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£4M awarded for research in Integrated Electronics

March 25, 2003

The University of Surrey's Integrated Electronics research programme is one of only eight research teams in the UK to receive one of the new Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Portfolio Partnership Awards being announced at the EPSRC's annual conference in London on Wednesday 3 April 2003. The University of Surrey (UniS) team, led by Professor Ravi Silva, will be awarded funding in excess of £4M over 5 years to further their research in three specific fields.

The Portfolio Partnership is fostering the cross-disciplinary activities required to address the 'grand challenges' of the future. Much of the themed research undertaken by the group has relevant interfaces; in terms of, for example, plastic displays that allow for immersive environments, or high speed electronic information transfer with maximum information content for surgery in a portable manner.

Speaking of the award today, University of Surrey Vice-Chancellor Professor Patrick Dowling said: 'I am delighted and proud that Surrey has been selected as one of the leading centres of excellence in the UK for our research in this field. Together with our outstanding 5*A rating in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, this award is a credit to all members of the research teams involved, past and present, that they have been recognised in this way.'

Radical alternatives to established microelectronics technologies promise to revolutionise applications in wireless multimedia communications and medical imaging systems. Through the use of novel materials, such as carbon nanotubes and its composites, and the exploitation of system level RF integration techniques and advanced information processing, futuristic new concepts such as wearable multimedia communicators and wrap-around medical diagnostic systems are envisaged.

Nanotechnology, System on a Chip and Plastic Electronics research under the leadership of Professor Ravi Silva and Professor Ian Robertson in UniS new Advanced Technology Institute, will be truly multi-disciplinary, bringing together Electronics, Physics, Biology, Computing and Engineering. One objective is to produce devices to functionalise carbon nanotubes. Expertise unique to Surrey on low temperature growth will be utilised in conjunction with large area plastic substrates for applications such as wrap-around displays, solar cells, large area sensors, and composites for the aerospace and automobile sectors. The team will also explore new device structures and novel architectures that will attempt to exploit one-dimensional conduction, and will examine devices to interface directly to biological systems. The focus of the systems integration and circuit design activities is to push the upper frequency limit of radio frequency and optoelectronic transceiver modules. Future wireless multimedia communication systems are expected to exploit the millimetre-wave spectrum. The research will investigate use of the nanoelectronic devices for these and other applications such as medical imaging systems based on bioelectromagnetic interactions.

I-Lab: Wireless Multimedia Research team in the University's Centre for Communication Systems Research (CCSR), is led by Professor Barry Evans and Professor Ahmet Kondoz. As part of the portfolio activity, technologies will be studied that encompass enhancing existing technologies in areas such as 3G and develop new technologies for the 4G. Immersive presence and augmented reality will be the areas focused on for the mid- to long-term research. The navigation and interaction with information over the fixed but more importantly wireless networks, including the Internet will be a key part of this programme, which will help make the man-machine interface a more enjoyable experience.

The Medical Imaging team led by Professor Maria Petrou in the UniS Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), will base their research on optimising the search of a database of 3D objects, to enhance extraction of feature values that characterise human organs and human tissue. As part of the programme the use of photometric stereo techniques for 3D-surface and colour reconstruction, will be studied, which are of particular relevance to representation of human faces for plastic and reconstructive surgery.

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