Dr. Christos Vezyrtzis is currently employed in the US as an IBM Research Staff Member, after concluding his PhD at Columbia University in the City of New York! Instead of a life-long career in the US, he decided to take the step back to Europe. Through his unique expertise in continuous-time digital signal processors, he will acquire a career in Europe, establishing himself in the field of next-generation communication circuits. The primary technical focus is the novel event-driven design approach to achieve maximum energy efficiency for the next generation digital communication circuits. This will lead to a drastic reduction in power cost, environmentally friendly products and significantly prolonged operation time. The novel radios will have a cleaner emitted spectrum, less interference which leads to higher data rates (closer to the theoretical limit). Improvement in energy-efficiency will help the European market get one step ahead of the competitors, mainly in the US and Asia. Infineon, as the host organization, is highly supportive to this idea gaining one of the top-level experts in asynchronous and continuous-time digital circuits to strengthen the European Semiconductor Industry. Such effort will greatly benefit from Dr. Vezyrtzis’ extensive skills in the new and upcoming field of continuous-time digital circuits. The Marie S. Curie funding gives Dr. Vezyrtzis the freedom to develop his own strategy to re-integrate in Europe while gaining additional industry experience and support an application oriented research project for future communication solutions. The career goal for the researcher is to find a long-term position in European research, starting in industry to get an additional set of capabilities while investing his know-how in the project. At the end of the Marie S Curie fellowship he will have clarity about his further path in Europe – being qualified for industry as well as for academia.

There is persistent demand for radical advancements in telecommunication systems. The digital baseband processing unit (or Digital Signal Processor – DSP) is of paramount importance for the overall performance and it consumes a significant part of the total power. Breakthroughs in terms of accuracy, speed and efficiency are required in custom DSP implementations. To this end we propose to employ ideas that lead to advances in quantum algorithms for scientific computing to obtain silicon integrated circuit implementations meeting the performance expectations. Our experience and the similarities in the efficiency and accuracy requirements between such quantum algorithms and custom silicon-based integrated circuit design have not been exploited. This has a huge potential for obtaining high performance DSP cores in 5G MaMi systems. We propose to derive DSP algorithms and corresponding digital circuits with performance guarantees in terms of accuracy and speed. In some cases we will be deriving entirely new algorithms and circuits. In others we will investigate the degree to which the existing quantum algorithms for scientific computing can be used as a basis to derive efficient custom integrated circuits for DSP. To address the efficiency requirements and to control the error propagation we propose a modular approach. Algorithms will be composed by combining modules performing sub-tasks. Digital circuits with a priori known error and cost characteristics will be used to implement the different modules. This allows the comparison of the trade-offs between implementation alternatives and paves the way toward fully automatic overall resource optimization in DSP design. The proposed approach will provide a new and sound methodology to design and test custom integrated circuits for next generation communication systems (5G).

The terahertz frequency band attracted strong research interest over the last few years and it is proclaimed as an ideal solution for accommodating the escalating needs of the envisioned applications in the fourth industrial revolution era. The implementation of efficient and affordable integrated hardware components and systems able to provide solid performance in this frequency range requires the solution of many technical and scientific challenges. On account of this, the main target of this proposal is to provide a holistic approach that will enhance and optimize the foundations of the development of these building blocks, starting from the underlying advanced semiconductor and IC packaging technology platforms that offer the basis for the implementation of THz IC designs. The project approach is multidisciplinary applying novel ideas and the latest achievements in material science to the engineering of custom silicon-based IC designs in the THz regime. In some cases, the researcher Dr. Mitronika intends to design new components and include them in a dedicated library to assess the IC design and in others, to evaluate, improve and propose new thin film technologies that improve the total chip performance. Accordingly, our work will deal with two major objectives based on which a complete THz hardware design platform will be proposed as a practically feasible solution. The first objective is to enhance the required process design kit with a set of scalable microwave elements, adequate for THz IC design. The second objective is to explore the implementation of microwave passive components in the IC packaging technology and propose modifications to the thin film technologies. A successful elaboration of our holistic approach will enable the THz infrastructure evolution that will affect the advancements in the next generation of communication systems (6G) but also in biomedical and sensing applications.