The Centre for Electronics Frontiers (CEF) led by Regius Chair of Engineering Prof Prodromakis, brings together diverse and interdisciplinary expertise for transforming modern society through technology. Our ambition is to push the frontiers of electronics through emerging technologies, disrupting current ways of thinking by innovating advanced nano/biosensors, safe and efficient energy storage solutions and novel hardware for AI. We are offering prospective PhD students the opportunity to join our team, interested in devoting their passion for addressing some of the challenges we have identified.

The adoption of sensory networks has been steadily increasing across various technology domains including healthcare, environmental monitoring, industrial automation, smart homes, agriculture, transportation, security, and defence. The number of these sensory nodes is projected to grow exponentially, reaching 75 billion by 2025 and escalating to 125 billion by 2030. This substantial increase will result in a vast amount of raw data that needs to be processed. This Von Neumann-like bottleneck adds more power and performance penalties to the already struggling conventional technologies in the era of AI. To mitigate this, it is crucial to adopt different unconventional technologies that span emerging electronic/photonic technologies and in-memory computing to push computational capabilities closer to the edge. Ongoing research at CEF focuses at defining a novel approach to embed intelligence locally enabling training at the edge by developing novel in-sensing processing elements (enabling electronic and photonic control). We are developing an in-sensor processing architecture using emerging devices (RRAMs) for image classification; however, it can be used in various domains such as light, RF, IR, and gas.

This PhD will be supervised by Prof Themis Prodromakis and Dr Spyros Stathopoulos and aims to develop 3D multi-level RRAM structures for electronic and optical applications. This idea builds and expands upon our metal-oxide RRAM platform by vertically stacking functional oxide layers with varying functionalities in a Metal-Insulator-Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIMIM) fashion. Given the versatility of metal-oxides as functional materials different behaviours can be imprinted into the different active layers. These could comprise a selection layer, a memory layer and a sensory layer all independently controlled. The PhD student will develop, fabricate and characterise such structures targeting different applications for electronic and sensory elements. The research is affiliated with the EPSRC programme “Pro-Sensing” that is developing next-generation semiconductor technologies for smart-imaging applications.

The successful candidate will join our team which includes researchers at the Centre for Electronics Frontiers, the Institute of Micro and Nano Systems and the wider College of Science and Engineering. They will also have the opportunity to with our collaborators at the Institute of Photonics, University of Strathclyde. They will be based within the Institute for Integrated Micro and Nano Systems and will be trained to access our class 10 Micro and Nanofabrication cleanrooms at the Scottish Microelectronics Centre, complemented by our state-of-the-art semiconductor characterisation facilities.