New BICS members Federico Loi and Renzo Barraza

We welcome Federico Loi and Renzo Barraza as new PhD students in the BICS group.

Federico Loi is passionate about exploring the intersection of materials science, neuromorphic computing, and circuit design to create innovative sensory systems. He earned his BSc in Physics from the University of Cagliari, Italy, and completed his MSc in Physics at the same institution, where he focused on condensed matter theory and simulations. His PhD is part of the NEUROTACT project. Together with three other PhD students in different research groups, he will work on integrating piezoelectric-based flexible sensors with neuromorphic circuit architectures to develop energy-efficient tactile sensory systems for robotics and prosthetics.

Renzo Barraza’s experience is in analog and digital electronics, ranging from analog design of integrated circuits (microelectronics), to the use of Systems on Chip that incorporate an FPGA and a microcontroller together. Renzo obtained his BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. After that, he worked as Application Engineer at Synopsys Chile, then worked on static timing analysis in the Chilean startup Timeless-IC, whose main focus is asynchronous circuits, and finally he worked at the SAPHIR Millenium Institute developing electronics used in particle physics experiments. Renzo’s PhD project focuses on the characterization and integration of memristors in a CMOS chip, allowing to take advantage of the memristor’s memory behavior to implement the computational primitive Time Difference Encoder.