Short bio:
Georges Gielen is Full Professor in the MICAS research division at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) at KU Leuven and (part-time) Research Director at imec. He received the MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, in 1986 and 1990, respectively. Since 1993 till now, he is professor at KU Leuven, where he currently is Full Professor. From August 2013 until July 2017 he served as Vice-Rector for the Group of Sciences, Engineering and Technology. In 2018 he was visiting professor at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) at KU Leuven.
Research activities:
He is proud to have graduated more than 55 PhDs thus far, with young researchers coming from all around the world. His research interests are in the design of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, and in analog and mixed-signal CAD tools and design automation, including modeling, simulation, optimization and synthesis as well as testing. He is a frequently invited/keynote speaker/lecturer and coordinator/partner of several (academic and industrial) research projects in this area, including his ERC Advanced Grant AnalogCreate. Till now, he has (co-)authored 14 monograph books and more than 800 publications in edited book chapters, international journals and conference proceedings.
Professional leadership:
He has provided countless services to the IC design and EDA communities. He served in the Board of Governors and as President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society, as well as Vice-President Awards and Strategy of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation. He served twice as Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society and currently of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS). He is associate editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE as well as for the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design. He served/serves as TPC member of many conferences including ESSCIRC, DAC, DATE, ICCAD, ISCAS, SMACD, etc., and was the General Chair of the IEEE/ACM DATE conference in 2006, the IEEE/ACM ICCAD conference in 2007, the IEEE ESSCIRC conference in 2017 and the (online) IEEE ETS conference in 2021. He also served as Chair of the EDAA organisation and in the Board of Directors of several start-up companies.
Awards:
He is Fellow of the IEEE since 2002, and has been elected member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium in the class of Technical Sciences as well as of the Academia Europaea. He is a 1997 Laureate of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature and Arts in the discipline of Engineering. He received the IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg award in 2015 and the IEEE CAS Charles Desoer award in 2020, as well as the EDAA Achievement Award in 2021.
The full publication list can be found at : https://micas.esat.kuleuven.be/team
Here are some selected publications in the area of computer-aided design / design and test automation of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits :
Mohsen Ahmadzadeh, Georges Gielen, "Using probabilistic model rollouts to boost the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning for automated analog circuit sizing," proceedings IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, 2024.
Nektar Xama, Martin Andraud, Jhon Gomez, Baris Esen, Wim Dobbelaere, Ronny Vanhoren, Anthony Coyette, Georges Gielen, “Machine learning-based defect coverage boosting of analog circuits under measurement variations,” ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Vol. 25, No. 5, pp. 1-25, August 2020.
Anthony Coyette, Baris Esen, Nektar Xama, Georges Gielen, Wim Dobbelaere, Ronny Vanhooren, "ADAGE: automated DfT-assisted generation of test stimuli for mixed-signal integrated circuits," IEEE Design & Test, 2018.
Bo Liu, Qingfu Zhang, Georges Gielen, "A Gaussian process surrogate model assisted evolutionary algorithm for medium scale expensive optimization problems," IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 180-192, 2014.
Georges Gielen, Wim Dobbelaere, Ronny Vanhooren, Anthony Coyette, Baris Esen, “Design and test of analog circuits towards sub-ppm level” (invited keynote), proceedings International Test Conference (ITC), 2014.
Bo Liu, Dixian Zhao, Patrick Reynaert, Georges Gielen, “GASPAD: a general and efficient mm-wave integrated circuit synthesis method based on surrogate model assisted evolutionary algorithm,” IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 169-182, February 2014.
Elie Maricau, Georges Gielen, “Computer-aided analog circuit design for reliability in nanometer CMOS,” IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems, Vol.1, No.1, pp.50-58, January 2011.
Trent Mc. Conaghy, Pieter Palmers, Michiel Steyaert, Georges Gielen, "Trustworthy genetic programming-based synthesis of analog circuit topologies using hierarchical domain-specific building blocks," IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computing, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 557-550, August 2011.
Rob Rutenbar, Georges Gielen, Jaijeet Roychowdhury, “Hierarchical modeling, optimization and synthesis for system-level analog and RF design,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 95, No. 3, pp. 640-669, March 2007.
Georges Gielen, Rob Rutenber, "Computer-aided design of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 88, No. 12, pp. 1825-1854, December 2000.
Georges Gielen, Willy Sansen, "Symbolic analysis for automated design of analog integrated circuits," Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
Georges Gielen, Herman Walscharts, Willy Sansen, "ISAAC: a symbolic simulator for analog integrated circuits," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 1587-1597, December 1989.
Here are some selected publications in the area of innovative and bio-inspired analog integrated circuit design :
Jonah Van Assche, Charlotte Frenkel, Ali Safa, Georges Gielen, "FREYA: a 0.023-mm2mW/channel, event-driven 8-channel SoC for spiking end-to-end sensing of time-sparse biosignals,"IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 1093-1104, March 2025.
Mark Alea, Ali Safa, Flavio Giacomozzi, Andrea Adami, Inci Temel, Maria Rosa, Leandro Lorenzelli, Georges Gielen, "A fingertip-mimicking 12x16 200mm-resolution e-skin taxel readout chip with per-taxel spiking readout and embedded receptive field processing," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp. 1308-1320, December 2024.
Ali Safa, Ilja Ocket,André Bourdoux, Hichem Sahli, Francky Catthoor, Georges Gielen, "STDP-driven development of attention-based people detection in spiking neural networks," IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 380-387, February 2024.
Ali Safa, Jonah Van Assche, Mark Alea, Francky Catthoor, Georges Gielen, “Neuromorphic near-sensor computing: from event-based sensing to edge learning,” IEEE Micro, Vol. 42, No. 6, pp. 88-95, November-December 2022.
Georges Gielen, Jelle Van Rethy, Jorge Marin, Max Shulaker, Gage Hills, H.-S. Philip Wong, Subhasish Mitra, “Time-based sensor interface circuits in CMOS and carbon nanotube technologies,” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, Vol. 63, No. 5, pp. 577-586, May 2016.
Carolina Mora Lopez, Alexandru Andrei, Srinjoy Mitra, Marleen Welkenhuysen, Wolfgang Eberle, Carmen Bartic, Robert Puers, Refet Firat Yazicioglu, Georges Gielen, "An implantable 455-active-electrode 52-channel CMOS neural probe," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 248-261, January 2014.
Tao Chen, Georges Gielen, "A 14-bit 200-MHz current-steering DAC with switching-sequence post-adjustment calibration," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 42, No. 11, pp. 2386-2394, November 2007.
Geert Van der Plas, Jan Vandenbussche, Willy Sansen, Michiel Steyaert, Georges Gielen, "A 14-bit intrinsic accuracy Q2 random walk CMOS DAC," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 34, No. 12, pp. 1708-1718, December 1999.
