assignment

In today’s world electronic devices are all around us. A primary building block within these devices is the Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC). This block can convert a digital signal (i.e. a code consisting of 1’s and 0’s) into an analog signal by for instance switching on/off current sources using switches. A traditional switching method requires 2 overdrive voltages to make this work. If this voltage can be reduced, applications can work at lower supply voltages which saves power. A new switching technique is build and tested in a Digital-to-Time Converter (DTC) application.

Automatization in the agro- and food industry requires more intricate robotic grippers, which is currently quite a hassle due to how hard grasping (fragile) food products is for machines without intuition. What seems as an easy task for us due to our years of experience, is actually a daunting task for unconscious robots.

In the future, we expect most people will drive in electric vehicles daily and, as a result, charge them daily. Our power grid is not designed to handle the load of these vehicles. Therefore, ElaadNL proposed the idea of GridShield [1], a robust backup system that can prevent grid congestion and blackouts in areas where many vehicles charging simultaneously are causing overloads.

You may have seen or read a lot about quantum computers in the past years, like how they have the potential to completely outperform classical computers in terms of computation time for more complex problems. However, the emphasis is on their potential: the main reason we haven’t all thrown our regular computers into the recycling bin and replaced them with quantum computers is that qubits, the quantum equivalent of bits, are extremely unstable. ...

We live in a digital age in which more and more data is being stored every day. One popular way to store data digitally is through ‘solid-state devices’ such as SSDs, USB drives and SD cards. These devices have an advantage over traditional hard disk drives in that they have higher read and write capabilities. However as these devices get smaller and smaller to store more data, they come with a downside; they become less reliable over time as their size decreases. ...

Every time we open our favorite photo app on our smartphone we are amazed by the fact that Google and Apple are able to accurately identify the people in our photographs. This shows the incredible accuracy that facial recognition of these days has to offer. Recent advances in deep learning, and specifically within the field of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly improved image recognition and object detection capabilities. Nevertheless, each system has its Achilles heel, and in the case of facial recognition software, a weak spot is one that we may all have encountered at some point ourselves; the difficulty to distinguish between twins. ...