My main area of expertise is embedded system design. I have been active in different subdomains, including batteryless sensing, wireless networking, hardware-software co-design, autonomus agents, and more recently, space electronics.

Embedded Systems

My work in embedded system design focuses on robust, energy-efficient and autonomous IoT devices. I take a holistic approach, designing both hardware and sofware components to optimize energy efficiency, memory usage, and network bandwidth. My contributions focus on the sensing, computing, and wireless networking domains for IoT. More specifically, realiable batteryless/intermittent systems, energy-efficient embedded artificial intelligence, resource-constrained autonomous agents and wireless sensors for mixed reality systems. These projects typically entail designing custom hardware designs, based on commercial components like microcontrollers, FPGAs or analog front-ends.

I am a strong proponent of open source projects, and publish my own designs whenever possible. You can find a collection of my batteryless system designs on the BatterylessLab website.

Space Electronics

As space technology becomes more affordable and democratized, new opportunities open for emerging applications. Our group actively participates in muliple Space-related activies, from student-led projects to deep-space scientific missions. We collaborate closely with other research institutes, including Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Whenever possible, we cross-polinate ideas from our embedded systems research into space-related projects, including hardware/software co-design, system reliability and long-range communication for LEO nanosats.

For more details on our work related to deep-space missions, please consult the following publication:

• Fritzner A, et al. Electrical integration of the VenSpec spectrometer consortium: an architecture trade-off. In Proc. Infrared Remote Sensing and Instrumentation. SPIE. 2024.

Geolocalization

One of the fundamental tasks in many mobile applications is to determine the device’s location. Modern solutoins embrace a multi-modal approach compabile with both indoor (e.g. RSSI-based) and outdoor (GNSS-based) location tracking. Our work in this domain focuses on developing highly optimized solutions for energy-efficient geolocalization. We collaborate with research institutes in Switzerland and Spain to develop next-gen geolocalization technologies, including snapshot GNSS. Recent results include an open-source implementation of OSNMA, a secure, spoof-proof communication channel between GALILEO satellites and receivers.

For more details on our recent results, please consult the following publication:

• Ghionoiu-Martínez C, et al. Enhancing GNSS Security with Open-Source OSNMA Integration in GNSS-SDR. Proc. NAVITEC. ESA-ESTEC. 2024.