Distributed FlexIC Architectures for Smart Surfaces and E-Skins

Background:

Electronic skins (e-skins) are emerging as a key enabling technology for future robots, wearable systems and intelligent environments. Inspired by human skin, electronic skins combine large numbers of distributed sensors over flexible surfaces to monitor pressure, strain, touch, temperature and proximity over areas ranging from a few square centimetres to several square metres.

Recent advances in flexible integrated circuits (FlexICs) enable intelligence to be embedded directly within these sensing surfaces, creating distributed sensing systems capable of local processing, communication and decision making.

This PhD aims to advance the state of the art in flexible integrated circuits by developing reusable FlexIC building blocks and system architectures, and develop a robust packaging strategy that enables multimodal sensing nodes on highly flexible substrates.

Within this PhD, you will conduct pioneering research at the intersection of flexible electronics, integrated circuit design and multimodal sensing systems. Your work will contribute to the development of future wearable and robotic sensing platforms that integrate sensing, signal processing and communication directly on flexible substrates.

You will work within a multidisciplinary team at CMST (imec/Ghent University) and collaborate with technology providers, circuit designers and application developers to bring novel FlexIC concepts from design to fabricated demonstrators.

What you will do:

1. Develop analog and mixed-signal FlexIC building blocks

· Design and optimize operational amplifiers, transimpedance amplifiers and sensor interface circuits in FlexIC technology.

· Develop readout circuits for resistive, capacitive, voltage-based and current-based sensors.

· Design higher-resolution ADC architectures suitable for flexible electronics platforms.

· Investigate low-power circuit techniques under the constraints of flexible transistor technologies.

2. Create scalable multimodal sensing architectures

· Develop flexible acquisition architectures capable of interfacing with multiple sensing modalities.

· Design digital processing blocks for local filtering, pulse counting and feature extraction.

· Implement communication interfaces such as I²C and SPI for distributed sensor systems.

· Investigate bus-based and addressable sensing-node concepts for large-area sensing skins and wearable systems.

3. Validate FlexIC technology in real-world applications

· Explore packaging and assembly solutions of FlexICs for reliable integration in flexible substrates

· Integrate designed FlexICs into demonstrators for healthcare, wearable and robotic sensing applications.

· Participate in chip tape-outs through Europractice and Pragmatic Semiconductor.

· Characterize fabricated circuits and evaluate their performance in multimodal sensing systems.