On March 29th 2024 at 16::00, Lucas Santana will defend their PhD entitled “TOWARDS UNCHARTED TERRITORIES: HIGH-PERFORMANCE AND HIGH-BANDWIDTH RINGAMP-BASED DELTA-SIGMA ADCs”.

Everybody is invited to attend the presentation in room D.2.01, or digitally via this link.

Analog-to-digital (ADC) research often happens in an agnostic detachment from the intended application; although motivation is sometimes presented, it is not always implemented with the proposed prototype. Advancements in ADC linearity and speed enable applications that were nonexistent before to emerge, such as direct RF conversion and 8k camera recording. Most ADC architectures cover all regions of the performance space, being at the forefront of the state-of-the-art for some areas and not so much for others. This high coverage enables the use of the advantages and peculiarities of different architectures across different applications. One notable architecture that does not perform this is the Discrete Time (DT) Delta-Sigma Modulator (DSM) ADC, in which the published state-of-the-art bandwidth front is limited to 20 MHz. This work investigates this limitation, showing that it can be overcome with high-efficiency ring amplifiers (ringamps) and the correct design process. This work presents a prototype for a single loop 3rd-order DT DSM ADC based on ringamps for the loop filter that could double the bandwidth reached by DT DSM ADC at 47.5 MHz and achieve 67 dB of signal-tonoise and distortion ratio (SNDR) when clocked at 950 MHz. It also shows outstanding figures of merit (FoM): the Schreier FoM, FoMs is 167 dB and the Walden FoM, FoMw is 27 fJ per conversion step. The second prototype used time interleaving to improve the sampling rate and bandwidth further and used a noise-coupled (NC) noiseshaping (NS) SAR quantizer to enable aliased noise suppression. It achieved 1.4 GS/s of sampling rate, a decimated bandwidth of 70 MHz at a peak SNDR of 67 dB, with a power consumption of 32 mW; this translated to a FoMs of 160 dB and a FoMw of 143 fJ/c.s. Both prototypes were the first to pave the way to increase the bandwidth in DT DSM ADC efficiently and can still benefit from recent developments in ringamps and noise-shaping SAR ADCs, leading the architecture to conquer even more space in this uncharted territory.

Fundamentals of evolutionary transformations in biological systems. Special Issue of the journal BioSystems, with Giuseppe Iurato and Abir Igamberdiev

       The relation between genetic and epigenetic factors is central to the concept of biological evolution. In early 19th century, the concept that major evolutionary changes are related to rescaling of embryogenesis was formulated by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and reintroduced in more detail by Karl Ernst von Baer who suggested that evolution is based on organism’s interpretation of itself in a dynamic environment and on persistence of these interpretations over generations. In recent years, we observe a transition from the view that the genetic factors are the sole source for biological inheritance and transformation to the broader understanding that, in addition to the mutational process and natural selection, other factors, in particular those associated with alterations in development and morphogenesis, determine the evolutionary process. This means that epigenetic effects can trigger many aspects of biological evolution. The contextual readout of DNA represents an important feature of the evolutionary change that determines consequent transformation and complexification of biological systems. The fundamental mathematical principles operating in living systems and constituting the basis for epigenetic transformation and evolutionary expansion require clarification and further substantiation on the basis of novel findings and discoveries. The issue is dedicated to one of the first evolutionary biologists Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire on the occasion of his 250th birthday.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/biosystems/special-issue/10FRKKW4VHK

Complexity, Chaos and Computation in Living Systems. Special Issue in Entropy

Complexity, chaos and computation in biology may be characterised in terms of entropy, but is this most closely related to the criterion of order, or more correctly to the concept of ‘unification’ of an entity? Clausius’ description of entropy in terms of ‘disgregation’, or disassociation of parts, suggests that the latter would be more relevant to biology, in the sense that a viable and therefore  ‘highly unified’ organism, exhibiting comparatively low entropy, could be compared to one suffering from a degree of disorganisation (sickness?), exhibiting comparatively higher entropy. It is notable that the holistic concept of ‘unification’, integrating both reductive top-down character and non-reductive (partially emergent) bottom-up character, is completely absent from conventional science.

Submissions are invited relative to all or a part of these questions.

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/Chaos_Living

• Equipment for diffusion, oxidation and epitaxial growth, a huge repro-camera, mask-aligner and vacuum deposit equipment is arriving.
• Microwaves are metallic waveguide, klystrons en Gunn oscillators were one of the play grounds of Jean Taeymans.
• Motorola launches its 6800-microcomputer system.

Benyameen Keelson and Pieter Boonen sucessfully finished the LifeTech.brussels MedTech accelerator with their startup projects PADFLOW en KARMA.

Some extra infomation can be found here.

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lifetech-brussels_medtechaccelerator-juryprize-publicprize-activity-7250177652748169216-x5-_?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
• https://lifetech.brussels/en/medtech-accelerator/
• https://lifetech.brussels/en/innovation-in-progress/

The introductory movies for the projects:

Benyameen:

Pieter:

ETRO, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and imec are proud to announce that Prof. Nikos Deligiannis has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council to make a groundbreaking contribution to science and society.

Project: IONIAN: Reinventing Multiterminal Coding for Intelligent Machines
Budget: €1,999,404

Professor Deligiannis’ IONIAN project focuses on reinventing multiterminal coding, a crucial technology for efficient communication and collaboration between intelligent machines. With the explosive growth of data, such as video and point cloud streams, current storage and communication technologies are under pressure, undermining the ability of intelligent machines to cooperatively perceive their environment. This project develops a groundbreaking compression and communication approach based on interpretable and explainable AI that breaks the limits of traditional compression and cooperative perception techniques.

IONIAN combines classical theories, such as distributed source coding, with modern deep learning techniques and explainable AI, focusing on three innovative pillars:

1. Solving theoretical limitations in multiterminal coding.
2. Designing interpretable and efficient machine learning models.
3. Developing new methods to enhance model interpretation.

The goal of this project is to elevate the collaboration between intelligent systems, such as autonomous vehicles and mobile robots, to a higher level, with greater safety and trust as the result.

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