项目介绍

2026年6月29日

KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering Technology organises bachelor and master degrees in Engineering Technology on six campuses across Flanders, Belgium. This vacancy is situated in the research group Emerging technologies, Systems & Security at Campus Diepenbeek. ES&S is part of the COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) group.

Unit website

Project

Integrated circuits based on flexible thin-film transistors have received lots of attention due to recent progress in literature and the pioneering aspect of multi-project wafers with thin-film transistor foundries. The targeted semiconductor is Indium-Gallium-Zinc-Oxide (IGZO) from the UK-based foundry Pragmatic. IGZO is attractive due to a simple process flow and potential small channel lengths on flexible substrates.
This PhD topic is part of the LOGICARE project that concentrates on low-power and secure flexible healthcare patches. The project starts from the observation that established assumptions for side-channel leakage and countermeasures in conventional CMOS technology cannot be directly transferred and must be re-evaluated in the context of flexible electronics.
The key application is to design flexible chips for low-power and side-channel protected authenticated encryption in next-generation wearable healthcare applications. It will be your task to perform a detailed system level study, to design the targeted circuits for tape out and to characterize the manufactured circuits. The characterization can occur at our ES&S lab at Campus Diepenbeek. It will be important to understand the opportunities of the specific technologies, and to overcome the challenges related to the flexible technology.

Profile

• You have a master’s degree in electrical engineering or engineering technology.
• You have good basic knowledge and hands-on experience in digital electronics and have a keen interest in technology-aware design activities.
• You have a good knowledge of VLSI IC design, and Cadence has no secrets to you.
• You master the tape out flow for chips.
• You can work independently and pro-actively, you are well-organized, accurate and stress resistant.
• You are analytical, flexible, result-oriented, customer and market oriented.
• You are an enthusiastic and enterprising team player with innovative ideas that searches for improvements, experiments with new concepts and solves problems in a creative and clear manner.
• You want to dedicate yourself to spreading the mission and values of the faculty: you are open to other cultures and world views and you are motivated to work internationally.

Offer

The successful candidate will be offered a PhD fellowship to become part of our team to work towards a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Nele Mentens and Prof. Kris Myny. This full-time mandate, for which funding is secured for the full duration of the PhD, is initially limited to a 1-year contract with a possible extension depending on the performance of the candidate. The final goal will be obtaining a PhD after 4 years.

Interested?

For more information please contact Prof. dr. ir. Nele Mentens, mail: nele.mentens@kuleuven.be or Prof. dr. ing. Kris Myny, mail: kris.myny@kuleuven.be.You can apply for this job no later than August 05, 2026 via the online application tool