News

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).