Digital Circuits Design

This is where ideas become hardware. Digital circuits are the foundation of every computer, from the smallest sensor to the supercomputer. We design them to do exactly what an application needs, fast and with little energy.

What we work on

• Computer architecture: modern processors, parallelism and open RISC-V architectures
• IC design: methods and tools for designing integrated circuits
• Accelerators: application-specific hardware on FPGAs and as ASICs, standalone or as processor extensions

Our circuits are often built together with German and European hardware vendors.

Microelectronic systems

We research microelectronic systems: systems-on-chip, processor design, domain-specific architectures, especially graphics processors (GPUs), cryptographic processors and AI accelerators. The field comprises the groups Computer Architecture and IC Design and is led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Mladen Berekovic.

Hardware Accelerator Lab

In the Hardware Accelerator Lab we design and build application-specific accelerators, as independent units or as extensions of a processor's instruction set. With a state-of-the-art development environment, the lab targets both FPGAs and ASICs, helped by our background in simulation and virtual platforms (digital twins). Through numerous research projects we work with hardware vendors from Germany and Europe; through the Cadence Academic Network we use industrial design tools.