Brief description of the research topic: Research project dedicated to the compact modeling of passive integrated components at high frequency. The project was ruled by the principle "More Moore" of the Technological Platform PT5 - Nano-electronics (ENIAC). The time duration of the project was 2001-2004. As signal speeds grow while device size shrink in modern digital very large scale integration (VLSI) design, the correct modeling of on-chip components and interconnects became more and more important. At high frequencies, an integrated circuit model has to be obtained from the electromagnetic simulation of its constitutive parts. Such a model is huge, having a number of degrees of freedom that can reach the million order of magnitude. That is why model reduction has to be applied. This technique transforms a model with a very large number of degrees of freedom to a much smaller one, but more or less equivalent, the reduced model obtained allowing a rapid simulation.

My activities and responsibilities: My main activity consisted of the development of  a software platform called ROMWorkbench  (RWB). The RWB consists of a set of benchmark problems, a set of model order reduction methods (based on Krylov, Laguerre, interpolation or combined methods) and criteria for results evaluation and comparison. Even if this was a prototyping tool for research, it served also for the educational purposes (see for instance the MOR course    http://www.win.tue.nl/casa/meetings/special/mor/ held in 2006, where I was an invited professor).

      Brief description of the research topic: Research project dedicated to the comprehensive modeling with high accuracy of the electromagnetic effects from the nano-blocks of the integrated circuits of radio frequency. This project continued the research done in Codestar. In RF blocks, both active and passive, can no longer be treated in isolation. Complete RF blocks must be considered as one entity, and be treated as such by the design automation tools. Today, it is not possible to perform such analyses of complete RF blocks. Therefore the project aims to develop a methodology and prototype tools that take a layout description of typical RF functional blocks that will operate at RF frequencies up to 60 GHz and transform them into sufficiently accurate, reliable electrical simulation models taking variability into account.

      My activities and responsibilities: My main responsibility was to ensure the enhancement of the RWB with features that takes into account parameterization. This required also conceiving appropriate modeling procedure for the electromagnetic field models that have to be parameterized. The objective is to provide robust software tools for the designers, allowing the advance in nano-electronics.