Wolfgang Fichtner, Professor for Electronics
Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH Zürich
Research
The research groups of Prof. Wolfgang Fichtner center around design and test of complex, testable ASICs for system applications, development of numerical and physical characterization of semiconductor structures, and furthermore analysis and simulations of bio-electromagnetic systems.
Since 1986, Prof. Fichtner has raised more than 53 million Swiss Francs in external funding to support research at the Integrated Systems Laboratory. Further information can be found in Funding.pdf.
The research activities of the IC and System Design and Test group are concerned with high-performance digital VLSI design. Research focuses on problems from modern telecommunications including adaptive antennas, digital modulation schemes, data compression, forward error correction, and cryptographic security. Digital processing of speech, audio, image, video, and multimedia signals are other applications of prime interest. Various techniques are being put to service to provide the silicon resources needed for such applications. These include dedicated VLSI architectures, special-purpose arithmetic units, application-specific instruction set processors (ASIP), and parametrized virtual components. Special areas of competence include VLSI design and test methodologies, architecture and circuit design for high-performance and low-power, architectural concepts and clocking disciplines that favor reuse, VHDL synthesis, design of VHDL testbenches for highly parametrized components, and test methodologies for forthcoming CMOS technologies.
The TCAD research activities concern nanoelectronic technologies and devices, first-principle modeling of carrier transport, simulation of quantum structures, ab initio and molecular dynamics simulation for diffusion and activation and numerical solvers optimized for process and device simulation. Scientific challenges are future generation manufacturing technologies, devices in the decananometer regime, quantum transport, parallel solvers for sparse matrices, noise modeling and harmonic balance analysis. These research activities are closely coupled with physical characterization and electronic measurement at our laboratory to validate the results of TCAD.
The Physical Characterization Laboratory disposes on a variety of experimental techniques for supporting the design of devices, as well for calibrating and validating models used in device and process simulation. Fields of research include high-resolution techniques for the determination of 2D dopant profiles (Scanning Capacitance Microscopy), robust design of BiCMOS devices, and high-temperature Silicon power devices for traction applications.
The BioElectroMagnetics Group of the Integrated Systems Laboratory, in tight cooperation with the Foundation for Research on Information Technologies in Society (IT'IS), is facing these issues and has activities in the following three areas: Risk Assessment, Near-Field Analysis and Design Tools, and Life Support Systems.