The Hellman fellowship is awarded to “young faculty in the core disciplines who show capacity for great distinction in their research and creative activities.”  Prof. Mercier plans to use this award to research and develop anatomically-miniaturized, energy-autonomous biomedical sensors and instrumentation electronics.

Congratulations to Professor Mercier who has won the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Teaching Award for the 2012/2013 academic year.  This award is based on high student reviews and executed performance in ECE 283 (now called ECE 203): Biomedical Integrated Circuits and Systems.  

Congratulations to Loai Salem, who will be presenting a paper entitled “An 85%-Efficiency Fully Integrated 15-Ratio Recursive Switched-Capacitor DC-DC Converter with 0.1-to-2.2V Output Voltage Range” at the 2014 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, California.  ISSCC is regarded as the premier conference in the area of solid-state circuits.

Congratulations also to Saurav Bandyopadhyay (now at Texas Instruments), along with collaborators at MIT, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, who will be presenting a paper entitled “A 1.1nW Energy Harvesting System with 544pW Quiescent Power for Next-Generation Implants”, also at ISSCC 2014.

The advanced program can be found here.  More details about the papers will be available after the conference in February 2014.

Researchers at UC San Diego, along with their industry counterparts, are working to make power amplifiers more energy efficient while at the same time capable of handling ever increasing amounts of data across the wireless spectrum.  Read an article about the conference here.

We are currently looking for up to two post doctoral fellows to work in the EEMS lab on projects pertaining to magnetic sensors and high-speed link design.  In both cases, the ideal applicant should have strong IC design and system-level design experience.  In both cases, interested applicants should contact Prof. Mercier directly with a CV, brief personal statement, and list of references.  An anticipated start date is January, 2014.

Magnetic sensing

The ideal post-doc applicant should have high-precision analog IC design experience, and have a strong background in physics. Experience with lock-in amplifiers and PLLs is a plus.

High-speed links

The ideal post-doc applicant should have experience design high-speed ICs.  This project entails design of a differential communication link over 500m with a required bandwidth of 500Mbps.

Disclaimer: We receive many applications on a daily basis, and we will unfortunately not be able to respond to all inquiries.  Both positions will remain open until filled by a qualified candidate.

The biochemical energy harvesting work in the inner-ear outlined in the previous posts was featured on the cover of the December 2012 issue of Nature Biotechnology.  This is the first time in about 13 years that electronics have appeared on the cover of this journal.

Image credit: Patrick Mercier

A group of researchers consisting of Patrick Mercier (principal investigator of the Energy-Efficient Microsystems Group), Andrew Lysaght, Saurav Bandyopadhyay, Anantha Chandrakasan, and Konstantina Stankovic have discovered how to extract power from the biologic battery that occurs naturally within the inner-ear of mammals.  The results, featured in the journal Nature Biotechnology this week, show for the first time that it is not only possible to extract energy from the ear, but that it is also possible to use this energy to power useful electronic devices – in this case a miniaturized radio transmitter and sensor.

One of the main engineering challanges of building such a bioelectronics and energy harvesting system is that the extractable power from the inner-ear is extremely small – on the order of a few nanowatts.  By employing innovative near-zero-leakage power electronics, the researchers were able to boost the voltage of the biologic battery from approximately 80 mV to 1 V, which was then used to operated a 2.4 GHz radio transmitter.  The resulting chip design, implemented in a 180nm CMOS technology, employed an extremely duty-cycled energy-buffering architecture, where the radio transmitted a single packet approximately once per minute.

More detailed information regarding chip implementation results, clinical experiments, and future directions can be found in the paper here.  Meanwhile, the results have generated interest in the press, featuring coverage by many news and social media organizations, including the journal Nature, IEEE Spectrum, Popular Science, the front page of MIT’s website, Discovery News, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc.  In particular, MIT News has a recommended article about the work, and can be found here.

Work by Mercier and colleagues was highlighted in the journal Nature today.  More information can be found here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7423/full/491162c.html

The project was completed with cross-disciplinary collaboration between MIT, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Patrick Mercier joins the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego as an Assistant Professor.  The ECE department is part of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD.

Denis Daly, Patrick Mercier, Anantha Chandrakasan and colleagues from MIT, the University of Washington, and the University of Arizona receive the Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2010 (link to SSCS Magazine).  The work on cyborg insects and UWB radios was featured on Discovery News and IEEE Spectrum.  This work was also featured in a Technology Review article about Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan.