Exploring suitable Adder Designs for Biomedical Implants: A gracefully-degradable, fault-tolerant, and highly resource-constrained adder for SiMS

Modern applications demand extremely low power budgets in computer architectures for battery-operated devices. In the particular case of implantable devices —the main focus of this thesis— the system must have a long life span and batteries may not be possible or easy to recharge. In addition to power, chip area is also of major concern in this...

ρ-VEX ASIC: The Design of an ASIC for a Dynamically Reconfigurable VLIW Processor with 24-port Register File

The ρ-VEX is a runtime reconfigurable VLIW processor. It is able to exploit both ILP as well as TLP by running one program in multiple lanes, or several programs concurrently. To accurately quantify its performance compared to other processors, it is implemented as an IC.<br/>A fully automatic scripted flow is described, constructing an...

Acoustic characterization of a miniature matrix transducer for pediatric 3D transesophageal echocardiography

This paper presents the design, fabrication and characterization of a miniature PZT-on-CMOS matrix transducer for real-time pediatric 3-dimensional (3D) transesophageal echocardiography (TEE). This 3D TEE probe consists of a 32 × 32 array of PZT elements integrated on top of an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). We propose a...

Mixed-Signal IC With Pulse Width ModulationWireless Telemetry for Implantable CardiacPacemakers in 0.18-μm CMOS

A low-power mixed-signal IC for implantable pacemakers is presented. The proposed system features three independent intracardiac signal readout channels with pulse-width-modulated outputs. Also, the proposed system is capable of measuring the amplitude and phase of the bioimpedance with pulse-width-modulated outputs for use in rate adaptive...

Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Subdicing on an Ultrasound Matrix Transducer

Over the past decades, real-time three-dimensional (3D) medical ultrasound has attracted much attention since it enables clinicians to diagnose more accurately. This calls for ultrasound matrix transducers with a large number of elements, which can be interfaced with an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for data reduction. An...

Exploring Feasibility of FPGAs in Implantable Medical Devices

Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) are deployed in patients to treat a range of medical conditions. Technological advancements have enabled manufacturers to fit IMDs with specialized hardware that accelerates compute-intensive medical therapies next to a software-run host processor. However, mostly hardware acceleration is found in the form of...

Integrated Transceiver Circuits for Catheter-Based Ultrasound Probes and Wearable Ultrasound Patches

This thesis describes the design, prototyping and experimental evaluation of transceiver ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) for catheter-based ultrasound probes and wearable ultrasound patches. To reduce the loading effect of micro-coaxial cables in an ICE probe based on capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducers (CMUTs), an...

Advanced Measurement Techniques and Circuits for Array-Based Transit-Time Ultrasonic Flow Meters

This thesis describes the design, prototyping and evaluation of matrix-based clamp-on ultrasonic flow meters. Several new measurement techniques are presented as well as an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designed for accurate measurement of flow velocity with matrix transducers.<br/><br/>The influence of circuit topologies on the...

Integrated Circuits for 3D High-Frame-Rate Intracardiac Echocardiography Probes

This thesis describes the design of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for high-frame-rate 3D intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) probes. The work follows the whole process from the analysis of the application to the testing of a prototype with all envisioned functionality. It starts with the evaluation of the main challenges posed...

Design of an FMCW-LiDAR receiver front-end

This work presents an analog front-end (AFE) signal processing chain for automotive FMCW LiDAR. The AFE consists of a high-gain transimpedance amplifier (TIA) followed by a gain-stage. The gain of the AFE is 103.2dBΩ at a bandwidth of 505MHz. Since the noise of FMCW-LiDAR systems is dominated by the shot noise of the local oscillator (LO), the...

Real-Time Detection and Classification of Purkinje-Cell Neural Activity

Purkinje cell is a type of neuron that can be found in the cerebellum. What characterises Purkinje cell neural activity is the fact that it exhibits two types of spiking behaviour; the so-called simple and complex spikes. These two types of spikes are thought to play a role in motor functionality. In order to better understand the relationship...

Pitch-Matched Integrated Transceiver Circuits for High-Resolution 3-D Neonatal Brain Monitoring

This thesis presents the design and implementation of integrated ultrasound transceivers for use in transfontanelle ultrasonography (TFUS). Two generations of ultrasound transceiver ASICs integrated with PZT transducer arrays intended for TFUS are presented. In the first generation, a novel AFE design that combines an LNA with the continuous TGC...

Meta-learning for few-shot on-chip sequence classification

The growing interest in edge computing is driving the demand for more efficient deep learning models that fit into resource-constrained edge devices like Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors. The challenging limitations of these devices in terms of size and power has given rise to the field of tinyML, focusing on enabling low-cost machine learning...