Linköping Center for Electronics and Embedded Systems,
LINCE

Coordinator: Atila Alvandpour, Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University

The objective of the center is an efficient coordination of research and education on electronics and communication systems at Linköping University. This is motivated by the large industrial need for innovations in circuit technologies and system solutions, as well as the large national and global demand for engineers and researchers in the fields.

Computers, mobile phones, internet, and TVs are a few examples of today's electronic systems supporting our everyday life at work, at home, or anywhere else! Despite the historically excellent progress in electronics and semiconductor technology, it turns out that we are just scratching the surface of endless opportunities and capabilities to enhance the standard of the life! In addition to the demand for more affordable, faster, and advanced communication and information technologies, there are a countless number of emerging concepts and applications which are pending and waiting for future innovations in electronics and system architectures. As a few examples of potential applications, we have:
- To improve the quality of healthcare and reduce the cost by tele-health and tele-monitoring of patients at home, as well as ultra-low-power implantable medical devices enabling advanced cardiac rhythm management and neurostimulation for novel therapies of epilepsy, Parkinson's diseases, obesity, severe depression, and a host of other diseases
- To improve safety and security for people and societies at any place and at anytime using smart sensors, radars, and optical and infrared cameras for surveillance, detection, and protection systems.
- To improve efficiency of our industry, reducing the production cost and saving significant energy by more efficient systems for monitoring, control, automation, and communication.
- To make our homes more comfortable and more enjoyable with low-cost smart home appliance and entertainment systems.
Linköping center for electronics and embedded systems (LINCE) has the required broad spectrum of knowledge and experience to address the key future research and education challenges in the fields. The center which includes 10 full professors and about 60 active researchers is internationally recognized as one of the major contributors to state-of-the-art circuit technologies, system and computer architectures, system design methodologies, as well as communication systems. The center has close collaboration with major companies and research institutes worldwide, and it has contributed to a number of innovations which have been utilized in today's commercial products.
The publications from LINCE in the best journals on electronics constitute 0.5% of the total, indicating that we contribute to 0.5% of world research in this field (over 50% of the total contributions from Sweden in the field). As an example of the past achievements, during 2003-2007, the STRINGENT research program (supported by Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, SSF) produced 31 Doctors, 25 Licentiates, 66 journal papers and 405 high quality conference papers. About 70% of the produced PhDs have been directly recruited by industry in Sweden or abroad, and the remaining 30% are engaged in academia or in own companies. During 2003-2007, three new companies were spun off from the LINCE group, all of which have received public and/or private investments.
Based on the SSF's 2008 international evaluation of Swedish research in microelectronics, the center is considered as one of the strongest electronic circuits and systems research environments in Sweden and worldwide. Particularly, the center received the highest score (outstanding) for the quality of the research in high performance circuits. As examples, the international evaluation board has highlighted the contribution of our circuit techniques to some of the latest microprocessors of the world-leading Intel, our latest multi-purpose digital signal processor for DVB-H and other OFDM-based communication standards, as well as our high quality research work on design and test of embedded systems. In addition to our world-leading stronghold of the high-speed digital design, the center has also been recognized for its excellent progress of research on radio frequency (RF) and mixed analog/digital circuits for systems-on-chip in advanced CMOS technologies.
The key behind this success is a close collaboration between five established research divisions with a multidisciplinary and broad expertise in communication systems, signal processing techniques and algorithms, embedded systems optimization and test, embedded processor architectures, RF, analog, and high-speed digital integrated circuits and systems.

LINCE Divisions:

Electronic Devices

Dept. of Electrical Engineering (ISY)
Division head: Professor Atila Alvandpour

Division of Electronic Devices is focused on Education and Research on cutting-edge low-power, radio frequency, analog, and multi-GHz digital integrated circuits for systems on-chip. Our general goal is to exploit the maximum capability and possibilities of today and future advanced semiconductor technologies. We are particularly interested in flexible and multi-standard RF receiver front-ends, high-efficiency transmitters and power amplifier architectures, multi-GS/s data converters, VLSI chip timing and synchronization techniques, low-power multi-GHz clocking, low-voltage low-leakage and process-variation-tolerant circuit techniques, and high-speed on-chip and chip-to-chip signaling.

The division has over 25 years of research experience in high-speed, low power CMOS circuit techniques. We have close collaboration with major semiconductor companies world-wide. In addition to scientific publications and patents, a number of our research results have been utilized in advanced commercial products such as microprocessors, internet routers, CMOS cameras, data converters, and more. The division has produced 4 full Professors, and about 30 PhDs who are cur­rently with European and U.S. companies, such as Ericsson, Infineon, Intel, Lucent, Broadcom, and NXP.

Electronics Systems

Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Division head: Professor Lars Wanhammar

The research is directed towards design and implementation for analog and digital signal processing and telecommunication systems. This includes all design levels starting from specification, system architecture, algorithms, mapping to hardware structures, arithmetic, logic circuits down to integrated circuit design. The focus is on algorithms and hardware architectures for application-specific and algorithm-specific DSP and communication subsystems with low power consumption and stringent requirements on the computational capacity.The research topics include, digital and analog filters, filter banks and fast transforms, multirate systems, arithmetic processing elements, error correcting decoders, digital error correction of analog circuits, asynchronous techniques, robust CMOS logic circuits, data converters, and automated design of analog and mixed-signal circuits. The recent research has resulted in two spin-off companies.

Computer Engineering

Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Division head: Professor Dake Liu

In contrast to general purpose microprocessors, ASIP (Application Specific Instruction set Processor) give much higher performance, lower power, and lower silicon costs because of the optimized application specific instruc­tion set and microarchitecture. Volume embedded products use ASIP. The WSTS (World semi­conductor trade statistics) reported that the ASIP DSP sales in 2006 were USD15 billion out of a total USD208 billion semiconductor sales. ASIP research is a challenging area. The required knowl­edge for ASIP research is broad, ranging from applications, architecture selection, code compiling, parallel programming, microarchitecture, down to silicon fabrication. The research demonstrates state-of-the-art ASIP concept designs. The main academic interests include exploration of extreme performance with sufficient flexibility, low silicon cost, and low power architec­tures. We focus on DSP (digital signal processor) and multiple processors including SoC (System on chip) integration and hardware dependent programming issues. NPU (network processor unit) was also one of our research areas. To support the architecture design, ASIP design tools are continually developed for firmware coding, microarchitecture synthesis, and source code analysis. Source code analysis tool will explore design space by exposing data and program locality, opportunities of parallelization, and efficient parallel access of scratchpad memories. Applications covered by our research are radio baseband signal processing and other streaming signal processing.

Communication Systems

Dept. of Electrical Engineering
Division head: Professor Erik G Larsson

The Communication Systems division conducts research and education within the general area of digital and wireless communication systems. Our research is funded by major national and European agencies and we collaborate both with local industry and with a number of internationally well-renowned research groups. The main research activities in the division include: signal processing for communications, multiple-antenna (MIMO) wireless systems, cooperative communications and relaying, cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access, and resource allocation in wireless networks.

Embedded Systems

Dept. of Computer and Information Science
Division head: Professor Zebo Peng

Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESLAB) conducts research on the design and test of embedded systems, especially those consisting of interacting hardware and software components. Our recent research focus is on the development of methods and tools for specification, modeling, synthesis, real-time scheduling, analysis, simulation, design for test, test infrastructure design, formal verification and hardware/software co-design. We are also concerned with the exploitation of systematic design and design automation techniques for industrial application areas, such as telecommunication, automotive electronics and aerospace. Several of our on-going research projects are carried out in close cooperation with the industry, including Ericsson, Saab, Volvo, NXP and ST Microelectronics. The ESLAB group has produced a large number of international publications and several prize-winning results in recent years (e.g., four Best Paper Awards at major international conferences). Most of our papers have been published in well-established journals, such as the IEEE Transactions on Computers, on CAD, and on VLSI Systems, and the ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, and on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, as well as prime conferences in your field. Two of our papers have been recently selected as the most influential papers of 10 years DATE (the Design, Automation and Test in Europe conference).