Biography

Research

Biography

Timothy Constandinou originally trained in Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He is currently Deputy Director of the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology and leads the Next Generation Neural Interfaces (NGNI) lab. His group utilises integrated circuit and microsystem technologies to create new research tools for neuroscience and neuroprosthetic devices. He has projects on brain machine interfaces, epilepsy, sleep, as well as tackling fundamental challenges in electronic and implantable technology. Within IEEE he serves on the CAS Society Board of Governors, BRAIN Initiative Steering Committee and BioCAS/Sensory Systems Technical Committees. He co-chairs the Royal Society emerging technologies group in Neural Interface Ecosystems.

Research

The key overarching aim is to utilise the capability of (currently) mainstream CMOS microelectronics to enable efficient and effective ReRAM/CMOS integration. This technology platform will then provide new opportunities for integrated circuit design by exploiting the inclusion of new nano-scale memory primitives. Our research here is firstly supporting the technology integration through customisation of electronic design automation (EDA) CAD to include ReRAM capability within design tools (e.g. modelling, schematic entry, simulation, layout design, physical verification). These will then be used to design basic building blocks that contain ReRAM devices (e.g. memory elements, read/write instrumentation, readout circuits) in addition to macros and tools for generating memory arrays. The availability of an end-to-end design methodology will then allow us to exploit the technology for new circuits and applications. From a circuit perspective we will investigate continuous-time discrete value processing based on oscillator structures or level-crossing converters. This allows “analogue” processing with high dynamic range in a highly integrated manner. From an applications perspective, our work will target two specific areas: novel research tools for neuroscience, and active implantable medical device. Here, the availability of “above circuit”, back-end integrated ReRAM will enable hybrid/distributed processing/memory architectures, providing an order of magnitude improvement in both power consumption and integration density.

Biography

Prof. Piotr Dudek is is a Professor of Circuits and Systems in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Manchester, leading the Microelectronics Design Lab.  

He received his mgr inz degree from the Technical University of Gdansk, Poland, and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He worked as a Research Associate, and since 2002 as a Lecturer, at UMIST/The University of Manchester. He was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during 2008/09, Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics at the Gdansk University of Technology in 2015, Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow in 2016/17, and a visiting researcher at the Sorbonne University in 2017/18.

He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a member of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Technical Committees on Neural Systems, and on Cellular Neural Networks and Array Processing.  He was the Chair of the IEEE CAS Technical Committee on Sensory Systems (2015-17). He has been a member of Scientific Committees, Track Chair or Session Chair at many international conferences. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II and Review Editor for Frontiers in Neuroscience and an active reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. His work received several Best Paper and Best Demo awards at international conferences (ISCAS, IJCNN, CNNA, ICDSC), and he has given numerous keynote and invited talks, and examined PhD theses worldwide.

Biography

Dirk Koch is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. His group works on run-time reconfigurable systems based on FPGAs ranging from embedded systems to HPC. He developed techniques and tools for self-adaptive distributed embedded control systems based on FPGAs. Current research projects include hardware security database acceleration using FPGAs-based stream processing, HPC and exascale computing, as well as reconfigurable instruction set extensions for CPUs. Furthermore, in the FORTE project he is exploring how memristors can be used for building new kinds of analogue, digital and mixed-signal reconfigurable devices.

Dirk is author of the book "Partial Reconfiguration on FPGAs" and a co-editor of the book "FPGAs for Software Programmers" and his group is developing and maintaining the GoAhead framework that provides unique capabilities for building run-time reconfigurable systems. Recent awards include the FPL Community Award (2016) and the FPL most influential paper award (2015).

Biography

Research

Biography

Alexantrou Serb has graduated from Imperial college in 2009 as a biomedical engineer and later obtained his PhD from Imperial college in 2013 in electronics engineering. Since then he has been a research fellow in prof. Prodromakis' group, working on memristors technology characterisation and application development. His research interests include circuit design, computational neuroscience and biology-machine interfaces.

Research

One of the greatest challenges of current research is how to embody the level of intelligence found in the brain into a physical computer that operates with the energy efficiency of the brain. To that end, algorithmics, computer architecture design, nanotechnology and ultimately also bio-interfacing must work together, as no isolated approach can deliver this vision. Throughout project FORTE this researcher will be involved in: 1) developing new applications enabled by enmeshing memristors into existing electronics technologies and 2) understanding how the availability of memristive technologies can unlock new capabilities in artificial intelligence systems.

The applications developed in this programme will span from simple, modular micro-circuits employing several memristors to larger scale systems utilising thousands of devices. Examples of the former would include reconfigurable logic (digital) and filter (analogue) blocks that can be aggregated into much larger computational systems much like Lego pieces can be used to construct complicated superstructures. Examples of the latter would include functional blocks that can carry out probabilistic inference, biosignal processing or neutral network-type inference.

The algorithmics part of the research is oriented towards the 'problem of multiplication': multiplication is expensive to perform accurately in hardware. Memristive technologies, however, offer an opportunity to implement not only multiplication, but other basic mathematical operations such as scalar matching in hardware at very low energy. Furthermore, reducing energy budgets for such operations opens the way towards more powerful, more intelligent AI.

Bio

Dimitra is a Principal Research Fellow in the Electronic Devices and Materials group at the Zepler Institute, University of Southampton. Previously she held a position as Post-Doctoral Industrial Fellow at the Department of Materials, Imperial College London (ICL), working on a Knowledge Transfer project with PragmatIC, a UK-SME developing flexible radiofrequency electronic devices enabling the Internet of Things. Before that she was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, hosted within the Experimental Solid State Physics group at the Department of Physics (ICL).

Dimitra earned her PhD in Photochemistry/Organic Electronics from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. Before that she obtained a Master’s Degree (Honours) in Advanced Materials Science jointly from the Technical University of Munich, Ludvig-Maximilians University of Munich and University of Augsburg in Germany. She also holds a BSc in Chemical Engineering (majoring Materials Science) from NTUA. As a post-graduate, she gained industrial experience through internships in Procter & Gamble, Italy, and Schreiner Group, Germany.

Research

Dimitra’s main research interest, in a nutshell, is the fabrication and optimisation of nanoscale opto/electronic devices by applying novel materials concepts and alternative patterning techniques. Stemming from an organic electronics background, she has developed organic and inorganic materials-based thin films to act as interfacial layers in high performance Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) and Organic Photovoltaic Cells (OPVs). In the last 5 years, her work focuses mostly on the fabrication and characterisation of coplanar nanogap separated metal electrodes on rigid or flexible substrates. These are combined with functional organic, inorganic and hybrid materials to develop advanced opto/electronic devices targeting high speed applications, such as high– and ultra-high frequency (HF & UHF) radio frequency diodes, high response speed photodetectors, fast switching light-emitting diodes and novel optoelectronic memristors.

Biography

Ioulia Tzouvadaki received her B.Sc. degree in Physics, from National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (U.O.A) and the M.Sc. degree in Microsystems and Nanodevices from National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A). Her M.Sc. thesis concerned the computational study and simulation of polymer nanocomposite materials, within the Computational Materials Science and Engineering (CoMSE) research group, of the School of Chemical Engineering at the NTUA. She received her PhD in Microsystems and Microelectronics at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In her PhD research at the Integrated System Laboratory (LSI) she focused on the fabrication and characterization of nanostructures and their implementation as ultrasensitive nano-bio-sensors in both diagnostics and therapeutics. She joined Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow working on the design of an electronic platform for integration with wearable sweat biomarker sensors for multi-panel, continuous monitoring to enhance human health and performance. Currently she is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Electronic Materials and Devices group.  

Research

Inflammatory markers consist a pivotal tool in clinical practice since they allow detection of acute inflammation that might be an indicator of specific diseases, or to enable signalizing the response of a patient to a specific medical treatment. However, the detection of an inflammation is still performed only in vitro, while the overall testing procedure requires a long waiting time for the clinical results that can be crucial for instance in a case of serious injuries in a contaminated environment or after a rejection of an organ transplant. Moreover, the status quo of the clinical practice does not take into consideration the aspect of continuous monitoring of the inflammatory markers.

My research interests include the development of disposable, implantable sensing devices that give the possibility to perform reliable and robust continuous, in-blood, sensing of critical inflammatory markers directly from the patient’s body. I target to develop a flexible, low-cost, miniaturized sensing platform implementing memristive nanoscale devices as intelligent minimally invasive bio-interfaces, allowing reliable, continuous and real-time monitoring of inflammatory markers.

Biography

Spyros obtained his Applied Physics diploma in 2009 and his MSc in Microelectronics and Nanotechnology in 2011, both from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). In 2015 he received his PhD from the Department of Physics, NTUA for his work on the effects of infrared laser annealing in the electrical characteristics of silicon and germanium. He joined the University of Southampton, UK  in 2016.

Research

Spyros is currently working on the fabrication, characterisation and application of metal oxide memristive devices.

Biography

Dr Garlapati is a Research Fellow within the Electronic Materials and Devices research group in the Zepler Institute at the University of Southampton.

Previously, he was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Manchester, UK. He pursued his PhD in Technische Universität Darmstadt and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He did his Masters in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Bachelors in Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad, India. His research interests include printed electronics, oxide semiconductors, electrolyte gating, organic electronics, gas sensors and flexible electronics for non-volatile memory applications.

Biography

Neeraj is a Research Fellow in the Electronic Materials and Devices research group at the Zepler Institute of Photonics and Nanoelectronics at the University of Southampton. He received his Ph.D. in Microelectronics from IIT Bombay, India. He did his MTech in Solid State Electronic Materials from IIT Roorkee, India and MSc in Physics from Janta Vedic College Baraut, India.

Research

His research interests are Resistive Switching Devices for NVM and Neuromorphic Engineering applications; RF devices; and 3D integration of Memristor with CMOS.

Biography

Sachin Maheshwari is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Electronics Frontiers in the Zepler Institute at the University of Southampton. He did his PhD in the Applied DSP and VLSI Research Group at the University of Westminster, London, UK. His doctoral thesis was focussed on Adiabatic Approach for Low-Power Passive NFC systems. He did his Master of Engineering Degree in Microelectronics from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India and Bachelor of Technology Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from ICFAI Tech, Hyderabad, India. In the past, he was also a Lecturer in the EEE Department at BITS Pilani for over 4 years.

Research 

His research interest  includes Design of Ultra-low-Power Digital Circuits, Energy and Area Efficient Integrated Circuit Design and Energy Recovery Logic.

Biography

Nguyen received his Bachelor degree from The University of Technology, Vietnam in 2007. He worked as a hardware design engineer at Renesas Electronics from 2007 to 2010. He then obtained his Master degree from Western Sydney University in 2012 and PhD from The University of Sydney, Australia in 2017. He currently is a Research Associate at the APT Group, The School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester. His research interests include ASIC/FPGA design, device characterisation and modelling.

Research

The promising advantages of functional oxides, as researched in FORTE, could offer great opportunities to overcome the limitations in power, density and performance of reconfigurable fabrics. Our research is to exploit functional oxides to develop hardware architecture and design flow for a digital reconfigurable fabric. The current research is focusing on investigating memristor-based building blocks for reconfigurable FPGAs. These will then be used to develop a full memristor-based design flow for reconfigurable FPGAs

Biography

Peilong Feng is a postdoctoral researcher in Next Generation Neural Interfaces Lab at Imperial College London, London, UK. He received his BEng degree from the Henan Polytechnic University, China, in 2011, and his first MSc degree with distinction from the University of Southampton, UK, in 2012. Then he obtained his second MSc degree with distinction in 2015 and his PhD degree in 2020 from Imperial College London, London, UK.

Research

His research interests include RFIC for wireless power transfer and data communication and biomedical embedded system design

Biography

Jianing Chen received a B.Eng.(Hons) degree in automatic control and systems engineering from the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2010, and completed his Ph.D. degree in systems and control engineering at the same institution, in 2015.

At present, he is working at the Micro-eletronics Design Lab, the University of Manchester.

Research Interests

His research interests lie in computer vision, self-organizing systems, and computational intelligence.

Biography

Jakub graduated from Imperial College with MEng (Hons) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering in 2017. Jakub is currently pursuing a PHD at Imperial in Circuits and Systems (CAS) research group with the objective to graduate in early 2021.

Research

Jakub is investigating circuits which at their heart utilise memristors to provide the control. Jakubs main research interest includes filter tunability through memristor programming and understanding and utilisation of observed memcapacitive behaviour isn some devices. 

Jiawei Shen received his MSc Analogue and Digital Integrated Circuit Design from Imperial College London in 2018 and BEng. Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham. Jiawei joined Circuits and Systems (CAS) research group in 2019 as research assistant and part-time PhD.

Research

The primary researches of Jiawei are the analogue and RF circuits that utilises memristors.

Kate is a Prince2 qualified Project Manager, who has worked at the University for over four years.

Biography

Georgios received his M.Eng. degree in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) from the Democritus University of Thrace (DUTh), Greece, in 2015, and his M.Sc. degree in ECE from DUTh, Greece, in 2017. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. studies at University of Southampton in Electronic Materials & Devices research group, working towards the implementation of reconfigurable hybrid CMOS/memristor circuits, systems and computer architectures.

Research

Georgios currently participates in the research of novel nano-electronic circuits and systems design for reconfigurable mixed-signal CMOS/memristor computer architectures towards developing a post-von-Neumann computing paradigm. 

Biography

Jiaqi received her Bachelor of Science in Microelectronic Science and Engineering from Shenzhen University, China, in 2017. Then she obtained her Master of Science in Microelectronic Systems Design from University of Southampton, in 2018. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Electronic Materials & Devices Research Group, University of Southampton.

Research Interests

She is working towards the memristor-based analogue & mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) design. In neural recording system, we intend to design a front-end system outputting directly a digital, back-end processed waveform corresponding to neural spikes and demonstrate extremely low power dissipation in the process. The front-end contains an integrating amplifier and a dynamic latch comparator (DLC). Instead of purely amplifying the minute signal, we opt for integrating the micron-volt level signal. The integration process not only filters out noise, but also provides amplification. With memristors implanted along the differential current path, the offset can be tuneable precisely, making the systems operate with power efficiency and high precision.