PhD Positions, ETH Zurich, Switzerland (2017)

The Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS) of ETH Zurich invites applications for PhD Positions in “Ultra-low Power Baseband Processing for Extended Coverage Cellular Internet of Things”

Almost a decade after smartphones hit mass market, the next big breakthrough in telecommunication is on the horizon: The Internet of Things (IoT). In the near future literally every device ranging from drones and cars to thermostats and refrigerators will be connected to the internet. With the forecast of more than 30 billion connected devices by the year 2020, IoT is also one of the most promising market opportunities today. This initiated the development of multiple IoT communication standards upon which the LTE-based cellular IoT (cIoT) will play a dominant role. The Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS) of ETH Zurich is currently participating in an international research project with six academic and industrial partners including a global player in the smartphone and wearables market. The main objective is the development of a System-on-Chip (SoC) for extended-coverage cIoT.
We are looking for PhD candidates who are highly motivated to research on the implementation of cIoT protocols with special focus on physical layer baseband signal processing. Such cIoT devices are expected to have battery lifetimes of up to 10 years which requires ultra-low power implementations for the baseband processing algorithms. The development of these implementations is a highly-challenging endeavour requiring skills ranging from algorithm development to hardware prototyping.

The PhD candidates are expected to research and design dedicated hardware architectures for baseband signal processing and implement the architectures in form of FPGA and SoC prototypes. The candidates will work closely together with other PhD candidates at IIS and the project partners in a multidisciplinary composition between industry and academia.

Requirements are a MSc degree in electrical engineering or computer engineering with excellent grades. The successful candidate should further have knowledge in wireless communications and digital signal processing, strong coding skills in high-level programming languages (Matlab/C) as well as Linux command line experience (e.g. bash). Experience in VLSI design (VHDL/Verilog) will be an asset. Due to the international character of the research project an excellent proficiency in spoken and written English is a prerequisite.

Further details:
http://academicpositions.eu