Centre for Microsystems Engineering - Research
Research Team
Micro & Nano Systems are complex systems that cover many disciplines, hence extended teams with complementary fields of expertise are necessary to deliver relevant research. This has been achieved with staff that have multi-disciplinary profiles and by forming extended partnerships with a range of academic and industrial groups. Prof. Andrew Richardson has core skills in the fields of embedded test, design for test and reliability engineering in mixed signal electronics and MEMS enabled electronic systems. These skills are complemented by Dr. Dinesh Pamunuwa whose core competence is in electronic system design with particular emphasis on VLSI technology. The team also benefit from the experience of Prof. Chris Pickering, visiting Professor from QinetiQ who has a background in photonics, along with Prof. Colin Lambert, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Prof. Emeritus Tony Dorey. Projects are supported by Dr. Roshan Weerasekera who focuses on System-in-Package integration and Dr. Nick Burd who works on the development and delivery of training and educational material for MEMS and Microfluidic devices. Phd students Zhou Xu, Matt Grange, Qais Al-Gayem and Haroon Khan also provide invaluable support.
3-D Integration - Design for Manufacture Methodology for System-in-Package Technology
The main focus has been on the development of reduced order models for fast reliability analysis for System-In-Package (SiP) implementations and the integration of these models into a computational framework for risk analysis. Concepts for implementing an embedded monitoring architecture and specific solution for an RF-MEMS switch have been developed.
3-D Integration - Design for Extended System Integration Based on Die Stacking
Next generation Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits can contain up to many billions of transistors and the design of these chips presents a number of challenges including power delivery and heat dissipation, interconnection problems and integration of disparate technologies. Many high-performance electronic designs also suffer from what is known as the memory bottleneck, with long and narrow wires providing slow access to off-chip memory banks.
Embedded Test and Health Monitoring - Integrated Health Monitoring of MNT Enabled Integrated Sytems (i-Health)
The trend towards higher integration complexities in System-in-Package (SiP) and multi-layer board technology is now opening possibilities of embedding non-electrical functions such as optics, MEMS and bio-chemical based functions with silicon based electronics. Most of these technologies exist but the integration and associated manufacture of these systems places major challenges on the test and reliability validation processes. Typical applications are in areas such as ambient intelligence, intelligent sensing and medical technologies where fault tolerance and self-test are key requirements.
Embedded Test and Health Monitoring - Embedded Test of High Performance Analogue-to-Digital Converters
This work has been based around past research in the area of high speed, analogue front end systems that delivered a fully digital self-test solution for an ADC/Converter pair. This project has extended this methodology to high resolution sigma-delta converter designs where external test solutions based around DSP based testing are both lengthy and expensive.
Embedded Test and Health Monitoring - Health and Usage Monitoring
Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) are becoming increasingly important within systems & structures that can potentially cause injury, death or damage to critical infrastructure if failure is not effectively managed. In the main, these types of condition and health monitoring functions are based around sensors, data loggers and software based condition monitoring algorithms.
Nanosystems Integration - Nanoelectronic Device Modelling for Electronic System Design
The continuous shrinking of feature lengths which has historically followed Moore’s law and given us enormous benefits in the form of faster and more complex systems with each generation, will hit fundamental physical limits in the nanometre regime, predicted to be around the 20μm node by the ITRS. Beyond that node, quantum effects will start to significantly affect the operation of the contemporary workhorse of modern electronic systems, the MOSFET.
Nanosystems Integration - Nanomagnetism
Micromagnetic simulations are used to identify magnetisation patterns in nanoscale magnets. As with conventional bar-magnets, nanoscale magnetic objects possess a large magnetic moment, yet orientation, strength and stability can only be calculated using powerful computers. The data from these simulations contains the orientation of magnetic moments in every part of a nanomagnet.
Nanosystems Integration - Magnetoelectronics
The combination of magnetism with conventional electronics has recently produced a fast-growing area of research named “magnetoelectronics” or “spintronics”. The main advantages of using the spin of the electrons as well as their charge for data storage or data processing are non-volatility, low power consumption and speed. Direct application of spintronic devices are in magnetic random access memory and magnetic logic circuits.
Nanosystems Integration - Reliability Modelling Technology for MEMS Enabled Systems
Work has focused on delivering strategies for integrating behavioural models of MEMS components into system simulations that have enhanced accuracy, execution time and can be used to assess the impact of defects, degradation and the effect of material interfaces and environmental conditions. A number of linked activities have been active.
Coordination and Leadership
Advances in the field of Micro & Nano Systems requires multi-disciplinarily and close collaboration with both technology organisations and end-users. Cross-border extended teams is hence the norm and both effective progress and impact dependant on technical, dissemination and exploitation strategies developed by the community in addition to the quality of ideas and intellectual property. For these reasons, the team has both participated in extended collaborations and taken a leadership role in a number of key initiatives.