Hardware trojans (HT) impact our everyday life and may even cause life threatening situations. Unlike other errors and malfunctions, Trojans are inserted deliberately. Apart from insider attacks, the economically driven outsourcing of production steps to third party contractors enlarges the attack surface dramatically. Ideally, any undesired modification made to an IC should be detectable by presilicon verification/simulation and post-silicon...
Much of the knowledge that we have from our world stems from the analysis of images. Using optics and cameras, we can map how much light a sample absorbs or how by how quickly the light propagates in a medium (both together are described by the complex refractive index). From these spectral properties, we can...
3D-META proposes an entirely new principle for beam steering of relevance to 3D imaging with lidar microsensors. Our proposed mechanism avoids the fundamental limitations associated with current MEMS tip-tilt micromirrors by instead using MEMS to tune the electromagnetic properties of gap surface plasmon metasurfaces. Using such dynamic metasurfaces we target a factor 10 increase in scanning angle range...
Optical sensing is a vast and rapidly expanding field, demanding future applications require revolutionary sensors with high detection efficiency, high time resolution, spectral resolution, and statistical analysis of light. There are however no detectors currently available offering all these features simultaneously. In INSPECT we will combine integrated photonics with superconducting detector technology to realise a...
Displays components consume the most power in electronic devices such as smartphones. Portable devices usually convert electricity into light to show images and videos, which spends much energy. Alternatively, reflective-type displays in e-book readers consume little power but cannot provide colourful images nor fast frame rates to reproduce videos. Standard technologies cannot meet the requirements for virtual reality...
The goal of this project is to develop an innovative detector – called GEMTEQ – for microdosimetry. Microdosimetry is the study of the temporal and spatial distributions of absorbed energy in biological matter and is crucial for the understanding of the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of radiation on human tissue, for example of a carbon ion beam...
The present project aims to develop a wood disease detection sensor based on a bio-mimetic principle: repeatedly hitting the tree and listening. Animals such as the Aye-aye Daubentonia madagascariensis use their long, thin finger to constantly hit the surface of the trunks. At the same time, their extremely sensitive ear allows them to differentiate and locate those areas...
LIDAR is a distance and speed measurement apparatus using reflection characteristics of an emitted light. A laser emits a brief coherent light pulse at a defined frequency. A photodetector measures the reflected light. The time between emitted and detected light allows to compute the distance from the target. Frequency shift in the reflected light also...
We aim to combine recent breakthroughs in magnetic sensing technology and functional neuroimaging system design for beyond state-of-the-art investigations of the human brain in health and disease. The technical breakthrough consists of nano-fabricated high critical-temperature (high-Tc) junctions that yield superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometers that are simpler to fabricate, enable more flexibility in design,...
The development of IoT requires sensors with a significant autonomy. Among them, cameras play a major role for many applications. Today some battery-powered cameras offer at the best several weeks/months of autonomy. The goal of our project is to design and manufacture a first prototype of a fully self-powered camera. By eliminating the need for...
The SWaP project aims at developing revolutionary components for the next generation of cooling systems, directly embedding sensors in a hydraulic circuit element by the combination of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies. AM technologies, often referred to as “3D-printing”, are opening today new possibilities to manufacture objects with shapes that either were not possible before, or...
FastPix is a reconfigurable low light-level (LLL) hybrid sensor that can be scaled to arbitrarily large areas and that aims to detect the time of arrival of single photons with a time resolution (SPTR) close to 10 ps. The FastPix performance will be at least one order of magnitude better than any existing technology in time, spatial...
Recently, we proposed a novel imaging method which combines two different concepts; coded aperture imaging and incoherent digital holography. This combination opens new world of 3D imaging with interesting unexpected features. The new imaging concept is dubbed interferenceless coded aperture correlation holography (I-COACH). In I-COACH, modulating a single beam with a codded phase mask yields...
X-ray tomography is an incredibly useful diagnostic tool in various sectors of medicine. However, the typical radiation dose the patient absorbs during a ct scan is quite high, so that less informative tools must be often used instead. A drastic reduction of the radiation dose would open x-ray tomography to vast new applications, e.g. preventive...
The vision PRIMELOC envisions a future where location-based services, enabled outdoor by Galileo or GPS, will be widely provided also in indoor spaces, thanks to the availability of automatically generated maps and infrastructure-less localisation inside buildings. In this project, we devise the new concept of personal radar as a fundamental step toward this goal. This concept stems...
Microscopy (whether using neutral systems, such as photons or atoms, or charged systems, such as electrons) requires the ability to “optically” manipulate low energy particles, through a series of “lenses” that are used to focus a beam and scan it across a surface (except in the case of atomic force microscopy, where the divergently emitting...
This project will investigate innovative ways to realise single photon visible light imagers for a number of applications in astronomy, quantum technologies, autonomous systems, and life sciences. The main objective is to create image sensor designs suitable for adaptive optics systems and low-light level spectroscopic and imaging applications, based on detailed semiconductor and technology device...
The project aims to develop a novel rapid spectral imaging microscopy technique and device in light of its expected unprecedented capability in cancer detection. It brings together the expertise of three research groups at two universities with years of experience in relevant fields. While common image acquisition provides only three values (RGB) for each pixel of the image,...
Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is powerful technology that facilitates comprehensive analysis of chemical and biological properties of Earth surface on a large scale, with proven applications in environmental monitoring, farming, forestry, mining and water quality management. In the context of industrial agriculture, HSI allows for data-driven optimisation of cultivation practices, giving dramatic reduction in use of water, fertilisers and crop...
A high-resolution low-cost time-to-digital converter (TDC) technique has been developed utilising low-cost off-the-shelf field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. This TDC allows for the measurement of events to picosecond accuracies across many channels. A resolution of 1ps, an accuracy of 12ps RMS (single channel) and differential and integral nonlinearity figures of <±1 have been demonstrated, far...
