Research areas

The research areas cover different domains, but the focus of all our activities is the silicon chip, although we work on different aspects: design, manufacturing, and application. We always have topics for thesis at hand in the different areas.

Starting with the application, we fokus on medical applications. In more detail, we are working on a ring which is intended to be worn by elderly people. It is equipped in verion 2 with an accellerometer, a gysoscope, and an air pressure sensor. Using these sensors, it is principially possible to detect if someone has fallen. Nevertheless, research is necessary on different areas:

• Modelling of fall scenarios
• Development of a fall simulator for generating sythetic data
• Evaluation and fall detection software on the ring and/or in the connected device (smart phone or computer)

 The topic of manufacturing is pursued under two different aspects: the manufacturing process in a silicon foundry and the manufacturing strategies for systems or subsystems. The economic success of chip manufacturing depends on the yield, which means the number of functional chips in relation to the number of manufactured chips. Due the large number of process steps (> 600) and the number of devices (>20.000) the data analysis as a challenge. The research project iDEV40 covers this aspect. The second aspect of manufacturing focuses on the systems and subsystems. For hierarchical systems, the availability of all componnets over the complete design and manufacturing time span is essentiel. Here we focus on the obsolescence aspects and the integration of obsolescence strategies into the design process. 

 Chip design is done in our project LIANDRI, where the challenge is to privide an extremely fast power driver for LASER pulses with a durtation of 10 ns. This combination os not easy to chieve.