers beforehand and put your difficult questions via internet.

Contact

Dave Boomkens

Communications Officer at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science,

+31 6 40 28 75 77

[email protected]

European Microwave Week 2020

• Monday, 1 February 2021

Researchers from our Department, specifically from MS3, ELCA, QuTech, and THz groups, played a tremendous role both in the organisation of the event itself, originally planned to take physically place in Utrecht here in the Netherlands, and in the scientific contributions in the diverse fields of automotive technology, radar sensing, and microwave, THz, and quantum components and techniques.

Our scientific contributions included over 6 papers accepted and presented, 7 invited talks at different organised workshops and short courses, and at the Doctoral School and the Automotive Forum.

The most visible roles in the organisation of the even were the General TPC Chair, Prof Yarovoy, and the Treasurer, Dr Lager, plus the many researchers who volunteered as reviewers. Contributors to the scientific program of the conference in invited talks and workshops were also Dr Fioranelli, Dr Spirito, Dr Babaie, Dr Cavallo, Dr Sebastiano, Prof Vaucher, in addition to many PhD candidates and postdocs.

For more information on the event proceedings with papers and workshops, look at https://www.eumweek.com/docs/programme.pdf.

‘Rapid developments of LEDs offers all kinds of medical potential’

• Tuesday, 12 January 2021

You can use ultraviolet light from LEDs to combat coronavirus. But it’s not as simple as commercial providers are presenting it right now, concludes Professor Kouchi Zhang. On the need for a sound scientific basis and the potential for LEDs in medical applications.

Cardiac mapping of very young children reveals conduction disorders related to atrial fibrillation

• Friday, 8 January 2021

Research of Medical Delta professor prof. dr. Natasja de Groot (Erasmus MC and TU Delft)

Albert Theuwissen plenairy spreaker ISSCC 2021 (International Solid-State Circuits Conference )

• Wednesday, 6 January 2021

http://isscc.org/

Titel

There’ s more to the picture than meets the eye, and in the future it will become only much more

Abstract

Over the past five decades, solid-state imaging has gone through a difficult “childhood”, changing technology during its “adolescence”, and finally growing up to become a mature, “adult” technology that can compete with the human visual system when it comes to image quality. State-of-the-art mobile devices enjoyed by consumers, rely on a multi-disciplinary mixture of analog electronics, digital circuits, mixed-signal design, optical know-how, device physics, semiconductor technology and algorithm development. As a result, the CMOS image sensors utilized in today’s mobile phones come close to perfection as far as imaging characteristics are concerned. However this does not mean that further developments in the field are no longer necessary. On the contrary, new technologies and new materials are opening up new dimensions and new applications which complement the classical imaging functionality of the sensors. This trend will ultimately convert the image sensor landscape from image capturing to smart vision. Consequently, the future of solid-state imaging will not revolve around the shooting of beautiful images only, as the market driver will no longer only be limited to the mobile phone market.

Delft Bioengineering Institute awards Tiago Costa and Massimo Mastrangeli with 20KEUR grants

• Wednesday, 16 December 2020

Dr. Tiago Costa (BE) and Dr. Massimo Mastrangeli (ECTM) have been awarded grants of 20KEUR by the Delft Bioengineering Institute (BEI) to pursue their research projects on ultrasound-based regeneration of neuronal circuits and medical implants to investigate cell mechanobiology, respectively.
Their multidisciplinary project proposals, conceived to bridge expertise among different departments within TU Delft, are among the 5 selected for the grants out of the 13 total submissions received by the BEI in response to their first call for proposals.
The projects will be run respectively in collaboration with Dr. Dimphna Meijer (TNW/BN) and Dr. Mohammad J. Mirzaali (3mE/BM).
Below are short summaries of the projects.

Regenerating neuronal circuits using ultrasound

People suffering from neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis, have impaired neuronal circuits. Generation of new neuronal circuits by using a patient’s own stem cells may prove helpful in treating the disease. One of the difficulties in inducing neurons from stem cells, is the low efficiency rate we are able to achieve so far. In this project, BEI PIs Tiago Costa of Microelectronics (EWI) and Dimphna Meijer of Bionanoscience (TNW) join forces to explore the use of ultrasound for effectively building active neuronal networks from stem cells.

Project title: SoundCircuit: Regeneration of neuronal circuits using ultrasound
BEI PIs: Tiago Costa (EWI/ME), Dimphna Meijer (TNW/BN)

Medical implants to investigate cell mechanobiology

In order to study the cell’s behavior and differentiation, we need to be able to measure the mechanical, electrical, and biochemical signals that are dynamically transmitted throughout the cells. This requires the creation of biomaterial models equipped with different sensor types. In this project, BEI PIs Mohammad J. Mirzaali of Biomechanical Engineering (3mE) and Massimo Mastrangeli of Microelectronics (EWI) will team up to design, fabricate and test the proof-of-concept for medical implants equipped with force sensors that can reach a sensitivity level of one micronewton, so the mechanobiology of cells can be effectively investigated.

Project title: Sixth Sense Biomaterials
BEI PIs: Mohammad J. Mirzaali (3mE/BM), Massimo Mastrangeli (EWI/ME)

Read the full story on the TU Delft page.

Success!

New Associate Professor: Justin Dauwels

• Saturday, 12 December 2020

Per 1 January 2021, Prof. Dauwels starts at CAS. His expertise is in statistical signal processing and machine learning. Welcome!

EUSIPCO 2020 - virtual event on 18-22 January 2021

• Sunday, 6 December 2020

The organizing committee of EUSIPCO 2020 has decided that EUSIPCO 2020 will be a full virtual conferencedue to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic and resulting travel restrictions.

We are excited to be able to provide a virtual venue for EUSIPCO 2020 and hope you will join us and learn about the latest developments in research and technology for signal processing.

Please register today for a reduced fee of E 50, or sign up for one of the tutorials for E 25.

Microimplants: electricity instead of pills

• Monday, 30 November 2020

Interview in MEDICA Magazine with Prof. Vasiliki Giagka, Group Leader "Technologies of Bioelectronics", Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM and Assistant Professor of Bioelectronics, Delft University of Technology

CAS startup Innatera Nanosystems raises €5 million

• Wednesday, 25 November 2020

Innatera, started by CAS members Sumeet, Amir and Rene, is making the next step

Professor Wouter Serdijn legt in het consumenten programma Radar het bedrog achter de Healy bloot

• Tuesday, 17 November 2020

See the program

https://radar.avrotros.nl/uitzendingen/gemist/item/valse-medische-claims-achter-de-healy

EuMW Announces Virtual Event for EuMW 2020

• Friday, 6 November 2020

In light of the global pandemic, growing numbers of cases in Europe, and related measures imposed by the respective authorities, European Microwave Week (EuMW) organizers have decided to make EuMW 2020 a virtual event this year while simultaneously planning for the next in-person event in London in October of 2021. EuMW 2020 includes the European Microwave Conference, the 15th European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conference, and the 17th European Radar Conference.

EuMW is organized by Horizon House on behalf of the European Microwave Association (EuMA), an international non-profit association with a scientific, educational and technical purpose. Earlier this year, event managers postponed the live, in-person event in Utrecht, The Netherlands to 10-15 January 2021 in the hopes that the global pandemic would have subsided by then. It has now become evident that it would be extremely difficult to safely gather attendees and exhibitors in person this year.

Event management has selected the vFairs platform to host the conference and virtual exhibit. VFairs is an immersive environment that allows users to comfortably browse content, network with exhibitors or peers, and attend live webinars with only a few clicks.

“As the next best thing to an in-person conference, we have now embraced all the good things that a virtual conference can bring. I am excited to make this happen!" said Frank van Vliet, EuMW 2020 General Chair. The EUMW 2020 virtual event will begin on 10 January 2021 and last until 15 January 2021. Attendees can access conference sessions and visit the virtual booths until 5 February. The event management team is reaching out to exhibitors and speakers now to arrange for the transition to a virtual program for EuMW 2020.

“Individuals and business worldwide are quickly adapting to the pandemic. Fortunately, the options for virtual events have improved considerably over just the last few months. End users have much more experience and comfort with virtual events than before COVID. Although nothing can replace the experience of a live conference and exhibition, we are confident that the virtual EuMW 2020 will be a great show for the microwave and RF community,” said Ivar Anderson Bazzy, President of Horizon House.

"We all want to see each other in person again, chat, talk, drink and eat together, exchange latest information but also gossips, etc. That is why we decided to keep a live event in Utrecht alive as long as possible until it really was no longer possible. The alternative, a full virtual conference and trade-show is now becoming a reality. I am sure that we can create an event with the same look and feel as the original live event, with many options for interaction and virtual meeting places while not compromising in quality. Don't miss it, it will be a unique event in the best traditions of EuMW where you can find information that you don't find anywhere else. Follow our posts on social media to stay up to date," said Frank van den Bogaart, President of EuMA.

The technical program remains robust with plans to transition all scheduled talks to the vFairs conference platform. The conference program is available here: https://www.eumweek.com/docs/programme.pdf

Veni for Dr. Matús Rybak

• Friday, 6 November 2020

His research;

Zooming in on star factories in the early Universe

Observatory Will a star feel a difference between being born in Orion today, or in a dusty “star factory” galaxy 10 billion years ago? In this project, astronomers will use a new nanotechnology-powered instrument and magnification by gravity to understand the formation of new-born stars in the early universe.

New sensor chips; low-cost, smart and efficient

• Wednesday, 28 October 2020

In a greenhouse, cucumbers are growing beautifully. A grower is cultivating them under the most favourable conditions, closely monitoring the precise amount of water they need and whether the temperature is optimal, to ensure that the cucumbers that end up on your plate are juicy, flavoursome and green. The grower’s job is by no means carefree, however. What if the crop is blighted by some disease? One of the strategies that researchers are working on to prevent this involves an “electronic nose”. All plants, cucumbers included, emit a scent. An electronic nose can immediately detect whether something is wrong. The same technique can be applied in a chicken coop or cowshed. As soon as a disease breaks out, the electronic nose will detect it and give a warning.

For complete article;

https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/new-sensor-chips-low-cost-smart-and-efficient/

Treating your disorder with electronic medicines

• Thursday, 15 October 2020

Increasing numbers of people now have a chip in their body which they can use to make payments or check in to public transport. “It sounds futuristic, but the technology is not that extraordinary”, explains Prof. Wouter Serdijn. “My dog has something similar.”

The Matlab code has been published on the Code Ocean web-site

• Monday, 5 October 2020

Jianping Wang published the Matlab codes for the article "3-D Short-Range Imaging With Irregular MIMO Arrays Using NUFFT-Based Range Migration Algorithm":

Professor Ir. Leendert (Leo) Krul passed away

• Tuesday, 22 September 2020

Met innig medeleven hebben wij kennins genomen van het overlijden van Prof. Ir. Leendert (Leo) Krul. Met grote vakkundigheid en toewijding heeft hij een enorme bijdrage geleverd aan het vakgebied “Telecommunicatie” voor de TU Delft. Wij wensen de familie veel sterkte met dit verlies.

With heartfelt sympathy, we have taken note of the death of Prof. Ir. Leendert (Leo) Krul. With great skill and dedication, he has made an enormous contribution to the field of “Telecommunication” for TU Delft. We wish the family much strength with this loss.

Michiel Pertijs will present at ESSCIRC/ESSDERC Virtual Educationals

• Friday, 4 September 2020

Michiel will contribute to the upcoming ESSCIRC/ESSDERC Virtual Educational events (see https://www.esscirc-essderc2020.org/educationals). He will give an invited talk in the Workshop on Emerging Solutions for Imaging Devices, Circuits and Systems. In his talk, Michiel will show how integrated circuits play an enabling role for the next generation of smart ultrasound devices. The ESSCIRC/ESSDERC Virtual Educational events are available online between Sept. 7 and Oct. 16, with a live sessions on Sept. 14 and 15.

CUM LAUDE PhD Defense – Yanki Aslan

• Friday, 28 August 2020

On Wednesday, August 26th, 2020 Yanki Aslan, the Ph.D. candidate in the MS3 group, successfully defended his Ph.D. work entitled “Antenna Array Synthesis and Beamforming for 5G Applications: An Interdisciplinary Approach” and graduated cum laude.

Congratulations to Yanki for this excellent result!

Now dr. Aslan will continue to work within the MS3 group as a postdoctoral researcher on a project in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Abstract:

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 the 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.

New project: PCaVision

• Thursday, 27 August 2020

Prostate cancer detection using ultrasound

Best student paper award VLSI Symposium for PhD Efraïm Eland

• Wednesday, 12 August 2020

At the 2020 VLSI Symposium, Efraïm Eland got selected for the 2020 Best Student Paper Award! He will receive the award at the 2021 VLSI Symposium in Kyoto, Japan. The award was for the design of a high dynamic range zoom ADC for audio applications with state-of-the-art energy-efficiency in audio ADCs. Shoubhik Karmakar, Burak Gönen, Robert van Veldhoven and Kofi Makinwa were co-authors, and the work was done in collaboration with NXP Semiconductors. The resulting paper can be found here.

SSCS WYE Webinar

• Tuesday, 4 August 2020

Webinar: To Academia, or to Industry, That is the Question. Presented by: Kofi Makinwa and Shin-Lien Lu

Abstract:

REGISTER TODAY!

Cum Laude PhD Defense Sven van Berkel

• Thursday, 16 July 2020

The research

In millimeter and submillimeter-wave radiometric imaging systems, a persistent goal is the increase in the speed of acquisition of the image while maintaining a high sensitivity. Typically, the highest sensitivity is achieved by cryogenically cooling the detectors, specifically in astronomical applications. However, for the purpose of low-cost imaging applications, it is desirable to operate at room temperature. Without cryogenically cooling, the electronic noise introduced by the detectors becomes dominant, making the detectors less sensitive. In this thesis focal plane architectures are proposed that maximizes the imaging speed of radiometers operating at room temperature without using any amplification circuitry. It is shown that in such scenario a practical image acquisition speed can still be achieved when a very broad portion of the THz-band is exploited. Ultimately, the imaging speed is maximized when the FPA is undersampled, implying a tradeoff in the size of the optics. The analysis is substantiated by a case study with recently developed wideband leaky lens antenna feeds operating from 200 to 600 GHz. THe entire front end has been developed, fabricated (CMOS Technology) and characterized, demonstrating the complete feasibility of passive imaging in the THz frequencies at neglibile costs. The implications for the automotive and security applications are dramatic, as detecting obstacles in fog, and spotting concealed weapons or bombs can now be done at negligible costs (tens of euros). That these systems will be in our future lives is now sure. When this will happen, as usual, will depend on the market request.

Future Dr. Sven van Berkel

Sven has already signed a contract at NASA, in California where he will start working as soon as the Covid lockdown stops.

Max Schöpe wins 3rd prize in student paper competition at FUSION 2020

• Thursday, 16 July 2020

PhD student Max Schöpe won the 3rd prize in the student paper competition at this year’s edition of the International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION) for his paper “Multi-Task Sensor Resource Balancing Using Lagrangian Relaxation and Policy Rollout”.

For more than 20 years the FUSION conference has been recognised as a premier forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas in the field of information fusion and its impacts on our society. The presented papers cover foundational, technological, and application-focused innovations in the sensor, data, information and knowledge fusion scientific domains. This year 169 papers were accepted and presented at the conference in total.

Moore4Medical kicks off

• Thursday, 16 July 2020

The ECSEL Joint Undertaking Moore4Medical kicked off last June, 2020 with the overarching objective to accelerate innovation in electronic medical devices. Moore4Medical is masterminded by prof. Ronald Dekker (Philips Research & ECTM) and sees important involvement and vast opportunities for TU Delft’s Microelectronics department.

The project addresses emerging medical applications and technologies that offer significant new opportunities for the Electronic Systems & Components (ECS) industry, including: bioelectronic medicines, organ-on-chip, drug adherence monitoring, smart ultrasound, radiation free interventions and continuous monitoring. The new technologies will help fighting the increasing cost of healthcare by reducing the need for hospitalisation, helping to develop personalized therapies, and realising intelligent point-of-care diagnostic tools.

Moore4Medical will bring together 66 selected companies, universities and institutes from 12 countries who will develop open technology platforms for these emerging fields to help them bridge “the Valley of Death” in shorter time and at lower cost. Open technology platforms used by multiple users for multiple applications with the prospect of medium-to-high volume markets are an attractive proposition for the European ECS industry. The combination of typical MedTech and Pharma applications with an ECS style platform approach will enhance the competitiveness for the emerging medical domains addressed in Moore4Medical. With value and IP moving from the technology level towards applications and solutions, defragmentation and open technology platforms will be key in acquiring and maintaining a premier position for Europe in the forefront of affordable healthcare.

TU Delft’s Microelectronics department leads two of the six workpackages represented in Moore4Medical: the Implanatable Devices workpackage, led by Dr. Vasiliki “Vasso” Giagka (BE & Fraunhofer IZM), and the Organ-on-Chip workpackage, led by Dr. Massimo “Max” Mastrangeli (ECTM). Both workpackages will see the interaction and contribution of many world-class industrial and academic players to develop respectively bioelectronic medicines and smart multi-well plate platforms, and will provide a rich opportunity to capitalize on and further expand the standing expertise of the BE and ECTM groups of the department.

We wish Moore4Medical success!

Andra Velea wins Audience Award of the Young Medical Delta Thesis Awards

• Friday, 10 July 2020

We are proud to announce that the MSc thesis of Andrada Velea on the development of 'Flexible Passive and Active Graphene-based Spinal Cord Implants' won the audience award of the Young Medical Delta Thesis Awards 2020 with 418 out of the 1024 votes. The research theme is a successful synergy of the expertises of the ECTM and BE sections, and was supervised by Vasiliki Giagka and Sten Vollebregt. Andrada’s work has led to 2 IEEE conference publications, among which the prestigious 33rd IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (IEEE MEMS 2020), which took place earlier this year in Vancouver. We would like to congratulate her for this great achievement.

Medical Delta Professors appointed

• Monday, 22 June 2020

Medical Delta appointed 9 new MD Professors, with joint appointments at LUMC and TU Delft, or Erasmus MC and TU Delft. Three of these are connected to the MicroElectronics Department: Wouter Serdijn, Andrew Webb, and Natasja de Groot.

Prof. Dr. Natasja de Groot (Erasmus MC, TU Delft) researches the use of sensors and catheters to more accurately diagnose and treat cardiac arrhythmias. At TU Delft, she will have an affiliation with CAS and BE.

Prof. Dr. ir. Wouter Serdijn (TU Delft, Erasmus MC) researches the use of bioelectronics in medical research. At EMC, he will have an affiliation with Neuroscience.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Webb (LUMC, TU Delft) researches how imaging can be more widely available for medical purposes. He is a professor in MRI at LUMC, and already had a part-time appointment at CAS.

The new Medical Delta professors introduce themselves and their research in a short video. This can be viewed here:

Impulse health & technology research with nine new Medical Delta professors

• Thursday, 18 June 2020

Prof. Dr. ir. Wouter Serdijn researches the use of bioelectronics in medical research (part of Medical Delta Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab and Medical Neurodelta)

Medical Delta Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab

Cardiac arrhythmia is the cardiovascular epidemic of the 21st century. The number of patients diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia is rapidly increasing due to ageing, obesity, diabetes and elevated blood pressure. Atrium fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia. It is a progressive disease, which means that episodes of arrhythmia progress from short-lasting episodes to episodes which are continuously present and no longer terminate spontaneously. Atrium fibrillation may cause stroke and heart failure and is even associated with death.

Treatments are often not successful, but a new patient-specific therapy can improve existing treatments. This can be achieved by measuring the degree of electropathology (‘staging the arrhythmia’). However, this is still not yet possible because there are no diagnostic tools to measure electropathology. It is therefore also not possible to recognize patients at risk of arrhythmia early. In addition, there are no therapies specifically targeting electropathology.

Treatment of Arrhythmia

Electrical signals recorded from young hearts usually have a simple morphology, as electrical waves propagate smoothly through cardiac tissue. Over the years, these electrical signals may become more complex (electropathology) due to damaged cardiac tissue. When the degree of electropathology exceeds a certain threshold, cardiac arrhythmia may occur.

Treatment of cardiac arrhythmia is still often not successful, says Natasja de Groot, professor and cardiologist-electrophysiologist at Erasmus MC. Current treatment consists of either an ‘electrical shock’ to restore the normal heart rhythm, drugs or ablative therapy (eliminating the cardiac tissue that is causing arrhythmia). Unfortunately, these therapies have side-effects and are only moderately effective.

Unravel electropathology

The aim of the Medical Delta Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab is to reduce the cardiac arrhythmia burden by unravelling arrhythmia-related electropathology and designing and testing novel bio-electrical diagnostic tools and therapies targeting electropathology. This enables staging of the cardiac arrhythmia and selection of the appropriate treatment in the individual patient, thereby improving therapy outcome.

A first step is to unravel electropathology by quantifying electrical parameters. For this purpose, a 192 electrode-array has been designed to record electrical signals directly from the surface of the heart during open heart surgery. Advance signal processing techniques are then used to comprehend electrical activation patterns during arrhythmia. Linking electrical signals with the structure of cardiac tissue is essential to unravel the mechanisms of arrhythmia. The future goal is to assess the degree of electropathology using non-invasive mapping techniques.

Arrhythmia-on-a-chip

To further unravel the mechanisms of arrhythmia, this consortium aims to design an arrhythmia-on-a-chip platform enabling the investigation of electrical conduction in relation to e.g. genetic defects.

Collaboration

This program is a collaboration betwee biologists, engineers and medical doctors from Erasmus MC, LUMC and TUDelft. They combine their unique expertise on advanced signal recording and processing techniques, cardiac mapping tools and arrhythmia related molecular mechanics.

TU Delft launches first eight TU Delft AI Labs

• Wednesday, 17 June 2020

TU Delft is setting up eight new AI Labs to investigate how artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate scientific progress. To this end, scientists researching AI will be working together with scientist who use AI in their research. The first of these eight interdisciplinary AI labs will be followed by another sixteen in the course of 2020 and 2021.

Rapid developments in AI, data science and digitalisation can accelerate scientific progress in all fields, ranging from medical science to infrastructural research, and across all levels, from fundamental to applied research. TU Delft is boosting collaboration between AI scientists and scientists in other domains, with the launch of a series of TU Delft AI Labs.

Within the MACHINA Lab, for example, researchers in machine learning work together with materials scientists on the analysis of existing materials and the development of new materials. Within the AidroLab, researchers in geometric deep learning are working with researchers in water management on subjects such as how to improve flood forecasting in the urban environment. Researchers in the CiTyAI-Lab will use a wide variety of data sources to map the impact of the city's 'fabric' on its inhabitants in order to improve the living environment.

Education

Investments

DeTAIL: Delft Tensor AI Lab

Real-life biomedical data is often high-dimensional. Current signal processing solutions artificially segment such high-dimensional data into shorter one- or two-dimensional arrays, causing information loss by destroying correlations between these data. At the same time, advances in biomedical sensor and imaging technology – such as substantially larger recording durations of wearable sensor technology and the unprecedented increase in spatial and temporal resolution of the latest neuroimaging techniques – have led to ever increasing data sets. Tensors (multi-dimensional arrays) are the data structure of choice in artificial intelligence research to exploit the full potential of these data in a timely manner.

Within the DeTAIL Lab, we focus on both the development and application of novel low-rank tensor methods for biomedical signal processing, thereby enabling a much faster training of AI models from large datasets without any loss of accuracy.

We will exploit an as of yet unused property of real-life data; the fact that different modes of data may be correlated. Using tensor decompositions, we can find these correlations as well as compress the data, speeding up computations significantly.

Our findings will, for example, be applied to detect events, such as epileptic seizures, through the classification of multichannel time series data based on labelled training data. We also aim to reveal hidden structure, such as functional networks, in neuroimaging data. As biomedical innovation is a defining characteristic of the TU Delft, we will develop an interfaculty elective course on AI tensor methods to satisfy the expected continual increase in demand for such knowledge

In Memoriam – Earl McCune (1956 – 2020)

• Tuesday, 2 June 2020

In one of his last interviews, Earl told us that he was willing to fight a few persistent beliefs in the field of wireless communication. For instance, he was busy making 5G more energy efficient. A challenge in which, according to Earl, all links in the communication chain need to be overhauled. Being both a professor at TU Delft and entrepreneur in California, Earl was involved in several major projects in this field. In Silicon Valley, he followed the idea of building a single large switch in which the available power varies each time. At TU Delft he worked with various groups on a solution consisting of hundreds of smaller transistors of variable size.

The love for building things

One evening, when Earl was twelve, his father explained a few months’ worth of network theory of electrical circuits to him. From that moment on, Earl became enchanted by the subject. As a result, he worked on technology development in the field of radiofrequency and wireless design for more than 45 years, most of which he spent in industry. ‘I just love to build things,’ Earl told about that, ‘and I have seen a lot of what works, and what doesn’t work.’ Although he actually enjoyed his early retirement in California, he couldn’t do nothing. Because he still wanted to help solve society’s problems, he accepted a position as professor at TU Delft.

Warm personality

Earl will not only be remembered for his boundless enthusiasm for the improvement of systems, and the inexhaustible amount of knowledge he brought with him; more than that, Earl was a mentor, an inspirer, an adventurer and a warm personality who put a smile on many people's faces with his dry sense of Californian humour.

Opening Airport Technology Lab

• Tuesday, 26 May 2020

This Friday, May 29 at 15:30, the opening of the Airport Technology Lab will be done by Ron Louwerse (Director of the Rotterdam The Hague Airport), Prof. dr. ir. Tim van der Hagen (President of the Board and Rector Magnificus of TU Delft) and Henk Jan Gerzee (Chief Digital Officer of the Royal Schiphol Group).

The Microwave Sensing, Signals, and Systems section (Department of Microelectronics, EEMCS faculty), chaired by Professor DSc. Alexander Yarovoy, participates in the Laboratory and is going to use their professional expertise and advanced radar facilities to develop modern remote sensing techniques to extend the sensing capability of airport radars for constant weather monitoring. This real-time monitoring with high spatial and temporal resolution is aiming to improve air traffic planning (departing/arriving on time, less fuel, less noise, less pollution, etc.) and safety.

The Airport Technology Lab (ATL) is an organization for the development, test, and demonstration of the innovative products and services for airports. The digitization of everything that happens at airports and the application of Artificial Intelligence is increasing exponentially. With all that data and the right IT platform, companies can create and test new services and products. The most successful innovations will help to provide passengers with more comfort and convenience, make the airliners maintain smoother and more efficient flights, and the handlers will optimize their processes. Ultimately, the airport also contributes (extra) to its social responsibility to reduce air pollution, CO2 emissions and noise pollution.

ECTM developing UVC LED test system to study virus disinfection

• Saturday, 23 May 2020

Read the interview with Tianyi Jin who, together with 3 MSc students, the group of Professor Fouchier of the Erasmus MC, and supported by the TUDelft COVID-19 fund, is developing a platform to test the disinfecting power of UVC LEDs.

Professor Wouter Serdijn appointed as Medical Delta Professor

• Monday, 18 May 2020

Since 2011 Medical Delta professorships have been established and approved by the executive board of Delft University of Technology, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University. At the moment 13 professors are active as Medical Delta professor.

A Medical Delta professorship is an honorary title for those who meet the requirements that they have double appointments at, at least, two of the three universities participating in Medical Delta and are active in research and teaching in a way that makes a Medical Delta appointment appropriate.

In the last year the board of Medical Delta together with the scientific council of the Medical Delta and governors of the academic knowledge institutes developed a process to identify the professors that fulfil these criteria. Based on this process a number of professors have been identified to be eligible for this honorary title of which professor Wouter Serdijn is one.

Kleine Stromstöße mit heilsamer Wirkung (Eng: Small surges of electricity with a healing effect)

• Thursday, 30 April 2020

Winzige Chips statt Medikamente – leitet die „Bioelektronik“ eine neue Ära der Medizin ein? Ein Überblick über die neuen Ansätze (Eng: Tiny chips instead of medication - does "bioelectronics" usher in a new era of medicine? An overview of the new approaches). Article by Susanne Donner with, a.o. Vasiliki Giagka in Der Tagespiegel.

How smart sensors can prevent epilepsy

• Tuesday, 21 April 2020

In Delft and Rotterdam, Wouter Serdijn and Christos Strydis are collaborating on a network of sensors and stimulators for the body. By picking up signals and sending the brain a rapid wake-up call, they hope to be able to predict and prevent epileptic fits. ‘If we can close the loop, we’ll have the technology ready within three years.’ Article in Nodes, with Christos Strydis and Wouter Serdijn.

Bachelor student Dewwret Sitaldin wins first prize 3-E Royal SMIT BSc prize

• Thursday, 9 April 2020

Abstract

The main goal of this Electrical Engineering Bachelor project is to build a solar-power system for a quad-copter that will extend its battery life or rather its flight time. The complete system is comprised of a PV system (PV), a micro-controller (MC) and a DC/DC converter (DC) which was mounted onto the drone. On each subsystem, a separate thesis was written and this paper serves as a general yet complete overview of the design process, simulations and test results of a fully functioning solar drone with the theses attached as appendices for reference.

The original (optimistic) aim of an extension of at least 25% of the battery lifetime was set by our supervisors. For the PV part SunPower C60 IBC cells were used (no specific selection was done) together with a (borrowed) custom-built drone (not built by this team, it was borrowed from another research group) as a starting point. After analysing the limitations of the drone and the cells, multiple configurations were designed and a mathematical model that determines power usage, energy costs per solar cell and the optimum amount of cells was developed. A SEPIC converter will extract solar energy from a PV-module in order to charge the battery of the drone. The converter will be controlled by the micro-controller subgroup using MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracker) algorithm and this will be done by supplying a PWM signal to the converter.

Since the drone was not specifically designed for the project (thus not optimised when it comes to lift capacity and room for cell placement), the efficiency of the solar cells was not sufficient to extend the fight time by 25% (15.1% in summer, 5.6% in winter). Since these bottlenecks can easily be eliminated by replacing the drone and the cells, these results serve as a proof of concept and are an excellent starting point for future research

Outstanding TU Delft score at ISSCC 2020

• Friday, 28 February 2020

This year's iteration of the world's top conference in IC design, the International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC 2020), saw the TU Delft represented by no less than 7 papers from the Department of Microelectronics - an outstanding achievement that does not even include 3 additional papers presented by former TU Delft alumni, currently affiliated with Bosch, ADI and SiTime.

ME's papers were in the following areas:

• Precision Analog Circuits (Makinwa): An energy-efficient temperature sensor and an accurate frequency references, both with state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance;
• Amplifiers (Fan, Pertijs, Makinwa): A class-D power amplifier (SOTA linearity and efficiency) and an amplifier for ultrasound systems with continuously variable gain (a first);
• Circuits for Quantum computers (Sebastiano, Babaie): A multi-qubit controller (capable of handling 128 qubits, also a first) and a high-performance oscillator (also a first!), both operating at 4K;
• Human computer interfaces (Pertijs): A chip-set that enables pen/finger-driven electronic white-boards with SOTA resolution and frame rate;

Some more stories made this event additionally special:

• The TU Delft was the largest European contributor to the conference;
• TU Delft's PhD student Jeroen van Dijk participated in the 1st ever ISSCC Quiz show!

Congratulations to all co-authors and PIs for this great collective achievement!

List of contributions:

Ç. Gürleyük, S. Pan and K. A.A. Makinwa,
"A 16MHz CMOS RC Frequency Reference with ±400ppm Inaccuracy from 45°C to 85°C After Digital Linear Temperature Compensation";

S. Karmakar, H. Zhang, R. Van Veldhoven, L. Breems, M. Berkhout, Q. Fan and K. A.A. Makinwa,
"A 28W, -108.9dB/-102.2dB THD/THD+N, Hybrid ΔΣ-PWM Class-D Audio Amplifier with 91% Peak Efficiency and Reduced EMI Emission";

S. Pan and Kofi A.A. Makinwa,
"A CMOS Resistor-Based Temperature Sensor with a 10fJ∙K2 Resolution FoM and 0.4°C (3σ) Inaccuracy From −55°C to 125°C after a 1-point Trim";

E. Kang, M. Tan, J.-S. An, Z.-Y. Chang, P. Vince, N. Sénégond, T. Mateo, C. Meynier and M. Pertijs,
"A 2 pA/√Hz Transimpedance Amplifier for Miniature Ultrasound Probes with 36dB Continuous Time-Gain Compensation";

J.-S. An, J.-H. Ra, E. Kang, M. A. P. Pertijs and S.-H. Han,
"A Capacitive Touch Chipset with 33.9dB Charge-Overflow Reduction Using Amplitude-Modulated Multi-Frequency Excitation and Wireless Power and Data Transfer to an Active Stylus";

B. Patra, J. P. G. van Dijk, S. Subramanian, A. Corna, X. Xue, C. Jeon, F. Sheikh, E. Juarez-Hernandez, B. Perez Esparza, H. Rampurawala, B. Carlton, N. Samkharadze, S. Ravikumar, C. Nieva, S. Kim, H.-J. Lee, A. Sammak, G. Scappucci, M. Veldhorst, L. M. K. Vandersypen, M. Babaie, F. Sebastiano, E. Charbon and S. Pellerano,
"A Scalable Cryo-CMOS 2-to-20GHz Digitally Intensive Controller for 4×32 Frequency Multiplexed Spin Qubits/Transmons in 22nm FinFET Technology for Quantum Computers";

J. Gong, Y. Chen, F. Sebastiano, E. Charbon and M. Babaie,
"A 200dB FoM 4-to-5GHz Cryogenic Oscillator with an Automatic Common-Mode Resonance Calibration for Quantum Computing Applications".

Therapies without drugs -- Tech News

• Tuesday, 25 February 2020

Fraunhofer researchers Tim Hosman and Vasiliki Giagka are investigating the potential of microimplants to stimulate nerve cells and treat chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, or Parkinson’s disease. Find out what makes this form of treatment so appealing and which challenges the researchers still have to master.

Prof. Klaas Bult receives IEEE Donald O. Pederson award

• Monday, 24 February 2020

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award was established by the Board of Directors in 1987. The award was renamed the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits in 2005. Don was a co-founder of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council, the forerunner of today's Solid-State Circuits Society, in 1966, and he was instrumental in launching the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits that same year. Recipient selection is administered through the Technical Field Awards Council of the IEEE Awards Board. The award consists of a bronze medal, certificate, and honorarium.

Student Alberto brings wireless monitoring a step closer

• Saturday, 22 February 2020

In September 2017 Alberto Gancedo started his master programme Microelectronics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS). Alberto’s ambition was bigger than obtaining his degree. His ambition was to develop a small, portable and cheap monitoring device to detect unusual brain activity in premature babies directly after birth. Thanks to donations from EEMCS alumni, Alberto could start his master’s at TU Delft and work towards this ambition. Alberto graduated in the beginning of February 2020 and proudly updates Delft University Fund and EEMCS alumni about his achievements.

Christos Strydis winner of the Delft Health Competition

• Friday, 24 January 2020

During the Future Health at TU Delft Symposium of January 23, Christos Strydis (Computer Engineering, Bioelectronics and Neuroscience) won one of the three prizes of 10,000 Euro in the Delft Health Competition.

Aleksandar Jovic's paper highlighted as an Editor's Pick in Applied Optics

• Monday, 6 January 2020

The manuscript by Dr. Aleksandar Jovic et al. entitled "A Self-Aligned Micro-Optic Integrated Photonic Platform", recently published in Applied Optics, has been highlighted as Editor's Pick for the journal.

Editor's Picks serve to highlight articles with excellent scientific quality and are representative of the work taking place in a specific field - in this case, integrated phonotics.

Congratulations, Aleksandar and co-authors!

Milica Dostanic wins Best poster award at International MicroNanoConference 2019

• Monday, 16 December 2019

Milica Dostanic, PhD candidate at the Electronic Components, Technology and Materials (ECTM) group, has won the Best poster award at this year's International MicroNanoConference (iMNC, held in Utrecht, NL) for her poster titled "A miniaturized EHT platform for contractile tissue measurements".

The poster featured joint work between ECTM and Leiden University Medical Center for the development and characterisation of the smallest engineered heart tissues to date.

Congratulations, Milica and co-authors!

Two NWO-HTSM proposals from ECTM accepted

• Friday, 13 December 2019

Fundamentals of Backside Metals System for 5G RF Power Modules (Prof. Zhang, Prof. Fan and Dr. Fan)
The 5G communication technology is expected to cover a wide range of applications, such as autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things (IoT), High-speed mobile network, etc. A robust and highly reliable RF power amplifier is key for the 5G system because it works in a harsh environment which involves high temperature, high humidity, high current density, and so forth. Currently, the industry is still working hard on the development of the RF power amplifier to meet the requirements of the 5G communication technology. One of the key challenges is the backside metals system (BSM). Various failure modes and mechanisms are interacting with each other under the influence of multiple loadings, such as high temperature, high humidity, as well as mechanical stresses. This proposal aims to develop fundamental physics-of-failure models, optimization method and design rule to predict and prevent the potential failures in the BSM of 5G RF power modules.

Reliability of Silicone Adhesives and Sealants in Electronic Devices (Prof. van Driel, Dr. van Zeijl, Dr. Yazdan Mehr)
This research aims at developing a fundamental understanding of failure mechanisms and reliability of silicone sealants and adhesives in electronic devices. Degradation of silicone adhesives and sealants is considered to be a major reliability risk in microelectronic components. Understanding the interrelation and attribution of different mechanical, working, and environmental stresses to the failure of silicone adhesives and sealant is a key step in developing physically-based reliability models for microelectronic devices. The multi-physical interaction between temperature, moisture, radiation and oxidation, and their influences on the structure and properties of sealants are not yet well understood. In this project dedicated experimental techniques will be combined with reliability models to understand and predict the lifetime of silicone adhesive and sealants in microelectronic devices under different working conditions.

"The Rising Stars of TU Delft" featuring Tiago da Costa

• Friday, 15 November 2019

Delft Health Initiative introduces "The rising stars of the TU Delft". Here we present stories of talented researchers, assistant and associate professors in the field of healthcare. The goal is to get to know the rising stars, read about their research and ambitions, and look for collaborations. Click below for the story of rising star Tiago da Costa.

Call for Papers: Bioelectronic medicine: engineering advances, physiological insights, and translational applications

• Thursday, 5 September 2019

Special issue of Bioelectronic Medicine, edited by Vasiliki Giagka, Stavros Zanos, Timir Datta-Chaudhuri, Loren Rieth, and Theodoros Zanos

Wouter Serdijn appointed theme leader of Delft Health Initiative 2.0's NeuroTech theme

• Wednesday, 4 September 2019

The Delft Health Initiative has laid the foundation for connected health-oriented research at TU Delft and will continue to focus expertise, develop talent and to connect researchers to national and international initiatives. Wouter Serdijn will lead this for Neurotechnology.

Dutch-Japanese astronomical instrument measures 49 shades of far-infrared

• Wednesday, 4 September 2019

The Dutch-Japanese made DESHIMA instrument has passed its first practical tests when measuring the distances and ages of distant galaxies. The core of the instrument is a chip the size of two euro coins that measures 49 shades of far infrared light. The developers of the spectrometer publish the results of their first measurement campaign (first light) on Monday 5 August in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Measuring distances and ages in the universe is a problem. The brightness of a star or a galaxy says little about age. Astronomers bypass this problem by measuring the doppler effect of light from galaxies. The redder the light, the higher the speed, the farther the galaxy. Unfortunately, the redshift of many galaxies in the early universe cannot be measured with visible light, because starlight is shaded by dust clouds surrounding these galaxies. Measuring the redshift of these galaxies requires observing in far infrared.

49 channels

In October 2017, Dutch and Japanese researchers, led by Akira Endo (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands), mounted the special chip on the Japanese ASTE telescope in North Chile. The superconducting chip is developed by Delft University of Technology and SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research. The chip contains one antenna, 49 filters and 49 detectors. The antenna captures radiation of various wavelengths. The filters unravel the radiation in 49 tones of infrared. The 49 detectors measure the intensity of the radiation. When a detector picks up a signal, it can be seen as a peak in a graph.

First light

The first tests with the telescope, the so-called first light, were promising. The astronomers first focused the telescope-with-chip on Mars, Saturn and a number of well-known stars and galaxies. When they saw the expected slope in the graph without significant problems, the researchers aimed the telescope at the well-known distant galaxy VV114 and saw the predicted redshift.

The researchers are now working on a chip that can cope with 300 tones of infrared instead of the current 49. This allows them to determine the distances to galaxies that have hitherto been hidden behind dust clouds. In addition, the researchers want to link multiple chips so that they can study multiple galaxies at the same time. The development must lead to a handy-sized imaging spectrometer that is easy to use on a ground based telescope and is a must for use with space telescopes.

Incidentally, the first tests on the telescope in Chile almost failed due to material problems. There was something wrong with the cooling system of the chip. The researchers had brought spare parts for the cooling system, but they had forgotten the pins to align the parts. After searching for hours in the town of San Pedro de Atacama, the researchers came to jeweler Jose Pinto. In Pinto's toolbox, they found a piece of copper wire with exactly the right diameter. With that they could make the forgotten pins. And so the instrument was rescued and the tests could start.

Publications

• A. Endo, K. Karatsu, Y. Tamura, T. Oshima, A. Taniguchi, T. Takekoshi, S. Asayama, Tom J.L.C. Bakx, S. Bosma, J. Bueno, K. Chin, Y. Fujii, K. Fujita, R. Huiting, S. Ikarashi, T. Ishida, S. Ishii, R. Kawabe, T.M. Klapwijk, K. Kohno, A. Kouchi, N. Llombart, J. Maekawa, V. Murugesan, S. Nakatsubo, M. Naruse, K. Ohtawara, A. Pascual Laguna, J. Suzuki, K. Suzuki, D.J. Thoen, T. Tsukagoshi, T. Ueda, P.J. de Visser, P.P. van der Werf, S.J.C. Yates, Y. Yoshimura, O. Yurduseven, J.J.A. Baselmans, "First light demonstration of the integrated superconducting spectrometer," Nature Astronomy (2019)
• A. Endo, K. Karatsu, A. Pascual Laguna, B. Mirzaei, R. Huiting, D.J. Thoen, V. Murugesan, S.J.C. Yates, J. Bueno, N. van Marrewijk, S. Bosma, O. Yurduseven, N. Llombart, J. Suzuki, M. Naruse, P.J. de Visser, P.P. van der Werf, T.M. Klapwijk, and J.J.A. Baselmans, "Wideband on-chip terahertz spectrometer based on a superconducting filterbank," J. of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, 5(3), 035004 (2019).

Grants

Contact

• Dr. Akira Endo
  THz Sensing Group, Delft University of Technology & Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft
  +31 15 278 8183
  [email protected]
  http://terahertz.tudelft.nl/~endo/
  
• Prof. dr. ir. Jochem Baselmans
  SRON, Netherlands Institute for Space Research
  [email protected]
  https://www.sron.nl/personal-profiles?uname=Jochem_Baselmans
  
• Prof. dr. Paul van der Werf
  Leiden Observatory, Leiden University
  [email protected]
  https://home.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~pvdwerf/
  https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/medewerkers/paul-van-der-werf
  

Veni award for Masoud Babaie

• Thursday, 29 August 2019

Energiezuinige, mm-formaat radiofrequentiezendontvangers voor Internet-der-dingen toepassingen (PaTRIOT)

Miniaturization of wireless implantable medical devices to sub-mm dimensions can play a critical role in our future healthcare systems. However, the size of those devices is currently limited by off-chip crystal oscillators. This proposal introduces a new digital-intensive solution to break that barrier and enable fully integrated and implantable radios.

Integrated devices for neuronal ultrasound stimulation

• Monday, 15 July 2019

Neuronal interfaces have been widely developed in last decades with the purpose of providing a path for communication with the nervous system. The most common neuronal interfaces are based on electrical recording and stimulation of neuronal activity, which typically require surgical implantation of electrodes to achieve the necessary spatial resolution. To overcome the many hurdles and risks of surgery, non-invasive techniques to interface with the nervous system are currently being developed, and one of the most promising techniques uses focused ultrasound as a neuromodulation therapeutic modality. Due to its non-invasiveness, to achieve the necessary high spatial resolution, comparable to implantable electrodes, ultrasound transducers and electronics must be integrated in the same device. Its success may lead the way to surgery-free neuro-prosthetics and electroceuticals.

Read more on Pages 29-31 of ETV's Maxwell 22.4

Het medicijn van de toekomst slik je maar een keer en is bioelektronisch

• Monday, 15 July 2019

Item op BNR Nieuwsradio van 15 juli 2019, met een bijdrage van Wouter Serdijn over het onderzoek op bioelektronische medicijnen zoals onderzocht worden aan de TU Delft

NWA Idea Generator grant for Richard Hendriks

• Tuesday, 9 July 2019

Restored sound localization for hearing impaired people

The inability of hearing impaired people to localize sound has a big impact on their well-being and self- reliance. Compared to normal-hearing people, hearing-impaired people cannot efficiently use the same localization information. In this project will be investigated whether inaudible localization information can be transformed into a different audible form.

With a sum of 50,000 euros each, NWO granted 37 out-of-the-box research ideas with the potential to make an impact in society.

The applicants receive funding from the Idea Generator programme of the Dutch National Research Agenda (NWA). A total of 1.85 million euros was available.

Chao Chen receives Else Kooi Award

• Sunday, 7 July 2019

The 2019 Else Kooi Award goes to EWI alumnus Chao Chen, for his work on chips for miniature 3-D ultrasound probes. The Else Kooi Award is a yearly prize for outstanding young researchers in the microelectronics field in The Netherlands. Chao received the award, which consists of prize of € 5.000 and a work of art, at the PRORISC Conference in Delft on July 4.

Chao’s PhD was a multi-disciplinary project on the intersection between electronics and ultrasonic imaging, aiming to realize miniature ultrasound probes for 3-D medical imaging. In particular, he worked on endoscope-based probes for real-time 3-D imaging of the human heart. Such probes are an important step forward compared to current 2-D imaging devices. They will provide improved diagnosis of cardiac conditions and guidance of minimally-invasive procedures.

To realize such probes, more than 1000 tiny elements that can send and receive ultrasound need to be integrated in a mm-sized probe tip. Chao developed custom chips that make it possible to connect all these elements using a limited number of cables to an imaging system. To locally process the echo signals, his chips employ innovative amplifiers and beamformer circuits that are substantially smaller and more power efficient than previous designs. Moreover, Chao realized the first chip capable of digitizing the echo signals in the probe, enabling better image quality with fewer cables, and making an important step towards next-generation smart ultrasound probes.

Chao’s work was carried out at Ultrasound ASICs group at the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory, under supervision of Dr. Ir. Michiel Pertijs, in close collaboration with the Acoustical Wavefield Imaging group at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, and the Biomedical Engineering group at Erasmus MC. Chao's work was part of the MICA project. His PhD thesis can be found here. Chao now works at Butterfly Network, an American company developing hand-held ultrasound scanners.

Nikita Petrov defended his PhD thesis. Congratulations!

• Friday, 21 June 2019

Modern surveillance radars are designed to detect moving targets of interest in an adverse environment, which can encompass strong unwanted reflections from ground or sea surface, clouds, precipitation, etc. Detection of weak and small moving targets in environmental clutter remains, however, a challenging task for the existing radar systems.

One of the main directions for modern radar performance improvement is the application of wideband high-resolution waveforms, which provide detailed range information of objects at the observed scene. Together with such inherent advantages of wideband waveforms as multi-path separation, clutter reduction and improved target classification, additional benefits can be obtained by exploiting target range migration (range walk), essential for fast moving targets in the high-resolution mode.

This thesis aims at the development of novel signal processing techniques for migrating target detection in wideband radars. It involves both resolving range-velocity ambiguities and improvement in target discrimination from ground clutter by accounting for target range migration.

European research project Power2Power for more efficient power semiconductors launches

• Friday, 14 June 2019

The European cooperation project Power2Power has started. Over the coming three years, 43 partners from eight countries will research and develop innovative power semiconductors with more power density and energy efficiency. Power semiconductors are needed in all stages of energy conversion: generation, transmission, and use. More efficient semiconductors make a major contribution towards reducing carbon dioxide emissions in spite of the world's growing energy needs. Universities, research institutes, small and medium-sized companies and international corporations are involved in this cooperation. Infineon Technologies Dresden GmbH & Co. KG is coordinating this project.

The participants from The Netherlands are the Advanced Packaging Center, Alfen, Boschman, IWO Project, Jiaco Instruments and Delft University of Technology as academic partner. Within TU Delft two research groups from the Faculty of EEMCS are participating: Electronic Components, Technology and Materials (ECTM) and DC Systems, Energy Conversion & Storage (DCE&S). ECTM will investigate advanced interconnect materials for the packaging of the power semiconductors and reliability improvements by using digital twinning. DCE&S will investigate use cases of the improved power semiconductors in EV charging.

For more information visit the original press release from Infineon, and www.power2power.eu

NWO Matchmaking event: Degradation and Reliability of Organic Materials

• Friday, 14 June 2019

Together with Signify, TU Delft is organizing an NWO matchmaking event on the degradation and reliability of organic materials. Topics include:

• Brainstorming on challenges and future developments of inorganic materials used in (opto) electronic components
• Reliability, degradation, and lifetime assessment of inorganic materials in microelectronic devices
• Discussing collaboration opportunities between leading industries in Europe and Dutch Universities

Date: 30th of August, 9:00-14:00
Location: HTC45, High Tech Campus, 5656 AE Eindhoven
Organizers: Prof. dr. G.Q. Zhang, Prof. dr. W.D. van Driel, Dr. M. Yazdan Mehr

Register before the 27th of August by mail to: [email protected], for additional information check this PDF.

Thales Naval Nederland Delft celebrates 20 years

• Thursday, 16 May 2019

Yesterday the MS3 group congratulated our close partner Thales Naval Nederland who celebrates 20 years of their location in Delft. It is an important milestone for Thales Nederland, as soon as the research and development are mainly done in Delft.

Symposium ' The car of the future', KU Leuven; Prof Kofi Makinwa on ' Next generation CMOS temperature sensors'

• Friday, 10 May 2019

May 14, 2019

KU Leuven, Belgium, Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT)

Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, 3001 Heverlee Program:

14h00 welcome

14h15 IC design for automotive battery management systems

Pieter De Muyter - IC Sense

15h00 Current sensors for electrified automotive drive- trains

Wouter Leten- Melexis 15H45 Coffee break

16H15 Machine vision for automotive applications

Bert Moons-Synopsys

17H00 Next generation CMOS temperature sensors

Kofi Makinwa -Delft University of Technology

17h45 Reception

BI/OND wints the Philips Innovation Award

• Wednesday, 8 May 2019

We are proud to announce that BI/OND, the ECTM spin-off that develops microfluidic Organ-on-Chips in silicon, won the Philips Innovation Award 2019.

This year more than 100 teams from all around the Netherlands participated to this event and the jury, chaired by Frans van Houten, CEO of Philips, awarded BI/OND as the best startup.

BI/OND gave an interview to rtlz.nl that can be watched here: link

As the winner of the PHIA2019, the 8th of May the BI/OND team had also the honour to open the stock Market in Amsterdam with the VP of Philips Research, Hans Hofstraat. To watch this event follow this link

Open Course Analog Integrated Circuit Design No. 1 in Microelectronics and No. 2 in Electrical Engineering

• Thursday, 2 May 2019

Analog Integrated Circuit Design is an introductory course in analog circuit synthesis for microelectronic designers. Topics include: Review of analog design basics; linear and non-linear analog building blocks: harmonic oscillators, (static and dynamic) translinear circuits, wideband amplifiers, filters; physical layout for robust analog circuits; design of voltage sources ranging from simple voltage dividers to high-performance bandgaps, and current source implementations from a single resistor to high-quality references based on negative-feedback structures.

May 17th, 09.30, EEMCS lecture hall Ampere, Micro electronics symposium: Who's talking, who's listening?

• Thursday, 25 April 2019

Concept program

09:35 Welcome Leo de Vreede

09:45 Bram Nauta (University of Twente)

N-path filters the enabler for software defined wireless receivers?

10:15 Peter Baltus (Technical University Eindhoven)

Unconventional Wireless Applications

10:45 break

11:15 Patrick Reynaert (University Leuven, Belgium)

Polymer Microwave Fibers: who's waiting for it?

11:45 Leo de Vreede (Technical University Delft)

Digital Transmitters for Sub-6GHz Wireless Applications

12:15 lunch (Restaurantzaal)

13:00 Yao-Hong Liu(IMEC)

Listen to your gut: swallable digital transmitter design

13:30 wrap-up Kofi Makinwa (Technical University Delft)

13:45 conclusion

Inauguration Earl Mc Cune and Cicero Vaucher, May 17th

• Tuesday, 9 April 2019

Location: Aula

Time: 15.00

Topics:

Sustainable Wireless Systems, Prof Mc Cune

Waves for sensing and communicating: perspectives, Communicating and sensing: views on the road ahead, Prof. Vaucher

Asli Yelkenci wins BioEl 2019 best poster presentation

• Tuesday, 2 April 2019

Asli presented her approach for co-integration of planar patch-clamps and microelectrode arrays in the same device, thus enabling for high-throughput simultaneous intra- and extra-cellular measurements of cardiac cells. Asli received a prize of 300 Euros sponsored by Panaxium.

Ref: A. Yelkenci, R. Martins da Ponte, V. Valente. Co-integration of flip-tip patch clamp and microelectrode arrays for in-vitro recording of electrical activity of cardiac cells. Presented at the 2019 Winterschool on Bioelectronics, Kirchberg, Austria, 16-23 March 2019.

First Prize of 3-E Royal SMIT BSc Competition

• Thursday, 28 March 2019

ELCA research group congratulates Joram van der Velden and his team, comprising Louis Marting, Jordy van der Horst, and Nandor Toth, BSc. students from TU-Delft who have won the 1st prize in the Netherlands national competition for the best BScs. graduated in 2018 in Electric Energy and Electricity supply Engineering. This bachelor project has been executed inside the ELCA research group in the spring of 2018.

The 3 E-Royal SMIT BSc prize 2018 ceremony took place on Friday 22/03/2019 in Nijmegen. More information can be found here .

This bachelor thesis was supervised by Marco Pelk, Masoud Babaie, and Morteza Alavi. The thesis is located here .

Achievement Award for prof. G.Q. Zhang at EuroSimE

• Wednesday, 27 March 2019

Prof. G.Q. Zhang, Microelectronics Department of EWI, received the “Achievement Award” from 20th IEEE international conference on “Thermal, Mechanical and Multiphysics Simulations and Experiments in Microelectronics and Microsystems” (EuroSimE) on 26-03-2019 in Hannover, Germany.

As one of the founders, Prof. Zhang initiated this conference in 2000 in Eindhoven, to meet the increasing scientific and technology needs for multiphysics and multi-scale simulation, modelling, experiment and optimization. He served as the conference general chair for 17 years. Today, EuroSimE is a prime and very influential IEEE conference in this important academic and technologic field, with more than 10,000 annual paper download from IEEE explore system. The Award Committee chose the occasion of the 20th anniversary to recognize Prof. Zhang for his vision, strong leadership and decades’ commitment to stimulate global scientific collaboration and for his excellent scientific achievements. Prof. Zhang gave a plenary keynote talk on “EuroSimE – Mission to be accomplished”.

Micro electronics colloquium, Thursday March 28, 15.30 EEMCS Restaurantzaal

• Wednesday, 20 March 2019

Dr. Muhammed Bolatkale Muhammed Bolatkale is Senior Principle Scientist at NXP Semiconductors and part-time Associate Professor 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 from Delft University of Technology in 2007 and 2013. Since 2007, Dr. Bolatkale has worked for NXP Semiconductors, specializing in the design of wideband Delta-Sigma ADCs for wireless communications and automotive applications. Dr. Bolatkale received the ISSCC 2016 and 2011 Jan Van Vessem Award and the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits 2016 and 2011 Best Paper Award.

Abstract

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.

Prof. 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.

Abstract

New Ingredients in the Pot - Rethinking ADC 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.

Vasiliki Giagka appointed associate editor for Bioelectronic Medicine

• Saturday, 9 March 2019

Bioelectronic Medicine (BM) is an open access, peer reviewed and relatively young journal published by the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research (in New York, NJ, USA) on BMC’s platform (part of Springer Nature): https://bioelecmed.biomedcentral.com. The journal brings together material science, molecular medicine, bioengineering, neuroscience, computer science and other related disciplines focused on new insights into the role of the nervous system in disease and health, and the importance of discovering new molecular mechanisms and technologies to treat disease. The journal has an expanded community and multidisciplinary audience from healthcare, technology and scientific research. Specialists writing for BM come from fields such as neuroscience, biology, bioengineering, electronics, computing, data analytics, molecular medicine, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and personalized medicine and last named is extremely important in the upcoming domain of bioelectronic medicine, also known as electroceuticals, the electronic counterparts of pharmaceuticals.

At the core of electroceuticals is the electrical signal used by the nervous system to communicate information. Virtually every cell in the body is directly or indirectly controlled by these neural signals. Bioelectronic medicine technologies can record, stimulate and block neural signaling. Through its ability to manipulate neural signals it will change the way physicians treat diseases and conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, diabetes, paralysis, bleeding and even cancer.

All articles published by BM are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. This nicely aligns with Delft University of Technology’s Open Acces policy.

For the same journal, Wouter Serdijn (also Section Bioelectronics at Delft University of Technology) has agreed to be serving as contributing editor. In this role, he will advise the editors of new trends, which may soon become prevalent in the field; keep up-to-date with the journal’s publications and provide feedback to the editors; contribute topic ideas and manuscripts to thematic series that will be implemented by the journal in the future; recommend articles from the field for publication.

Wouter Serdijn nieuw lid Wetenschappelijke Raad Medical Delta

• Friday, 22 February 2019

Als lid heeft Wouter Serdijn de taak om bij te dragen aan het creëren van het wetenschappelijk programma en daarmee aan de visie van Medical Delta. Hij helpt mede vorm te geven aan onderzoeksprogramma’s en zal als ambassadeur optreden. Serdijn: “Met diverse langlopende samenwerkingen met zowel het ErasmusMC en het LUMC waren EWI en mijn sectie Bioelectronics al ‘Medical Delta’ vanaf het eerste uur. Niet zo verwonderlijk, want het behouden en terugwinnen van 100% gezondheid gerelateerde kwaliteit van leven vraagt steeds vaker micro-elektronische ondersteuning. Deze ondersteuning is belangrijk, zowel voor het begrijpen van de menselijke fysiologie en het menselijk gedrag als voor het betrouwbaar stellen van een diagnose, voor het nauwkeurig en ongestoord monitoren en voor een succesvolle persoonlijke behandeling. Ik denk dat dit goed aansluit bij de missie van Medical Delta en ik draag namens EWI graag een steentje bij.”

Medical Delta is een netwerk van life sciences, gezondheids- en technologie-organisaties. Gevestigd in de Nederlandse Rijndeltaregio bundelen zij een brede kennis en ervaring en fungeren als katalysator voor innovatie en samenwerking op het gebied van gezondheid.

First Microelectronics Synergy Grants

• Friday, 22 February 2019

According to Professor Geert Leus who heads the ME Research Committee, the Synergy Grants are also intended to kick-start the research of young faculty, as it can be quite challenging for them to obtain funding at the beginning of their research careers. The grants cover half the costs of a PhD candidate, with the rest coming from existing research funding. ‘The submitted proposals were carefully evaluated by the ME Research Committee on the basis of their scientific quality, their clarity and feasibility, the synergy between the participating sections, and the relationship to the departmental themes. The ME Management Team (MT) then decided to award Synergy Grants to the top three proposals.’

Changes

The aim of the grants is to encourage newly emerging combinations of technologies and to facilitate cross-overs between them, thus strengthening and broadening the department's research portfolio. This goal fits seamlessly within the research strategy of ME, which has defined itself around the four themes of Health & Wellbeing, XG, Safety & Security and Autonomous Systems to better address societal challenges.

Winners

Last week, the winners were received by the ME MT. They received flowers from the head of the department (Kofi Makinwa) and had the opportunity to briefly present their proposals to the assembled MT. Below are short descriptions of the successful proposals.

Akira Endo & Sten Vollebregt: ‘The aim of our project TANDEM: Terahertz Astronomy with Novel DiElectric Materials is to develop advanced dielectric materials to realize superconducting microstrip lines with very low losses in the frequency ranges of 2-10 GHz and 100-1000 GHz. The PhD candidate will combine the dielectric deposition, characterization, material expertise and facilities of the ECTM group and the Else Kooi Laboratory, and the submillimetre wave device measurement capability of the THz Sensing Group and SRON. The aim is not only to realize low loss dielectrics, but also to understand the underlying physics that governs these losses. If successful, these microstrips will be immediately applied to enhance the sensitivity of the DESHIMA spectrometer on the ASTE telescope in Chile.’

Bori Hunyadi: ‘On one hand, the vast complexity of the human brain (10^11 neurons and 10^14 connections) enables us to process large amounts of information in the fraction of a second. At the same time, imperfections of the wiring in this vast network cause devastating neurological and psychiatric conditions such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. Therefore, understanding brain function is one of the greatest and most important scientific challenges of our times. Brain function manifests as various physical phenomena (electrical or e.g. metabolic) at different spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, the PhD candidate working on this grant will develop a novel multimodal and multiresolution brain imaging paradigm combining EEG and a novel imaging technique, fUS. The specific engineering challenge is to understand and describe the fUS signal characteristics, deal with the large amount of data it records using efficient computational tools; and finally, formulate the specification of a dedicated non-invasive, multimodal, wearable EEG-fUS device.’

Virgilio Valente & Massimo Mastrangeli: ‘The seed money of the Synergy Grant will partially support a joint PhD candidate to investigate the tight integration of an heart-on-chip device with dedicated electronic instrumentation in the same platform. Our aim is to bring sensing and readout electronics as close as possible to a cardiac tissue cultivated within a dedicated micro physiological device. The grant helps promoting the logical convergence between current departmental research activities at ECTM and BE and within the Netherlands Organ-on-Chip Initiative (NOCI) on the development of instrumented organ-on-chip devices.’

ME chairman congratulates Massimo Mastrangeli with obtaining University Teaching Qualification within a year

• Sunday, 10 February 2019

Massimo Mastrangeli completed all the modules for his Teaching Qualification within a single year and was congratulated for this achievement in person by Kofi Makinwa, the chair of the ME department.

Health Prototype Grant for Single-Cable Ultrasound Catheter

• Wednesday, 30 January 2019

Verya Daeichin, Douwe van Willigen, Martin Verweij, Michiel Pertijs and Nico de Jong received a Health Prototype Grant of €10K from the Delft Health Initiative for their project on a “Single-cable three-dimensional opto-acoustic imaging catheter”. The objective of the TU Delft Health Initiative is to promote research in the field of Healthcare at Delft University of Technology. Out of a total of 26 applications, 13 were granted.

Minimally-invasive interventions have revolutionized the healthcare industry, allowing outpatient clinical treatment, which is critical for healthcare in an aging population. Ultrasound imaging is one of the modalities that can fulfil all the requirements for these interventions: it is safe, cheap, real-time and can be made in small devices. Recently we have demonstrated catheter-based imaging devices and their potential, in context of the Perspectief Programme “Instruments for Minimally-Invasive Techniques (iMIT)”.

One of the main challenges in a catheter-based ultrasound imaging device is the number of cables required to connect the ultrasound elements to the imaging system (typically 64-128 cables). Therefore, it is extremely valuable to keep the number of interface connections limited to facilitate a more flexible probe shaft and to leave room for other required pieces such as a guidewire and/or an optical fiber. To address the challenge of miniaturizing 3D ultrasonic imaging devices within the stringent size constraints of a catheter, we have developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) of 1.5 mm by 1.5 mm which can handle a matrix of 64 ultrasonic transducers elements using only a single cable to generate a real-time 3D ultrasound images. We have realized a prototype of this device on a PCB and have shown its imaging capabilities. The research goal of this proposal is to demonstrate our unique technology in a form that is significantly closer to the final clinical application: integrated at the tip of a small cylinder and connected using a single micro-coax cable.

This project is a collaboration between the Ultrasound ASICs group of the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory, and the Acoustic Wavefield Imaging group. It fits in the scope of our activities on devices for intra-vascular ultrasound (IVUS).

Microelectronics at work for sustainable healthcare

• Saturday, 19 January 2019

The Medical Delta has launched twelve research programmes that work on technological solutions for sustainable care. EEMCS is represented in three programmes; Neurodelta (Wouter Serdijn), Medical Delta Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab (Wouter Serdijn and Alle-Jan van der Veen) and Ultrafast Ultrasound for the Heart and Brain (Michiel Pertijs), all part of the Microelectronics department.

In order to give the research programmes an extra impulse, a strategically important project is financed within each research programme.

In the Medical Delta 2.0 Neurodelta program Vasiliki Giagka and Wouter Serdijn (both Section  Bioelectronics) will work on miniature implants for simultaneously measuring and influencing brain activity by means of light and ultrasound.

Read more about Vasiliki Giagka's work: https://www.tudelft.nl/ewi/actueel/nodes/stories/elektrische-implantaten/

Within the Medical Delta 2.0 Cardiac Arrhythmia Lab, Virgilio Valente (Section Bioelectronics) and Richard Hendriks and Borbala Hunyadi (both Section CAS) will work on new bioelectronic signal acquisition and processing techniques to identify the electropathology of cardiac dysrhythmia, such as atrial fibrillation, in an organ-on-chip set-up.

Read more about the work of Virgillio Valente: https://bme.weblog.tudelft.nl/2018/12/11/biocmos/ 

Within the Medical Delta 2.0 programme Ultrafast Ultrasound for the Heart and Brain, Michiel Pertijs (Section Electronic Instrumentation) will work on smart ultrasound probes that can take 3D images of the heart and brain at high speed, with the aim of enabling new and better diagnostics of cardiovascular and neurological disorders.

Read more about the work of Michiel Pertijs: https://www.tudelft.nl/ewi/actueel/nodes/stories/echos-uit-een-pleister/    

More information about Medical Delta: www.medicaldelta.nl/news/overzicht-programmas-medical-delta-20192023

Health Prototype Grant for Virgilio Valente

• Saturday, 19 January 2019

The TU Delft Health Initiative objective is to promote research in the field of healthcare at Delft University of Technology and they granted 13 out of total 26 applications. ‘Organs-on-chip (OoC) systems represent the new frontier in biomedical engineering, aiming at re-producing and mimicking key aspects of living organs on microengineered biosystems, by modeling the structural and functional complexity of organs, tissue to tissue interactions and cellular metabolism. Coupled to microfluidics and multi-parameter sensing, OoCs promise a significant revolution in the development of future targeted drugs and therapies, by providing a vital alternative to conven-tional cell cultures and animal models. By leveraging the distinctive features of modern complemen-tary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, coupled with high-density microelectrode array (MEA) systems, we can develop complex yet com-pact microelectronic biodevices capable of interact-ing with biological networks at a single-cell scale with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. Im-pedance-based measurements (IM) have shown significant potential in monitoring cell and tissue contractions, morphology and cell-to-cell heteroge-neity. Impedance assays are currently routinely developed to assess drug toxicity in cardiac cell cul-tures. Commercial systems, including the xCELLI-gence RCTA by ACEA Biosystems, are based on the use of two electrodes for IM, which greatly limits the measurement resolution. To date, there is no com-mercial or research system capable of measuring impedance profiles from cardiac cell culture with high resolution.’

Read more about the work of Virgillio Valente: https://bme.weblog.tudelft.nl/2018/12/11/biocmos/

Image formation for future radio telescopes

• Monday, 24 December 2018

Radio astronomy is an interesting application area for array signal processing. We developed a new image formation tool called PRIFIRA, inspired by Sparse Bayesian Learning. Featured in ETV Maxwell 22.1.

Burak gets Predoctoral Achievement Award

• Friday, 21 December 2018

The IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Awards Committee has granted Burak Gönen a Predoctoral Achievement Award for 2018-19. For a small number of promising graduate students, the award provides a $1000 honorarium and reimbursement for travel expenses to ISSCC, the Society's flagship conference. Awards are made on the basis of academic record and promise, quality of publications, and a graduate study program well matched to the charter of SSCS.

BioCMOS

• Tuesday, 11 December 2018

The new frontier in smart and efficient diagnostics and analytics is represented by the fusion of semiconductor technologies and electrochemical sensors. BioCMOS devices, also known as Lab-on-CMOS or CMOS biosensors, consist of microelectronic interfaces with integrated high-density sensing elements. On top of these elements, biological and chemical assays can be directly performed, limiting considerably the need for additional external units. The Bioelectronics group is currently developing BioCMOS microsystems that target applications, including lab-on-chip and organ-on-chip platforms, point-of-care devices, implantable and injectable smart biosensors. By leveraging the distinctive features of modern complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, we can develop complex yet compact microelectronic bio-devices capable of interacting with biological networks at a cellular and molecular scale with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. BioCMOS technology promises to play a key role in defining future targeted therapies and personalized medicine, cost-effective drug discovery and development, and efficient disease management strategies. Read more on Page 18-21.

Bioelectronic Medicine

• Tuesday, 11 December 2018

Imagine a tiny device that can treat patients by injecting small electrical pulses into the neuronal tissue. These tiny microelectronic devices are the main focus of a new exciting field called Bioelectronic Medicine, with the main goal of one day replacing conventional chemical drugs. When implanted, these devices can act on the body’s nervous system to treat a wide variety of disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, Crohn’s disease, migraine, epilepsy, etc.[1] .The technological challenges behind realizing such devices, however, are enormous and encompass almost every facet of microfabrication and bioengineering technologies. Read more on Page 6, 7 and 8.

Nikolas Gaio won a Lush Prize

• Monday, 3 December 2018

The 16th of November one of our students, Nikolas Gaio, was awarded in Berlin with a Young Researcher Award in the Lush Prize 2018 for his work ‘Replacing animal tests with silicon chips’. This work was performed during his PhD project in ECTM.

Video of the presentation

The Lush Prize is the largest global awards programme to recognize and celebrate scientists and campaigners working to replace animals in drugs and cosmetics R&D. Now in its seventh year, it has provided more than £1.8 million to support animal-free testing and campaigns around the world.

If you want to find more about the Lush Prize, visit https://lushprize.org

Perspectief Programme ULTRA-X-TREME Granted

• Friday, 16 November 2018

Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging for Extended Diagnosis and Treatment of Vascular Disease (ULTRA-X-TREME)

NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) has announced the new research programmes that will be part of its ‘Perspective for Top Sectors' funding programme. One of the programmes that will be funded is the ULTRA-X-TREME programme, in which new ultrasound techniques will be developed for improved diagnosis of dangerous vascular problems. Michiel Pertijs' Ultrasound ASICs group at the Electronic Instrumentation Laboratory will be responsible for the development of advanced integrated electronics for the high-frame-rate 3D ultrasound probes that will play a key role in this programme.

Vascular problems can be life-threatening. Cerebral infarctions (strokes) are often caused by calcification of the carotid artery and ruptures in the abdominal artery (aortic aneurysms) as a result of a weakening of the arterial wall. Currently, doctors determine the likelihood of both problems simply by measuring the diameter of these arteries. However, this has proved to have only limited predictive value, which means more people than necessary undergo life-threatening treatments and dangerous cases are overlooked.

The ULTRA-X-TREME programme will develop new, highly accurate ultrasound techniques to enable 3D imaging of the arterial walls and blood flow. New transducers, contrast media and analysis techniques will be developed in order to determine much more effectively whether treatment is necessary.

The ULTRA-X-TREME consortium brings together the best Dutch research groups in the field of ultrasound technology and the biomechanics of blood vessels with hospitals and international industry. Within this programme, Michiel Pertijs will work together with Nico de Jong and Martin Verweij (Imaging Physics, Fac. of Applied Sciences) and Hans Bosch (Erasmus MC) on the development of a unique matrix transducer with more than 20,000 elements and integrated electronics, for making 3D echo images with a high volume frame rate.

Programme leader: Prof. dr. ir. C.L. de Korte (Radboudumc and Twente University)

Participants: ANSYS, Bracco Suisse S.A., Catharina hospital, Erasmus MC, Harteraad, Mindray, Nederlandse Vereniging voor Vaatchirurgie (NVVV), Philips Electronics Nederland, Pie Medical Imaging, Radboudumc, Rijnstate hospital, TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, TOMTEC Imaging Systems, Twente University, Vermon S.A., Verasonics

BI/OND wins Accenture Innovation Awards 2018 for Health

• Tuesday, 13 November 2018

TU Delft start-up BI/OND is the winner of the Accenture Innovation Awards 2018 in the Health category.

According to the Jury: "This year’s winner has proven that science can indeed make a difference. They are truly a learning organization. Yet as scientists, they risk staying unsung heroes. Winning today provides them with the opportunity to realize their full potential and develop into a business, making their dreams come true."

It has been a challenging journey for BI/OND. From the top 50 innovation nomination, to the Summer Nights where 25 companies were selected, through the Semi-Finals (top 10), and all the way up to the Finals (top 5), the winners of the Accenture Innovation Awards 2018 (AIA18) were finally announced on November 2nd.

The AIA18 Innovation Journey focused on 8 global themes, tackling both local and global issues. DeFabrique, the Innovation Summit’s scenery, was packed with more than 2,500 visitors from various industries and backgrounds with one thing in common: the desire to disrupt the current status quo. The jury spent hours deliberating who should be the next leading innovator of their theme, culminating in the announcement of the winners.

Our work on Intravascular Ultrasound featured on the cover of TUFFC

• Thursday, 8 November 2018

The IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control selected our paper

J. Janjic, M. Tan, E. Noothout, C. Chen, Z. Chan, Z. Y. Chang, R. H. S. H. Beurskens, G. van Soest, A. F. W. van der Steen, M. D. Verweij, M. A. P. Pertijs, and N. de Jong, "A 2D ultrasound transducer with front-end ASIC and low cable count for 3D forward-looking intravascular imaging: Performance and characterization," IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 65, no. 10, pp. 1832-1844, Oct. 2018 (link)

to be featured on the cover of the October 2018 issue.

This paper is the result of a collaboration on intravascular ultrasound imaging between the Ultrasound ASICs group at the Electronic Instrumentation Lab, the Thoraxcenter at Erasmus MC, and the Laboratory of Acoustical Wavefield Imaging at the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology.

Forward-looking intravascular ultrasound (FL-IVUS) holds rich potential for guidance of complex vascular interventions, such as recanalization of coronary chronic total occlusions. The realization of FL-IVUS devices is fraught with technical challenges, as a high-resolution volumetric image needs to be created from a small (< 1.5 mm) aperture with scant space for cabling and electronics. In this issue of the Transactions, we present an innovative concept for an FL-IVUS matrix array, consisting of 16 transmit (yellow) and 64 receive elements (red), addressed by only four cables. A dedicated front-end ASIC performs element addressing and received signal amplification. The realized configuration produces a narrow pulse-echo beam profile with sidelobes below −20 dB. 3-D synthetic aperture imaging (bottom) at a volume rate of 100 Hz is feasible.

Details on the ASIC, which was designed at the Electronic Instrumentation Lab by Mingliang Tan, Chao Chen, Zhao Chen and Michiel Pertijs, can be found in

M. Tan, C. Chen, Z. Chen, J. Janjic, V. Daeichin, Z. Y. Chang, E. Noothout, G. van Soest, M. D. Verweij, N. de Jong, and M. A. P. Pertijs, "A front-end ASIC with high-voltage transmit switching and receive digitization for 3D forward-looking intravascular ultrasound imaging," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 53, no. 8, pp. 2284-2297, Aug. 2018 (link)

Six papers at the 2018 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium

• Tuesday, 6 November 2018

At the 2018 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS) - the world’s premier conference on ultrasound research held in Kobe, Japan, in October - the Ultrasound ASICs group presented six papers covering various aspects of our work on integrated circuits for smart ultrasound applications.

Douwe van Willigen presented two papers at IUS. The first, entitled “ASIC design for a single-cable 64-element ultrasound probe”, was nominated for the Best Student Paper Competition (top 3.5% of the student paper submissions). In this paper, we present an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) that interfaces 64 piezoelectric elements directly integrated on top of the ASIC to an imaging system using a single micro-coaxial cable. This innovative design allows a single-element transducer to be replaced by a transducer array, while using the same cable, making it a promising solution for 3D imaging with size-constrained probes. This work is part of our work on intra-vascular ultrasound , a collaboration with the Acoustical Wavefield Imaging Lab (Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology) and the Thoraxcenter, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam.

A second paper authored by Douwe, “Minimizing the zero-flow error in transit time ultrasonic flow meters”, presents results of our FLOW+ project, analysing the effect of driver- and readout electronics on the zero-flow error in transit-time ultrasonic flow meters.

Another paper that links to the same FLOW+ research project, entitled “Feasibility of ultrasound flow measurements via non-linear wave propagation,” was presented by Jack Massaad. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using non-linear wave propagation to improve the precision of flow measurements using ultrasound.

Zhao Chen presented a paper entitled “A Power-Efficient Transmit Beamformer ASIC for 3-D Catheter-Based/ Endoscopic Probes”, which presents an innovative approach to reduce the power consumption of integrated high-voltage pulsers in miniature ultrasound probes.

Zhao also presented a paper entitled “A quantitative study on the impact of bit errors on image quality in ultrasound probes with in-probe digitization”, in which we investigate an import question associated with the next-generation of digital ultrasound probes: if you digitize the echo signals in the probe, what are then the bit-error requirements on the digital datalink used to send the echo signals to an imaging system? We’ve found that very high bit-error rates can be tolerated without significant impact on image quality, opening the door to the use of simple and power-efficient datalink solutions.

Finally, Mehdi Soozande presented a paper entitled “Virtually Extended Array imaging improves lateral resolution in high frame rate volumetric imaging,” in which we describe a high-frame-rate transmission scheme which outperforms alternative methods in lateral resolution, targeting catheter-based 3D imaging applications.

Volgens de wetenschap kunnen doven straks horen en blinden zien

• Friday, 26 October 2018

Er staan veel filmpjes online van emotionele mensen die, met behulp van moderne technologie, voor het eerst hun familie kunnen zien. Of van kinderen die voor het eerst de stem van hun ouders horen. Het zijn voorbeelden van de eerste stappen naar het genezen van blindheid. Prof. dr. Wouter Serdijn doet onderzoek naar het ontwikkelen van bio-elektronica met als doel het behandelen van deze menselijke kwalen. Artikel in het AD van 26 oktober 2018.

New Assistant Professor

• Wednesday, 3 October 2018

CAS welcomes Borbala Hunyadi, a new Assistant Professor, working on Bio Signal Processing

Vacancy: Assistant/Associate Professor of Bioelectronics

• Friday, 28 September 2018

Assistant/Associate Professor of Bioelectronics

Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) is known worldwide for its high academic quality and the social relevance of its research programmes. The faculty’s excellent facilities accentuate its international position in teaching and research. Within this interdisciplinary and international setting the faculty employs more than 1100 employees, including about 400 graduate students and about 2100 students. Together they work on a broad range of technical innovations in the fields of sustainable energy, telecommunications, microelectronics, embedded systems, computer and software engineering, interactive multimedia and applied mathematics.

The Department of Microelectronics has a strong interdisciplinary research and education programme in the areas of 1. health and well-being, 2. autonomous systems, 3. next generation wireless and sensing technology and 4. safety and security.

With 11 IEEE Fellows among the staff, an excellent microfabrication infrastructure, electrical and physical characterisation facilities, and a strong international academic and industrial network, the department provides high-level expertise in each of these areas throughout the entire system chain.

The Section Bioelectronics is a relatively new section that has been created to address coherently the challenges we face in developing bioelectronic medicine and electroceuticals. The group conducts research, education and valorisation in the fields of circuits and systems for active wearable, implantable and injectable biomedical diagnostic, monitoring and therapeutic microsystems. The group is active in the domains of biosignal acquisition, conditioning and detection, electrical stimulation, transcutaneous wireless communication and power transfer, energy harvesting, bioinspired circuits and systems, CMOS diagnostic systems, flexible implants and microsystem integration.

Job description

The Bioelectronics group is offering a tenure-track position at the Assistant or Associate Professor level in the field of biomedical circuits and systems. You will further develop existing research topics, such as mixed-mode and digital circuits and systems for active wearable and implantable medical devices and create new topics, which may include bioelectronic medicine. You will be involved in teaching at the BSc and MSc levels in the TU Delft's Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering programmes and the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Technical Medicine programme. Collaborative initiatives are strongly encouraged. You are expected to write research proposals for national and international funding organisations. This is a tenure-track position for a period of five years with the possibility of a permanent faculty position at the end of the contract, subject to mutual agreement.

A Tenure Track, a process leading up to a permanent appointment with the prospect of becoming an Associate or Full Professor, offers young, talented academics a clear and attractive career path. During the Tenure Track, you will have the opportunity to develop into an internationally acknowledged and recognised academic. We offer a structured career and personal development programme designed to offer individual academics as much support as possible. For more information about the Tenure Track and the personal development programme, please visit www.tudelft.nl/tenuretrack.

Job requirements

You must have a PhD degree in the field of biomedical circuits and systems (BioCAS) and some years of experience as a post-doc or university professor. You have an excellent academic track record, reflected by peer-reviewed journal publications, conference contributions, and international research experience. An affinity for working on the interface with other disciplines (biomedical engineering, neuroscience, electrophysiology, biomedical signal processing, etc.) and with clinicians and medical researchers is preferred. You should have a demonstrated ability to initiate and direct research projects and to obtain external funding. Experience in teaching and mentoring of students is required. A teaching qualification is recommended. Demonstrated ability in written and spoken English is required.

Employment conditions

At the start of the tenure track you will be appointed as Assistant Professor for the duration of six years. Section leader, department leaders and you will agree upon expected performance and (soft) skills. You will receive formal feedback on performance and skills during annual assessment meetings and the mid-term evaluation. If the performance and skills are evaluated positively at the end of the tenure track, you will be appointed in a permanent Assistant Professor position.

TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, a discount for health insurance and sport memberships, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged. An International Children’s Centre offers childcare and an international primary school. Dual Career Services offers support to accompanying partners. Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.

TU Delft sets specific standards for the English competency of the teaching staff. TU Delft offers training to improve English competency.

Inspiring, excellent education is our central aim. If you have less than five years of experience and do not yet have your teaching certificate, we allow you up to three years to obtain this.

Information and application

For information about this vacancy, you can contact Prof. Wouter Serdijn, email: [email protected].

For information about the selection procedure, please contact Mrs. L.M. Ophey, HR-Advisor, email: [email protected]

To apply, please submit by email a detailed CV that includes a list of publications, contact information of at least three scientists whom we can contact for letters of recommendation, and a research and teaching statement along with a letter of application by November 30, 2018 to: [email protected].

When applying please mention vacancy number EWI2018-28.