Sensory Circuits and Control Systems
While sensors convert physical phenomena into electrical signals, dedicated circuits are required to process these signals into useful information. Additionally, the collected data must often be used to generate a response through interaction with the environment, a task achieved by controlling transducers. Our research focuses on front-end circuits for a variety of sensors, including, but not limited to, bolometers and air-quality sensors, that offer high performance and low power consumption. We are also investigating efficient control circuits for actuation and system-level interaction.
Bolometer Array Sensor
Contact person: Traian ANTONOVICI, Alex CĂLINESCU
Overview: Infrared (IR) sensors are divided into two categories: photon detectors and thermal detectors. The first category is based on the interaction between the absorbed radiation and the electrons in the crystalline structure of the material from which the detector is made. Thermal detectors, on the other hand, sense temperature variations caused by absorbed radiation, which in turn modify a physical property that can be transformed into an electrical signal.
To address the applications and challenges mentioned earlier, we research and develop integrated circuits with microbolometers, aimed at accelerating and facilitating the implementation of systems that require IR imaging.
The acquisition process starts with a pixel array, responsible for translating IR-domain information into electrical signals. The signals are acquired, conditioned and converted into discrete digital values. The Digital processing and control blocks manage the array at row and column level, the readout and conversion, and also handle the communication with external circuits and systems.
Published papers: –
Supporting research projects:
- Platforma Națională pentru Tehnologiile Semiconductorilor (National Platform for Semiconductor Technologies) – Development of a family of circuits based on Silicone Carbide (SiC) devices
Waveform Generation
Contact person: Florentina-Giulia STOICA, Alex CĂLINESCU
Overview: Sinusoidal wave is the cornerstone in many applications, from 3D graphics acceleration and music synthesis, to touch screen controllers and EMI cancellation in power electronics. Commonly used methods for sine wave synthesis are based on pre-defined values stored in LUTs or ROMs. High-fidelity signal reproduction yields a two-dimensional bottleneck in terms of memory depth (number of unique samples) and memory width (sample resolution), thus incurring large storage costs paid in area and latency. To address these limitations, ROM-less digital circuits, that utilize real-time computation through the implementation of various algorithms, have emerged. Although, these architectures use multiple complex circuits, such as multipliers and dividers, that also require large area and may significantly increase the propagation delay. Our team currently studies new ROM-less architectures, meant to reduce the occupied area and the propagation delay, while offering high fidelity signals.
Published papers:
Supporting research projects: –
