D-ITET News Channel (EN)

Rahul Bera, doctoral student in the SAFARI Research Group, won the Best Paper Award together with co-authors for their work “Hermes: Accelerating Long-Latency Load Requests via Perceptron-Based Off-Chip Load Prediction” at the MICRO’22.

Members of D-ITET participated in the IEEE Swiss Women in WICAS-ED Symposium on 9 September 2022, organised by the IEEE Swiss Circuits and Systems & Electron Devices (CAS & ED) Chapter.

On 31 August 2022 the "Drinks of the World" event, organized by the Diversity & Inclusion team at D-​ITET, took place. Around 50 people joined the joyful event at the ETZ foyer.

Together with ewz and the Center for Project-Based Learning at D-ITET (PBL), the Civil Engineering Office of the City of Zurich is testing newly developed sensors on Vulkanplatz and Münsterhof. They should provide information about how the chairs on the squares are used. If the sensors prove themselves, they could be used in the future for planning public spaces.

A mixed team consisting of members of the group of Prof. Luca Benini at the Institute of Integrated Systems and the Università di Bologna has won the Open-Source Hardware/Software Award at the "SAMOS XXII" International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation.

Prof. Ender Konukoglu, currently Tenure Track Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as Associate Professor of Biomedical Image Computing.

Minesh Patel from the SAFARI Research Group led by Prof. Onur Mutlu received the William C. Carter Award at this year's IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2022).

Prof. Mathieu Luisier, head of the "Computational Nanoelectronics" group, has received an Advanced Grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Prof. Kaveh Razavi, head of the Computer Security group, wants to increase the security of computer hardware and microprocessors with a new approach. To this end, he has subsequently received an ERC Starting Grant. Due to Switzerland's exclusion from funding by the European Research Council ERC, the project is now being funded by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI.

Salvatore Race, doctoral student at the Advanced Power Semiconductor Laboratory, received the Young Researcher Award at the PCIM (Power Conversion and Intelligent Motion) 2022 conference.

Dr. Romain Jacob, former doctoral student in the Computer Engineering Group and now a postdoctoral researcher in the Networked Systems Group, has received the BenchCouncil Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Onur Mutlu, head of the SAFARI Research Group, and colleagues Benjamin Lee, Engin Ipek, and Doug Burger received the NVMW 2022 Persistent Impact Prize for their 2009 ISCA paper on Architecting Phase Change Memory as a Scalable DRAM Alternative.

A combined team consisting of the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory and Infineon Technologies received a Best Paper Award for their paper „Next Generation GaN-​​based Architectures: From 240W USB-​​C Adapters to 11kW EV On-​Board Chargers with Ultra-​​high Power Density and Wide Output Voltage Range“ at PCIM 2022. 

The ETH board has appointed Dr. Mickaël Perrin, currently Research Scientist and Deputy Group Leader at Empa, as Assistant Professor of Low-​dimensional Quantum Electronics.

The flagship project F1TENTH of the Center for Project-Based Learning (PBL) pursues the goal to participate in the F1TENTH race, one of the top competitions in the world on autonomous race driving. The team of 9 students aim to complete different race tracks as quickly as possible with a self-driving racing car on a scale of 1:10.

Neha Nain, doctoral student at the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory, received the Ernst-Blickle Graduate Award 2021 for her outstanding Master's thesis.

Gregor Dumphart, Johannes Sager and Armin Wittneben of the Wireless Communications Group received the Best Paper Award for Track 1 “Physical Layer and Communication Theory” at this year's IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference taking place in Austin, Texas.

An international group of researchers, among which Prof. Daniel Razansky, has measured how much a laser beam tugs on the water it shines through. Their findings, titled "Unveiling bulk and surface radiation forces in a dielectric liquid", have been published in Light: Science & Applications.

Dr. Daniele Passerone, currently D-ITET Lecturer and Group Leader at Empa, has been appointed as Adjunct Professor by the ETH board.

A team of researchers of the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Automation, including Florian Dörfler, Professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA) at D-ITET, investigated how social media influencers arise and how communities form around them. Their results may lead to measures that mitigate the polarization that occurs on these platforms.

Professor Valerio Mante, currently Associate Professor at the University of Zurich and Lecturer at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as Associate Professor of Neuroinformatics, within the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI).

Prof. Mathieu Luisier heads the "Computational Nanoelectronics" group at the Institute of Integrated Systems. In our interview, the "Golden Owl" winner talks about the challenges of nanotechnology and about how he, as a former D-ITET graduate, perceives the department and its development. In the spring semester, he gives the lecture "Applications of Thermal Modelling: From Hot Atoms to Heated Tissues", in which there are still free places. It's worth dropping by!

In the 2022 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), members of the Energy Efficient Circuits and IoT Systems (EECIS) group Alessandro Novello, Gabriele Atzeni, Giorgio Cristiano and Prof. Taekwang Jang received the 2021 Jan Van Vessem Award for the outstanding European paper, together with a collaborator, Mathieu Coustans, of ST Microelectronics.

Prof. Onur Mutlu, head of the SAFARI Research Group, has been selected as one of Intel's 2021 Outstanding Researcher Award winners for his collaborative research on "Efficient Compute-in-Memory Architectures" with Intel.

Dr. Jasmin Smajic, Co-Head of the Institute of Electromagnetic Fields, receives the IEEE "Outstanding Engineer Award" of the Power and Energy Society (PES) Chapter in 2021.

On 30 November the D-​ITET Welcome Event for new doctoral students took place in a hybrid form. More than 30 participants, who were either present in the lecture hall or online, received a lot of useful information from several presenters and sources.

Richard Schlesinger, doctoral student at the Laboratory for High Power Electronic Systems, received the EPCIA Student Award 2021.

The paper "Ultra-Low Power Wake-Up Receiver for Location Aware Objects Operating with UWB" by T. Polonelli, F. Villani, M. Magno from the Center for Project-based Learning (PBL) won the best paper award at the the 17th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (IEEE WiMob 2021).

Patrick Althaus and Alexander Staub have been awarded with the Prix Litra for their Master's thesis “Antriebs-​ und Betriebskonzept für Kurswagen mit eigenem Hilfsantrieb“, which was carried out at the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory.

Prof. Luca Benini and researchers from IBM Research Zurich received the 2020 Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award for their paper "In-memory hyperdimensional computing".

Prof. Laurent Vanbever was selected to receive the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award. The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, toward improving the flexibility, correctness, and security of Internet routing.

On 23 September, the Open Day of D-ITET's Center for Project-Based Learning (PBL) took place. Hundreds of students interested in the projects and research activities of PBL attended the event.

Matteo Perotti, doctoral student at the Integrated Systems Lab with Prof. Luca Benini, received the SAMOS Open-Source HW/SW Award for the paper "RVfplib: A Fast and Compact Open-Source Floating-Point Emulation Library for Tiny RISC-V Processors".

The Editorial Board of the Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics (JESTPE) has awarded Dr. Spasoje Miric’s paper “Enhanced Complex Space Vector Modeling and Control System Design of Multi-​phase Magnetically Levitated Rotary-​Linear Machines” with the first prize paper award for 2020. Dr. Thomas Guillod’s paper “Dielectric Losses in Dry-​Type Insulation of Medium-​Voltage Power Electronic Converters” received the second prize paper award for 2020.

Prof. Johann W. Kolar received the 2021 European Power Electronics and Drives Association (EPE Association) Outstanding Achievement Award for his contributions in the fields of power electronics converters and control.

A cordial welcome to all new Bachelor's and Master's students at D-​ITET! During the "Welcome Day" on 20 September, Director of Studies Prof. Sebastian Kozerke, Study Coordinator Reto Kreuzer and representatives from the student organizations AMIV, LIMES and SOSETH provided the new students with important information for their start at ETH Zurich.

At this year's Pwnie awards at the annual BlackHat conference, the COMSEC group of Prof. Kaveh Razavi received double attention: The group, together with researchers from the United States and the Netherlands, has won one of the prestigious awards for their paper "Speculative Probing: Hacking Blind in the Spectre Era". Additionally, Finn de Ridder, doctoral student at the group, was nominated for his Master's thesis on compromising web browsers on modern systems with Rowhammer.

The ETH Board has appointed Dr Lana Josipović, currently Research Assistant at EPFL, as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Digital Systems and Design Automation.

The paper "Robust high-dimensional memory-augmented neural networks", co-authored by IBM and ETH Zurich authors, appeared as a featured article on the Editors’ Highlights webpage of recent research called “Applied physics and mathematics”. This page showcases the 50 best papers recently published in an area.

Rare transitions between long-lived metastable states are at heart of many processes in nature and technology. Prof. Lukas Novotny and researchers from his team together with colleagues from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna have now investigated the dynamics of such transitions for active matter and have published their findings in Nature Communications.

Prof. Lothar Thiele received the 2021 Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of women obtaining the right to vote in Switzerland, all National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCRs) have joined forces to feature women working in Swiss research institutes. From International Women’s Day on 8 March until 31 October 2021 – the 50^th anniversary of the first women’s vote in Switzerland – the NCCR women will present themselves and their work.

Onur Mutlu and co-authors received the HPCA Test of Time Award for their 2003 HPCA paper "Runahead Execution: An Alternative to Very Large Instruction Windows for Out-of-Order Processors”. The IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) Test of Time Award recognizes the most influential papers published in prior sessions of HPCA (held 18-22 years ago), and that have had a significant impact in the field.

In our interview, Ender Konukoglu, professor at the Computer Vision Lab (CVL), talks about his research at the intersection of medicine and engineering and about the challenges that arise when linking these two forward-looking fields.

The research group of Prof. Janos Vörös together with the startup Hemetron are co-developing an electrochemically enhanced rapid test for COVID-19, providing improved accuracy while retaining all the advantages of a rapid test: speed, mobility, price efficiency and ease of use.

Nils Wistoff from the Integrated Systems Laboratory has received the Best paper award of the Test and Dependability Track at the 2021 DATE (Design, Automation, and Test in Europe) Conference. The paper is a collaborative work between ETH Zurich, Università di Bologna, UNSW Australia and Data61, CSIRO.

With five new companies last year has been successful for spin-offs of D-ITET. Overall, 34 spin-​offs were founded at ETH Zurich, with a striking proportion in the areas of AI and sustainability.

PD Dr. Shih-Chii Liu from the Institute of Neuroinformatics (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich) has been awarded the 2020 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering. She and her team, consisting of doctoral students from both UZH and ETH Zurich, received the prize for their pioneering “Dynamic Audio Sensor, DAS” that emulates processing principles found in the biological hearing sensors.

Prof. Onur Mutlu, Fellow of ACM and IEEE, has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society 2020 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, "for innovative and impactful contributions to computer memory systems."

Minesh Patel, a doctoral student in Onur Mutlu’s SAFARI group, received a Best Paper Award at the 53rd International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO).

Prof. Luca Benini has received the A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation. The award honors a person or persons for an outstanding technical contribution within the scope of electronic design automation, as evidenced by a paper published at least ten years before the presentation of the award. 

The team consisting of Michael Gautschi, Pasquale Davide Schiavone, Andreas Traber, Igor Loi, Antonio Pullini, Davide Rossi, Eric Flammand, Frank K. Gürkaynak and Luca Benini received the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Very large Scale Integrated Systems (TVLSI) Best Paper Award.  

Prof. Helmut Bölcskei has been appointed as a Rothschild Distinguished Visiting Fellow by the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge University, UK.

Florian Dörfler is professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory (IfA). In our interview, he explains why systems control has been the "backbone" of all automation for decades. For him, today is the most exciting time in the history of his field of research.

Raphael Färber, former doctoral student at the High Voltage Laboratory, has won the ETH Medal 2020.

Last week the D-​ITET Welcome Event for new doctoral students took place – for the first time online via Zoom. More than 50 participants received a lot of useful information from several presenters and sources.

The startup No-Touch Robotics GmbH represented by Marcel Schuck has been selected for stage 2 of the Venture Kick programme. The project, which is linked to the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory of Prof. Johann Kolar, will receive 40.000 CHF.

Mauro Ciappa and Marco Pocaterra of the Integrated Systems Laboratory received the Best Paper Award (first out of 174 candidates) at the 31st European Symposium on Reliability of Electron Devices, Failure Physics and Analysis (ESREF 2020) that took place in Athens, Greece, from 4 to 8 October, 2020.

The Computer Engineering Group of Prof. Lothar Thiele is pleased to announce the public release of FlockLab2, a refinement and extension of the original FlockLab testbed concept.

Dr. Mehmet Ozdas from the Neurotechnology group of Prof. Mehmet Yanik received both the Young Investigator Award 2020 of the FUS foundation as well as the Marino Memorial Talent Prize awarded by the Swiss Pediatric Oncology Group.

A team of ETH and UZH researchers at the Institute of Neurinformatics (Chang Gao, Antonio Rios-Navarro, Xi Chen, Tobi Delbruck, Shih-Chii Liu) received the best paper award at the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Artifical Intelligence Circuits and Systems.

SecurePay won the 2020 best paper award at the annual European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P). The paper is a collaboration of Prof. Kaveh Razavi, head of the computer security group, and researchers from VU Amsterdam and University of Cyprus.  

From 7 to 12 September 2020, the 6th annual international Computational Psychiatry Course (CPC) is held – for the first time completely online – at ETH and University Zurich. The course brings together (prospective) engineers and clinicians and teaches the mathematical modeling of neuronal circuits and cognition to shed light on psychiatric disorders. The event has attracted 1’000 registered participants, about four times more than in previous years.

Two-dimensional materials have been the focus of materials research in recent years as they could be used to build tiny, high-performance transistors. The research group of Prof. Mathieu Luisier at the Institute for Integrated Systems and a team from EPF Lausanne have now simulated and evaluated one hundred possible materials for this purpose and discovered 13 promising candidates.

Dr. Krishnaswamy Sankaran, a Swiss citizen of Indian origin based in Finland and D-ITET doctoral graduate, has won the prestigious Mission Innovation Champion Award. He was earlier nominated by the Government of Finland for this Prize.

We are happy to announce that the website of the new D-ITET Center for Project-Based Learning, headed by Dr. Michele Magno, is now online. The center will primarily focus on creating, promoting and providing education and courses with projects and hands-​on practice for Bachelor's students, but also for Master's students.

As of 1 June 2020, Prof. Christoph Studer has started as Associate Professor of Integrated Information Processing.

As of 1 June 2020, Prof. Kaveh Razavi has started as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Secure Systems Engineering.

On 26 May 2020 the event "Vertiefungsrichtungen am D-ITET" took place online via Zoom.

By appointment of the ETH board, Professor Metin Sitti (*1970), currently Head of Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, has started as Affiliated Professor of Physical Intelligence.

In the interview, Prof. Christian Franck talks about the major societal tasks he would like to help solving with his work, and his experiences with online courses in the Corona crisis.

This week over 20 high school students took part in the first online taster session at D-ITET. As the official taster day of 11 March had to be cancelled due to the corona virus, D-ITET decided to host a shorter version of the event via Zoom.  

Prof. Luca Benini received the Achievement Award by the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA).

Michael Hersche, doctoral student in the group of Prof. Luca Benini, received the 2020 IBM PhD Fellowship Award.

In the interview, Director of Studies Prof. Juerg Leuthold talks about the biggest challenges for lecturers and students in times of Corona, learnings for the future and how he personally deals with the unfamiliar situation.

According to an article in the Swiss daily newspaper Tagesanzeiger, the ETH spin-off Uepaa would have the technology to detect potentially coronavirus-infected persons with smartphones. Uepaa was founded by Mathias Haussmann and Franck Legendre at D-ITET in 2012.

Professor Laurent Vanbever is head of the Networked Systems Group (NSG), and two-time winner of the students’ award "Golden Owl". In our interview he explains how he gazed in awe at the large computer infrastructures in his father’s office as a child, and how he, nowadays, makes students realize that it takes a truly collective effort to make the Internet work.

The ETH board has appointed Professor Kaveh Razavi (*1987), currently Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands, as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Secure Systems Engineering.

Professor Christian Franck, currently Associate Professor, has been appointed as Full Professor of High Voltage Engineering.

Isabel Berwian, psychologist and postdoc at the Translational Neuromodeling Unit, won the Best Publication Award in the category "Human and Clinical Neuroscience" by the Swiss Society of Neuroscience for her paper "Computational Mechanisms of Effort and Reward Decisions in Patients With Depression and Their Association With Relapse After Antidepressant Discontinuation".

For the first time, the departments D-ARCH, D-INFK, D-ITET, D-MAVT and D-MTEC have joined forces to create "Master your Master!", an event aiming to help Bachelor’s students in choosing the interdisciplinary Master’s programme that suits them best. On an info market, programme coordinators and professors offered students lots of details on study content and perspectives. Speakers of each department presented the study programmes with time for Q&A afterwards.

In our interview, Prof. Johann Kolar, Power Electronic Systems Laboratory (PES), talks about the future-oriented research projects of his group, the breathtaking speed at which new concepts are developed today and his regret that the day has only 24 hours.

Prof. Benjaman Grewe of the Institute of Neuroinformatics has been selected as Leshner Fellow in the area of artificial intelligence by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

End of January the lecture series "The role of power electronics and drive systems in the modern all-electric and all-digital society" took place at D-ITET. At the three events speakers from various backgrounds gave insights into latest developments in the field.

Elaheh Zare-Eelanjegh, doctoral student at the Laboratory of Biosensors and Bioelectronics, has won the best poster award at the 22^nd International Conference on Advances in Single-Molecule Research for Biology & Nanoscience.

In a joint collaboration Juerg Leuthold (D-ITET) and Jerome Faist (D-PHYS), together with Larry Dalton from the University of Washington, Department of Chemistry, Seattle, USA, show a terahertz detector on a silicon chip in Nature Communications. The two lead authors of the paper, Yannick Salamin (D-ITET) and Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus (D-PHYS) see in this demonstration an enormous potential for future ultrasensitive broadband spectroscopy and telecommunication.

Maksym Yarema, currently a post-​doctoral student at ETH Zurich and Empa, has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Nanoscale Memory Devices.

Professor Laurent Vanbever, currently Tenure Track Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as Associate Professor of Networked Systems by the ETH board.

Prof. Jürgen Biela, currently Associate Professor at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as Full Professor of High Power Electronics by the ETH Board.

Why should I study engineering? Answers to this question were given by the Departments Electrical Engineering and Information Technology as well as Mechanical and Process Engineering to the more than 80 participants at the taster day for schoolgirls on 29 November.

Julian Böhler, doctoral student at the Power Electronics Systems Lab, received the Best Paper Award at the SGRE 2019 (2nd International Conference on Smart Grid and Renewable Energy).

Pascal Niklaus, doctoral student at the Power Electronics Systems Lab, received the Best Paper Award at ICRERA (International Conference on Renewable Energy Research and Applications) 2019 for his publication „Ultra-High Bandwidth GaN-Based Class-D Power Amplifier for Testing of Three-Phase Mains Interfaces for Renewable Energy Systems“.

Dr. Richard Rau of the Computer-assisted Applications in Medicine group received the Best Presentation Award at MICCAI (Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention) 2019 conference in Shenzhen, China, one of the largest technical conferences on medical image analysis.

On 9 October 2019, the D-ITET Welcome Event for new doctoral students took place. At the event, about 50 participants received a lot of useful information from several presenters and sources.

Dr. Olivia Faull, postdoc in the Translational Neuromodeling Unit, a joint institution of ETH Zurich and University of Zurich within the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, received a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship by the Royal Society Te Apārangi. The fellowship seeks to attract, retain and develop New Zealand’s most talented early- to mid-career researchers and support their career development by helping them to establish a track record for future research leadership.

Marco Pocaterra and Dr. Mauro Ciappa from the Integrated Systems Laboratory received the Best Paper Award at the 30th European Symposium on Reliability of Electron Devices (ESREF).

Professor Giacomo Indiveri, currently Associate Professor at the University of Zurich, has been appointed also as Associate Professor of Neuromorphic Cognitive Systems at ETH Zurich, within the Institute of Neuroinformatics (INI).

Prof. Gabriela Hug, currently Associate Professor at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as Full Professor of Electric Power Systems by the ETH Board.

The groups of Prof. Mathieu Luisier from the Integrated Systems Laboratory and Prof. Torsten Hoefler (D-INFK) have developed a method that can simulate nanoelectronics devices and their properties realistically, quickly and efficiently. This offers a ray of hope for the industry and data centre operators alike, both of which are struggling with the (over)heating that comes with increasingly small and powerful transistors – and with the high resulting electricity costs for cooling.

A warm welcome to all new students at D-ITET! In the course of the "D-ITET Welcome Day" on 16 September, Director of Studies Prof. Juerg Leuthold, study coordinator Reto Kreuzer as well as representatives from student organizations AMIV, LIMES and SOSETH provided the new students with important information for their start at ETH Zurich.