Integrated Circuits – also known as ”chips” - are at the heart of the rapid developments in electronics. Without chips, the modern world would simply be impossible. Applications like (wireline and wireless) communications, sensing, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and in fact the whole internet, are fueled by chips! This field has become of extremely high societal, industrial, and geopolitical importance. While signal processing and computing are done in the digital domain, the interface with the natural world and the physical implementation of circuits is all analog by nature. The University of Twente has one of the few leading groups in the world in this exciting analog (and Radio Frequency) domain.
In the Integrated Circuit Design group (ICD-group) we do research on analog and radio frequency integrated circuits in CMOS technology. This includes transmitters and receivers for wireless and wireline communication and radar systems, but also analog to digital and digital to analog converters, timing circuits, power stages, and precise references. With the help of MSc and Ph.D. students, we advance this field with fundamental solutions for practical problems. The transfer of our results to the industry is high and many of our inventions are now in your smartphone or other devices!
Publications
Research Topics
- High-speed data converters for communication applications
- High-Resolution Wideband ADCs
- Analog Approximate Accelerators (I, II, III)
- Alternative Receiver Architectures (I, II, III, IV, V, VI)
- Arbitrary Digital Clock Generation
- Ultra Low Power Building Blocks
- Densely Interleaved Arrays for Multi-Tone Transmitters
- Very Accurate Reference Circuits in CMOS II
- ZERO: Towards Energy Autonomous Systems for IoT
Research group & facilities
The ICD group has a firm research tradition in bipolar and CMOS circuits, and published many papers on transconductors, ADC's, LNA's, filters, mixers and power amplifiers. Due to many contacts and research contracts with industry, and the part-time position of some members in industry, the industrial relevance of the research program and the knowledge transfer is high.
A strong co-operation exists with the following groups:
The three groups have a common infrastructure offering:
- Modern CAD facilities for IC design (CADENCE, ...)
- Access to several IC processes amongst others via the EUROPRACTICE channel
- Modern test equipment for analog and mixed-signal testing