Ultra Low-power Electronics Research

The group has a key focus on ultra low-power analogue and mixed-signal circuit and system design for a number of high-performance and/or resource-constrained devices, particularly for biomedical applications. This involves the design of very low-power microchips with analogue front-ends for signal acquisition and low-complexity intelligent algorithms for automatic detection of events from these signals. Here, key requirements are low-power, low-noise, low-area, high-precision and high-reliability operation, from front-end circuits (i.e. sensor interfacing/instrumentation, amplification, conditioning and data conversion) to back-end processing and communication (both wired and wireless).

Biomedical and Bio-inspired Applications

Biomedical applications include a multitude of wearable, implantable and point-of-care medical devices for diagnostics, monitoring and therapy. Examples include:

  • Wearable: artificial pancreas for type-1 diabetes, wearable intelligent vital sign monitoring, chronic respiratory conditions and neurological disorders such as sleep apnoea and epilepsy.
  • Implantable: neural interfaces for motor rehabilitation (e.g. brain-machine interfaces for amputees, spinal cord injury), optogenetics, closed-loop neural prostheses for epilepsy.
  • Point-of-care: handheld/lab-on-chip technologies for DNA detection and sequencing, lifestyle monitoring, breath analysis for cancer detection, diagnostics for infectious diseases.

Bio-inspired, biomimetic, neuromorphic applications aim to develop electronic systems that exploit the many highly desirable properties of biological systems. These include energy-efficiency, adaptivity, resilience to ill-conditioned data, distributed processing organisation, redundancy and robustness to component failure. Examples include bio-inspired sensing and signal processing based on based on enzymatic cascades (e.g. G protein-coupled cascade and the process of phototransduction) and retinomorphic vision systems (e.g. dynamic vision sensors).

See also the Centre for Bio-inspired Technology (part of the Circuits and Systems research group).

Academic staff

Tim Constandinou

Tim Constandinou

Tim Constandinou

Pantelis Georgiou

Pantelis Georgiou

Pantelis Georgiou

Christos Papavassiliou

Christos Papavassiliou

Christos Papavassiliou

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas

Esther Rodriguez-Villegas

Chris Toumazou

Chris Toumazou

Chris Toumazou