Biomedical Research in Integrated Circuit Design

Open-SERDES: Towards an Open-Source High-Speed Serial Link in IHP SG13G2 (Open Project)

Every fast interface — PCIe, USB, Ethernet, chiplet links — rides on a SerDes, yet SerDes IP is closed, NDA-bound and locked to a single process. Open-SERDES is an open project to build a high-speed serial transceiver in IHP’s 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS, together with a reproducible channel-to-GDS flow on open tools, for anyone to study, reuse and extend. SG13G2’s fast SiGe HBTs give current-mode logic ample headroom, its thick top metals support inductors and low-loss lines, and open shuttles give a real path to silicon.

Design space NRZ / PAM4 · CML / SST drivers · TX FFE · CTLE · DFE · CML & StrongARM samplers · bang-bang CDR

A 2.4 GHz LC-VCO Fractional-N Phase-Locked Loop in 130 nm BiCMOS

A type-II Δ-Σ fractional-N PLL with a cross-coupled differential LC-VCO and a custom spiral inductor (4 nH, Q = 16.8) modelled in OpenEMS — the first fully open-source RF IC design of its kind from Sri Lanka, demonstrating that high-performance radios are achievable in the open CMOS ecosystem. Published at SMACD 2026 and submitted for fabrication through the UNIC-CASS 2025 program with full DRC, LVS and PEX sign-off.

Dry-Contact Ear-EEG with Continuous Electrode-Skin Impedance Monitoring — Moving On Chip

A dry-contact Ear-EEG system that injects a 1 kHz driven-right-leg stimulus to continuously track electrode-skin impedance mismatch, using it as the reference for online adaptive motion-artifact cancellation (IEEE BioCAS 2026). The team — Lohan Atapattu, Sajitha Madugalle, Imasha Nethmal and Erandee Jayathilaka — is now integrating the I/Q impedance-extraction path in CMOS: a fully-differential two-stage op-amp on Tiny Tapeout SKY25a (silicon received July 2026) and fully-differential I/Q multipliers in IHP SG13G2 for UNIC-CASS 2025, presented in a paper accepted at IEEE ICM 2026.

A 30 MHz Charge-Pump Fractional-N PLL — Our First IHP BiCMOS Tape-out

A charge-pump type-II PLL that synthesizes programmable output frequencies from a 10 MHz reference, using an 11-stage ring VCO and two 3-bit programmable dividers (f_out = M/N × f_ref). Designed over five months with Xschem, Ngspice, KLayout and KPEX, and submitted to the July 2025 IHP OpenMPW shuttle — the team's first tape-out in the IHP 130 nm BiCMOS open PDK.

A 100 kSPS 8-bit Fully-Differential SAR ADC for Low-Power Applications

A charge-redistribution SAR ADC with binary-weighted capacitor arrays, an auto-zeroed pre-amplifier and regenerative latch comparator, and digital SAR logic — aimed at battery- or RF-powered IoT and wearable/implantable medical devices. Built from scratch by ENTC undergraduates in ten weeks with Xschem, Ngspice, Netgen, OpenLane, Magic and KLayout, and submitted to the Efabless chipIgnite shuttle through the IEEE CASS UNIC-CASS 2024 program — ENTC's first CMOS tape-out.

BraiNeoCare: Low-Cost Dry-Contact EEG and Explainable AI for Neonatal Seizure Detection & Prediction

A research line toward affordable seizure care for newborns, where continuous video-EEG is costly and needs specialists. It combines an adjustable 3D-printed headset with active dry-contact electrodes and a custom analog front end, a multimodal artifact-removal algorithm, and explainable deep-learning models that work from a reduced EEG montage — detecting seizures in real time and, with added ECG, predicting them up to 30 minutes before onset. Clinically evaluated against a commercial wet-electrode cEEG system at Lady Ridgeway Hospital for Children, with work published in IEEE TBME and IEEE SMC and accepted at IEEE BHI 2026 (Hong Kong, December 2026).

Intelliscope: A Simultaneous ECG-PCG Screening Tool for Cardiovascular Disease in Resource-Constrained Settings

An end-to-end dual-modality device that records electrocardiogram and phonocardiogram signals together, with a real-time burst-adaptive NLMS noise-cancellation pipeline light enough for embedded hardware. Validated on real recordings from noisy hospital wards, it improved SNR by 30.32 dB (ECG) and 37.01 dB (PCG). Presented at IEEE EMBC 2026 in Toronto and winner of the 2025 SLAAS Manamperi Main Award for the best inter-university final-year engineering project in Sri Lanka. The project began in 2020 as a low-cost AI-powered wireless stethoscope that won first runner-up in the IEEE CASS COVID-19 Special Student Design Competition at ISCAS 2020, followed by a transfer-learning ECG-PCG screening paper at ISCAS 2021.