Y. Luo: ADCs are essential building blocks for almost all electronic systems, they represent the key element that allows the digital representation of any electrical signal located in the analog domain, and hence these by-nature analog signals could be processed by the latest sophisticated digital processing units only after well A/D conversion in the ADCs ... [ more]

M. Häberle: Many life and material science applications like Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy (SICM) and Electrically Detected Magnetic Resonance put demanding constraints on readout electronics. In a SICM experiment a pipette is used to map the surface of soft biological samples. An EDMR experiment is used to derive the efficency of solar cell materials ... [more]

P. Vogelmann:  In the past few years, an increased interest in biomedical implants like neural recorders is noticeable as measured by the number of publications. These devices are integrated circuits (ICs) that comprise more and more functionality which increases their versatility and importance in medical research...  [more]

M. Pagin: In last decades development of Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) became more and more widespread. The technology allows recording of electrical activity in the brain, to further understand its complex dynamics. But not just for pure research, BMIs offer a bridge between thoughts and actions, robotic prosthesis activated by “thoughts” have already been tested on human patients ... [ more ]

J. Chi: Continuous-time (CT) Sigma-Delta ADCs are a promising candidate for high-speed receiver applications, such as software-defined radio (SDR), due to its inherent anti-aliasing and signal filtering, potential lower power consumption because of less stringent requirements on Op-Amps, and easy reconfigurability ... [ more]

M. Haas:  In recent years, brain machine interfaces enable scientists to observe and record neural activity. In some cases neural stimuli can also be applied to partially restore lost neural functionality.  Such interfaces require means of bidirectional wireless communication between the brain implant and the outside world without the risk of inflammation ...  [more]

J. Anders: Methods based on the electron spin resonance (ESR) effect are amongst the most powerful analytical techniques in medicine as well as in the natural and material sciences because they enable to study the structure, dynamics and spatial distribution of paramagnetic species in a large variety of samples. In this context, the main goal of this project is to improve and/or to enhance ... [more]

D. Djekic: The main objective of the this project is to develop fully-integrated CMOS detectors for combined amplitude- and frequency-sensitive ESR experiments at B0-field strengths between 1.25 and 3 T in order to improve the state-of-the-art in spin sensitivity by at least one order of magnitude and thereby enable a speed-up of the analysis of mass limited biological samples ... [more]

D. Djekic: Die Möglichkeit zur Bildgebung im Nichtkontaktmodus mit subzellulären Auflösungen machen die Rasterionenstrommikroskopie (engl. „scaning ion coductance microscopy“ (SICM)) zu einem vielversprechenden Verfahren für Untersuchungen im Bereich der Molekularbiologie. Kürzlich eingeführte Neuerungen im Bereich der Probenköpfe in Kombination mit neuen Bildgebungsmodi haben dabei die Auflösung, die Stabilität ... [mehr]

J. Handwerker: Konventionelle fMRT Experimente basieren auf dem BOLD-Effekt, der die Messung neuronaler Aktivität über die korrespondierenden lokalen Suszeptibilitätsveränderungen ermöglicht. Diese werden in der Regel mit Hilfe T2*-gewichteter EPI Sequenzen gemessen, wobei eine zeitliche Auflösung im Bereich von Sekunden und räumliche Auflösungen im Mikroliterbereich erzielt werden. Das beantragte Forschungsprojekt zielt auf die Überwindung dieser Beschränkungen in der zeitlichen und räumlichen Auflösung, um so feinere Details der neurovaskulären Kopplungskaskade untersuchen zu können ... [mehr]

J. Handwerker: Moderne Forschungs-Magnetresonanztomographie- (MRT-) Scanner mit sehr hohen statischen Magnetfeldern von mehr als 7 T eröffnen die Möglichkeit zur MR-basierten Bildgebung mit signifikant verbesserten Auflösungen im Vergleich zu konventionellen Systemen mit Feldstärken zwischen 1,5 T und 3 T. Allerdings verhindern oftmals Nichtidealitäten in Form von Verzerrungen in den Gradientenfeldern, also den örtlich veränderlichen Magnetfeldern zur Positionskodierung des MRT-Signals, das Erreichen der theoretisch möglichen Bildqualität ... [mehr]

C. Feller: All modern hybrid video codecs utilize spatial and temporal redundancy removal to compress video sequences. In order to reduce the data necesssary to properly describe a certain area of an image, the similarity to a reference image is exploited. This process is one of the central elements of each hybrid video codec and is called prediction. One can expect the enhancements of traditional hybrid 2D video compression to settle in the near future. Therefore new concepts need to be explored ... [more]

M. Lorenz: Various circuit nonidealities of continuous-time Sigma-Delta modulators can drastically reduce the performance of the requested A/D-conversion. Since some of these nonidealities can occur due to manufacturing of the chip or even during run-time, e.g., due to temperature-drift, ... [more]

K. Sooksood, E. Noorsal, H. Xu: In this project, the power efficient and area-optimized CMOS circuits for a highly reliable epi-retinal stimulator are developed. The goal of this epi-retinal stimulator is a capability of >1000  output channel including active charge balancing, ESD protection, and a flexible stimulation protocol. [more]

H. Xu: Recent researches have demonstrated the promise of developing implantable prosthetic devices to restore lost motor and sensory functions using neural stimulating method. In such an application, inductive links are commonly used for remote powering of the embedded system, because this method does not require any transcutaneous wires, which may cause infections, or any implanted batteries, which need to be replaced at the end of their lifetime. [ more ]

T. Brückner: Designing CT SD Modulator Filters needs a good insight into the filter design, control theory and stability issues of SD modulators. Therefore archiving good filter characteristics is depending on the knowledge of the designer and the used techniques. [more]

M. Gerhardt: In this project we carry out electrical modeling of the nerve tissue and experimental verification of the simulation results. [more]

J. Wünschmann: The processing chain of film production, coding, distribution and finally reproduction on the consumer display includes processing steps which suggest modifications. Not only fully animated movies but most of the films contain increasing amounts of animated content (e.g. special effects or non-real characters). Every animation is composed of 3D objects and rendered to be represented in frames. [more]

T. Roll: This project focuses on the improvement of the perceptual quality of erroneous compressed audio streams as well as the efficient implementation of these methods on programmable devices (e.g. FPGAs). [more]

A. Zahabi: To circumvent the timing-related non-idealities of conventional continuous-time sigma-delta (SD) analog to digital converters (ADCs), semi discrete-time elements like transmission lines (TL) can be used. Up to now, the TL based SD modulators for sampling frequency of several hundred MHz using lengthy off-chip TLs have been successfully designed. [more]

P. Witte: There exist plenty of possibilities for the correction of non-idealities in CT SD Modulators, e.g. for coefficient mismatch, excess loop delay, D/A error correction and others. Our research focuses on background calibration and correction of SD A/D converters, which track the system into its optimal operating point in a closed loop procedure. The investigated techniques use either test signal injection or work completely blind on the circuits output signal. [more]

E. Noorsal: In this work, the digital control for an arbitrary waveform stimulator is investigated. The goal is to achieve an optimal compromise of high flexibility for the flexibility of the stimulation waveforms on the one hand and a feasible complexity on the other hand. This is achieved by digital distribution and execution of the stimulation waveform data, where the external and internal protocol of data transmission is optimized. [more]

K. Sooksood: In implantable devices, a major problem for functional electrical stimulation (FES) is the charge imbalance due to imperfections of the stimulator electronics. Blocking capacitors have been used to achieve charge balanced stimulation for a long time, because of capacitor's characteristic - allow AC and block DC. In multi-channel stimulator, however, there's no room for blocking capacitors, and active charge balancing has to be taken into consideration in order to avoid electrolysis. [more]

Ch. Günter: Neuartige Datenratenkontrollverfahren, welche auf Modellen der Entropie- und Quantisierungsverhalten basieren, werden in dieser Arbeit entwickelt. Die Minimierung der Rechenleistung für das wavelet-basierte JPEG2000 Bildformat wird hauptsächlich durch die Entwicklung neuer Algorithmen für die Implementierung in eingebetteten Systemen erreicht. [mehr]

Ch. Beuschel: Datentransfer über einen verrauschten Kanal führt zu Verzerrung und möglicherweise Veränderung des Dateninhalts. Um Übertragungsfehler zu korrigieren werden fehlerkorrigierende Codes eingesetzt. Wir entwickeln partiell parallele Hardware-Implementierungen für voll programmierbare LDPC Dekoder [mehr]

Ch. Günter, K. Schmidt, F. Böhm: In Kooperation mit den Firmen trinloc GmbH und ATMEL GmbH wurde eine Entwicklungsplattform für DAB Multimedia Systeme entwickelt. [mehr]