Welcome to the Electronic Systems group

We are located on the 4th floor of the Flux building on the University campus.

Mission

The mission of the section electronic systems is to provide a scientific basis for design trajectories of digital electronic circuits and systems 'from (generalized) algorithm to realization'. To identify the key problems, and verify the validity, robustness and completeness of our results, we develop, implement and maintain consistent and complete fows, and use them for realizing innovative multimedia hardware with emphasis on video processing and embedded architectures.

Scientific challenge

Implied in the mission statement is the question of how to convert the "art" of designing electronic systems into methodology, an absolute necessity, because

• the complexity of modern integrated circuits continues to increase,
• new physical phenomena at submicron feature dimensions are having more and more impact, not only on performance, but even on the functionality,
• and the heavy demand pull from signal processing applications, in particular multimedia and telecommunications, requires rigorous and robust answers.

Algorithms play a key role here, and with a dual nature:

• they still form the basis for efectively using a computer in design assistance, so in the first instance we want to support or develop algorithms for synthesis and verifcation of complex integrated systems where we do not stop at the level of point-wise solutions to specific problems, but integrate them into complete design environments: this is the methodological challenge.
• and they are the core of signal processing, and since video processing is our major application area, we aim at discovering efective algorithms to treat video signals in multimedia systems.

We like to emphasize our generalized view on algorithms, generalized towards computational networks that is graphs with computations at the nodes and transfer protocols on the arcs. Of course, groups at other universities and industries, are facing these challenges, and we gladly adopt their results and tools to come to full trajectories and innovative processors. Our contributions come from tackling the fundamental problems and filling the essential gaps, revealed by careful analysis of the methodological scene, using our insight in video processing and our experience with design environments.

Program design

The chair's expertise is firmly rooted in industrial research of video processing, multiprocessor architectures and design automation for deep submicron vlsi, and complemented with a solid theoretical basis in combinatorics and process algebra. This makes a distinctively design-oriented group, which aims to push ideas so far that they are implemented and used in design programs and in major applications.