Research at Electronics Systems

The research as well as the education is directed towards design and implementation of analog and digital signal processing and telecommunication systems. This includes all design levels starting from specification, system architecture, algorithms, mapping to hardware structures, arithmetic, logic circuits down to integrated circuit design. The focus is on algorithm-hardware co-design with emphasis on low power consumption. The driving applications are to be found within telecommunication systems with high transmission capacity and stringent requirements on low power consumption. These transmission systems, e.g., xDSL and OFDM use either copper cables or radio. Often these systems are high-volume products aimed at the consumer market. Hence standard CMOS processes and a high degree of integration must be used in order to achieve low cost and at the same time high performance. The aim is low cost single chip implementations using ULSI technologies, i.e., system-on-a-chip.
    Current research on the system level involve design and synthesis of high-performance telecom/DSP systems with low power consumption and is based on a GALS approach - asynchronous communication between synchronous subsystems. This view, which focuses on intrachip communication, is well suited for telecom/DSP systems since they tend to be data driven. Advantages with this approach are multifold, here we only mention the obvious reduction in power consumption due to reduced and simplified clock networks, problems due to multiple clocks and clock skew are avoided, and that subsystems may be in standby mode in burst mode applications. This approach also tend to improve the design efficiency since the design tasks can be de-coupled and reuse of subsystems, that may be optimized with respect to the requirements at hand, is supported.
    Other research topics include efficient methods and techniques for design of application-specific or algorithm-specific DSP subsystems with high requirements on the computational capacity and low power consumption, multirate systems, digital filters, analog and digital filter banks, fast transforms, co-optimization of algorithms and implementations, algorithm-specific processors, low power arithmetic processing elements, robust CMOS logic circuits with low power consumption, and analog circuits, such as integrated analog filters and A/D and D/A converters.