Neural Microelectronics Lab

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Utah

Room 3129
Merrill Engineering Building
50 S. Central Campus Drive
Salt Lake City, Utah

Lab phone: (801) 581-6038

Areas of Research

• Analog and mixed-signal CMOS integrated circuit design
• Low-power, low-noise integrated electronics for biomedical applications
• Integrated electronics for large-scale, multi-unit neuronal recording
• Silicon models of continuous-time recurrent neural networks
• Efficient VLSI implementations of biological vision systems for smart sensors
• Mixed-signal ICs for automated aircraft wiring fault detection

Current Graduate Students

• Ryan Kier (Ph.D.) - low-power RF transmitter design; silicon models of recurrent neural networks
• Daniel Black (MS) - wireless power and data transfer for biomedical electronics
• Chirag Sharma (Ph.D.) - mixed-signal ICs for aircraft wiring fault detection
• Paul Watkins (Ph.D.) - low-power electronics for neural signal analysis and data reduction

Harrison Lab Alumni

• Anand Gopalan (MS, 2002) - currently with AMI Semiconductor, Pocatello, ID.
• Cameron Charles (MS, 2003) - currently a Ph.D. candidate in the SOC lab at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
• James Bergstrom (MS, 2003) - currently with Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA.
• Shuhuan Yu (Ph.D., 2004) - currently in San Diego, CA
• Nathan Neihart (MS, 2004) - currently a Ph.D. candidate in the SOC lab at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
• Robert Lovejoy (MS, 2005) - currently with Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM.

Selected Publications

• R.J. Kier, R.R. Harrison, and R. Beer, "An MDAC synapse for analog neural networks," To appear at International Symposium on Circuits and Systems 2004, Vancouver, Canada, May 2004. PDF.
• R.R. Harrison, "A low-power analog VLSI visual collision detector," To appear in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2003), Vancouver, Cananda, 2004. PDF.
• C. Winstead, J. Dai, S. Yu, C. Myers, R.R. Harrison, and C. Schlegel, "CMOS analog MAP decoder for (8,4) Hamming code," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 39: 122-131, January 2004. PDF.
• R.R. Harrison, "A low-power integrated circuit for adaptive detection of action potentials in noisy signals," In: Proc. 2003 Intl. Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Cancun, Mexico, September 17-21, 2003. PDF.
• R.R. Harrison and C. Charles, "A low-power low-noise CMOS amplifier for neural recording applications," IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 38: 958-965, June 2003. PDF.
• A. Gopalan and R.R. Harrison, "A CMOS imager with on-chip temporal filtering for motion pre-processing," Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, 37: 243-251, 2003.