CREDO

Creative Circuit Design Solutions

About the project

With the begining of 2009, the Microsystem Engineering Group of the University of Siegen in Germany started the CREDO-project. The aim of the project is to stimulate the development and realisation of innovative and new integrated systems. In the project microelectronics and MEMS systems are designed, fabricated and characterized, frequently with student groups, in many cases in close cooperation with partners from industry. Several new ideas and concepts were developed and implemented in the context of the project in the last two years. In the following, three developed ASICs will be presented.

ASD - Automatic Siren Detection

The first result of the project was presented at DATE 2010 in the context of the University-Booth. The authors presented an ASIC, called Automatic Siren Detection (ASD), for the recognition of acoustic signals from emergency vehicles.

The basis for the development was the german standard DIN 14610, which regulates the composition and characteristics of acoustic signals of police, ambulance and fire-fighting vehicles in Germany. Completed by a standard electret condenser microphone, the ASIC monitors the acoustic sourrounding of a vehicle. The analog signal from the microphone is connected to the ASIC, which digitizes and processes the signal. From the environmental noise around the vehicle, the chip extracts frequencies in the range from 360 Hz to ~700 Hz, the base frequency range of an acoustic signal according to the standard. It checks if a sequence of alternating tones is present in the frequency range.

To extract the frequencies an autocorrelation algorithm is applied. The data is analyzed by a special classification algorithm. The feasibility of the concept was proven with an implementation in a 0.35 μm four metal layer CMOS technology. Application scenarios are the usage in automotive as a driver assistance system or as a portable device for hearing-impaired and deaf people. In the future, the concept will be enhanced to a versatile system, capable of detecting arbitrary acoustic environmental signals.

Publications related to this topic.

Broadcasts/interviews (german):

Radio Siegen:

Radio Siegen (Armin Grünewald)

Radio Siegen (Christian Müller)

Newspaper reports:

Online press:

PSI5-TC - PSI5-Testchip

A modern car contains a large number of sensors of different types, e.g. to monitor the wheel speed for the anti-break-lock system or the temperature of the exhaust emissions. To cope with the increasing number of sensors, two students from the CREDO-project developed an innovative automotive sensor conversion ASIC, the PSI5-TC, in summer 2010.

The ASIC was developed in cooperation with the BMW Group (Munich) and Austriamicrosystems (Graz). It is the first ASIC solution on the market place that collects data from up to three automotive sensors and converts them to the PSI5 standard. The input data can be PWM-, SENT- and/or analog signals, which are sampled, prepared for transmission and sent via the PSI5 interface to an engine control unit. Configuration is made via a SPI-bus. It can be saved in an one-time programmable memory, which is read after power-up and after reset. In addition to clustering different sensors, the ASIC allows to record and monitor the values of the sensors by a microcontroller connected to the SPI-interface.

CLIP - Chip with Lowpass filtering Image Pyramid

In cooperation with the Institute for Real-Time Learning Systems from the University of Siegen, a group of six students developed a new ASIC for the image processing in mobile robotics. The ASIC accepts a video data stream from a digital camera chip and calculates five image streams with reduced horizontal and vertical resolution.

Main feature of the chip is the calculation of a five level Gaussian Pyramid, which is often used by image processing algorithms. From the input stream, which may be either in RGB 5:6:5 or grayscale, the ASIC computes five compressed video streams with lower resolution. To reduce the amount of on-chip memory the calculation of a level is carried out on the fly and only the results are stored. Special attention was paid to the regularity of the hardware-structures for easy reuse of the developed modules. The developed ASIC is specified for images with a horizontal resolution of up to 1024 pixel and a pixel clock up to 30 MHz. It is implemented in a 0.15 μm CMOS technology with six metal layers by Lfoundry.