Ben Fletcher receives Doctoral College research award

Many congratulations to Arm-ECS PhD student Ben Fletcher, who received the ‘best in School (Electronics and Computer Science’) research award from the University of Southampton’s Doctoral College.

The Research Awards recognise the exceptional contribution of doctoral researchers to research group, School, Faculty or University research strategy. The recipients of these awards were decided by each Faculty and announced at the Doctoral College Awards Ceremony on Tuesday 30 June 2020, by Professor Chris Howls, Director of the Doctoral College.

His nomination was based on the following successes from his PhD research:

Ben has successfully published 12 publications, with another currently in press. The majority of these were published in top conferences (e.g. ISLPED, DATE) and journals (e.g. IEEE JSSC, ACM TECS) etc.
Ben received the Best Paper award at the ISLPED 2019 conference
Ben received an IET postgraduate award for his research
Ben presented his research at STEM for Britain (at the houses of parliament), and was awarded the IEEE Communications Society Prize
Ben has undertaken a programme of industrially relevant work, spending a significant proportion of time at Arm Research in Cambridge (his PhD is part of the Arm-ECS Research Centre). He has written a number of public blog posts for Arm on his research.

On receiving the award, Ben commented:

“I’m delighted to have been awarded the Doctoral College research award – there’s lots of great Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) research happening within Southampton University, so it’s fantastic to have my contribution recognised as the best in the School”

Ben Fletcher

PhD Student

3D Integration for the Internet of Things

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COILS-C1

COILS-C1, taped-out out in November 2018, is the latest in a series of test-chips investigating low-cost 3D die stacking using near-field wireless communication. This two-tier SoC, fabricated using a TSMC 65nm process, incorporates two Arm Cortex M0 CPU cores in addition to a wireless vertical AHB lite bus for inter-layer power and data transfer. The wireless AHB-Lite bus consists of four, 250um diameter, inductive channels to simultaneously transmit data (at speeds up to 6Gbps) and wirelessly transfer power, whilst also allowing ‘plug-and-play’ integration with existing SoC AHB-Lite peripherals. Figure 1 – Illustration showing the key components of the COILS-C1 chip.

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COIL-3D

COIL-3D is a CAD tool for determining best performing inductor geometries for use in Inductive Coupling Link (ICL) based Three Dimensional Integrated Circuits (3D-ICs), developed at the University of Southampton, in collaboration with Arm Research. The tool takes as its inputs a configuration file (*.cfg) describing the physical and electrical parameters required for the design and then generates an inductor layout to maximise the performance of the inductive channel, for data transmission at a given frequency. COIL-3D consists of two main elements: The solver: a set of mathematical expressions to compute the electrical characteristics of the link directly from its…