“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.
In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.
Featured articles:
- De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
- Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
- Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)
Since you are required to follow preparatory courses, you will need to make two applications:
– One for the preparatory program (VRB Biomedical Engineering – 00404)
– One for the master program (MA Biomedical Engineering – 00399)
Growth of personnel: 5 staff members: Jacques, Jean (assistants) Ingrid Sansens and André Pletinckx (technicians), as secretary Gilberte Lievens and Oscar Steenhaut (HoD).
There are several online Q&A sessions organized before the start of the academic year – you will be informed and updated regarding this.
Sofia Granda attended the Master in Biomedical Engineering in 2020-2021. She chose the program because she really liked mathematics, physics, and biology at high school and liked to be able to find practical solutions to problems. Sofia described the program in the following three words: Empathy, Logic and Medicine. Strengths of the program were the flexibility in the second year choosing the electives from a very wide offer. It included many practical sessions and visits to the hospital. But sometimes is was difficult to understand the global picture and the purpose of some contents of the program. There were some overlaps. Her favorite course was Health Information and Decision support systems. The collaboration with the other students from different cultures lead sometimes towards cumbersome communication but in the end, it was enriching. Sofia’s golden tip for future students is: Be true to yourself and don’t be afraid of following your goals, even when you get demotivated due to bad scores or difficulties with learning, especially with courses you don’t like but that are mandatory.
Sofia would like to end up applying her knowledge improving people’s lives or investigating in a job that fulfills her and that she is proud of.
ETRO Prof Nikolaos Deligiannis was asked for a contribution to the Belgian Senate on Monday Jan 18. The hearing was focused on fake news in social media and representatives of Facebook and Google Belgium as well as from the EC were also present.
(The input from Nikos starts after 2:20h)
On February 8 2023 at 16.00, Pratap Renukaswamy will defend his PhD entitled “PLL MODULATION AND MIXED-SIGNAL CALIBRATION TECHNIQUES FOR FMCW CHIRP SYNTHESIS”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01, or though this link.
Radar sensors have moved in the past decade from bulky systems to integrated solutions, driven by many applications in varying domains. Radar sensors are key components in self-driving cars to provide robust sensing capabilities in every weather condition. They allow contactless monitoring of vital signs such as breathing and heart rate. One of the latest applications is gesture recognition in recent smartphones.
The signals used in radar sensors are modulated signals: Frequency- Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) is today the most widely used modulation. Here a carrier frequency is linearly modulated to reach a maximum over a specified period. This waveform is called a chirp.
The key component to realize this is a frequency-chirping Phase-Locked Loop (PLL), that generates an clean sinewave of a linearly increasing frequency. Many of the key performance criteria of the radar system are determined by the quality of the generated FMCW source. Any nonlinearity in the frequency versus time curve causes errors in the detected distance and speed. Any noise in the system will prevent the detection of small targets, hidden in the noise floor. The total available bandwidth (difference between maximum and minimum frequency) that can be generated determines the range resolution of the radar, where several GHz of bandwidth are required to detect targets with cm accuracy.
To address these challenges, this thesis presents a PLL modulation architecture and circuit blocks for low-power and high-performance chirp synthesis and verified using two 28 nm CMOS prototype chips. The designs will further push the performance of the FMCW PLLs, by combining innovative mixed-signal processing and calibration techniques with Charge-Integrating Digital-to-Analog Converter (QDAC) as a key building block. The 10 GHz sub-sampling PLL prototype achieves 23 MHz/ÎĽs chirp slope with 28 kHz rms-FM-error, while consuming less than 12 mW power. The 16 GHz duty-cycled charge-pump PLL design achieves a 29 MHz/ÎĽs slope with an rms-FM-error below 41 kHz while consuming less than 16.5 mW.