Thomas Herndl

• Dipl.-Ing.
• Infineon Technologies

Thanks to the advancements in Time-of-Flight depth perception technologies, new approaches emerge to support visually impaired people in their everyday life. This chapter presents a novel Electronic Travel Aid prototype based on a miniaturized and smartphone integrated Time-of-Flight 3D imaging camera. The presented Electronic Travel Aid prototype...

Among the actual trends that will affect society in the coming years, autonomous driving stands out as having the potential to disruptively change the automotive industry as we know it today. As a consequence, this will also highly impact the semiconductor industry and open new market opportunities, since semiconductors play an indispensable role a...

Supporting visually impaired people in their every-day's life is of crucial importance. Thanks to the technological advancements in semiconductors and cyber-physical systems, novel powerful tools and capabilities emerged recently. The integration of miniaturized Time-of-Flight 3D imaging modules combined with vast CPU and GPU power into commerciall...

Time-of-Flight 3D imaging, using the indirect measuring method that employs photonic mixing devices, increases in popularity. This is due to the recent availability of accurate and miniaturized Time-of-Flight cameras that can be integrated into small embedded devices. However, providing a system comprising a camera and hardware-accelerated processi...

Industrie 4.0, Industrial IoT, and cyber-physical production systems in general introduce high levels of automation. Hence, at shop floor level, for example, the interfaces between human and machines are crucial. If a robot's environment perception is not robust and fail-safe, humans may not be detected properly, which may cause critical consequenc...

Time-of-Flight 3D imaging, using the indirect measuring method that employs photonic mixing devices, increases in popularity. This is due to the recent availability of accurate and miniaturized Time-of-Flight cameras that can be integrated into small embedded devices. However, providing a system comprising a camera and hardware-accelerated processi...

In recent years, depth sensing systems have gained popularity and have begun to appear on the consumer market. Of these systems, PMD-based Time-of-Flight cameras are the smallest available and will soon be integrated into mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. Like all other available depth sensing systems, PMD-based Time-of-Flight camera...

Computer vision is becoming more and more important in the fields of consumer electronics, cyber-physical systems, and automotive technology. Recognizing and classifying one's environment reliably is imperative for safety-critical applications, as they are omnipresent, e.g., in the automotive or aviation domain. For this purpose, the Time-of-Flight...

Replacing batteries in wireless sensor nodes by energy harvesting enables a maintenance-free operation and an increasing degree of miniaturization at the cost of higher power management efforts. The limited power capability of environmental sources requires a careful investigation of the different harvesting opportunities to find the optimal source...

State-of-the-art tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) are wirelesssensor nodes mounted on the rim. Attaching the node on the inner liner of a tireallows sensing of important additional technical parameters, which may be used forimproved tracking and engine control, feedback to the power train and car-to-carcommunication purposes. Thus a signific...

Wireless sensor networks become more and more attractive due to their ongoing miniaturization and decreasing costs. One of the major challenges concerning the design is the power consumption of the wireless sensor node. Low power consumption is mandatory to guarantee a long lifetime if a battery is used as a power source or to allow the use of an e...

This paper presents a complete ultra-low power receiver with direct down conversion architecture. It is designed as Wake-up Receiver for wireless sensor nodes. The 130nm CMOS chip includes envelope detector, low noise baseband amplifier, PGA, mixed-signal correlation unit and auxiliaries for stand-alone operation. At 868MHz, a receiver sensitivity...

Wireless communication in a car has several advan- tages, given that demanded safety and real-time requirements are fulfilled. This paper presents a wireless MAC protocol designed for the needs of automotive and industrial applications. The proposed MAC protocol provides special support for network traffic prioritization in order to guarantee worst...

In this paper three different oscillator topologies are investigated. The oscillator is to be used in an all-digital phase-locked loop for frequency synthesis for the ISM/SRD license-free frequency bands at 315.0 MHz, 433.9 MHz and 868.3 MHz. The oscillator's frequency range is 75 MHz to 80 MHz and its frequency is controlled via a digital code wor...

This work presents a BAW based transceiver which can be used as a wake up receiver. The low power consumption can be achieved by using a high duty cycle. In contrast to typical quartz based systems, the BAW based approach allows for a high repetition rate of the duty cycle, which is not possible with conventional systems. The sensitivity of the rec...

Attaching a tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) on the inner liner of a tire allows sensing of important additional technical parameters, such as vehicle load or tire wearout. The maximum weight of the sensor is limited to 5 grams including package, power supply, and antenna. Robustness is required against extreme levels of acceleration. The nod...

This work presents the approach to use an additional protocol processing unit for efficient MAC protocol operation in a wireless sensor node. This allows for reduced power consumption at the main general purpose microcontroller. Consequently, the requirements of typical MAC protocols are analyzed and according generic MAC acceleration functions are...

This work presents an advanced sensor node for direct tire pressure monitoring with an overall size below 1 cm3, where the applied components are arranged in a 3D integrated stack for high compactness, improved thermal behavior, and enhanced robustness for pressure, inertia, and temperature sensing. The utilized through silicon via (TSV) technology...

This paper describes two measures for image rejection in a 2.45 GHz receiver frontend. The presented receiver frontend is part of a BAW-based transceiver in a 130 nm pure CMOS process. It uses the narrow bandwidth of single BAW resonators for filtering at RF as well as an image-reject architecture for additional image suppression. Der Artikel besch...

In the field of wireless sensor node design a wide range of new potentials are opened by means of emerging 3D integration technologies. These technologies enable the design of highly integrated sensor nodes, but the designers face novel challenges, which specialized communications engineers are not familiar with. This work presents an advanced dire...

In this chapter, we describe the architecture of an in-tire-pressure sensing system for automotive applications. Challenges are the supply of sufficient power, the proper functioning of the sensors (pressure, acceleration, and temperature), and a transceiver architecture with extremely low power consumption. Power consumption is reduced by use of a...

Introductione-CUBES ConceptEnabling 3D Integration Technologiese-CUBES GHz Radiose-CUBES Applications and RoadmapConclusion References

The following paper presents a 2.1 GHz transceiver, which makes use of BAW resonators to replace the external quartz crystal and the external band select filter. It has been fabricated in a 130 nm CMOS process and has a power consumption of 5 mA. To derive the specifications for the transceiver the requirements of a TPMS have been taken into consid...

The goal of the PAWiS project is to develop both, efficient system architectures and the related design methodology for power aware wireless sensor and actor network nodes that allow for capturing inefficiencies in every aspect of the system. These aspects include all layers of the communication system, the targeted class of the application itself,...

This diploma thesis presents implementation of the UMTS synchronization functions at di#erent levels of abstraction. The newest system level design tool from Synopsys, CoCentric System Studio Release 2002.05 supports SystemC versions 1.0 and 2.0 was used for this task. The reference design is the slot synchronization, which is a part of the UMTS ce...