Ricardo Carmona Galán received the degrees of Licenciado (B. Sc.) and Doctor (Ph. D.) in Physics, in the speciality of Electronics, both from the University of Seville, Spain, in June 1993 and June 2002, respectively. He designed his first chip, a smart CMOS image sensor delivering the Radon Transform of an input image binarized with an automatic threshold, as his graduation project. From 1994 to 1996 he was a graduate student at the Institute of Microelectronics of Seville. Later, from July 1996 to June 1998, he worked as a Research Assistant at Prof. Chua's laboratory at the EECS Department of the University of California, Berkeley. From 1999 to 2005 he was an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Electronics and Electromagnetism at the School of Engineering of the University of Seville. He taught "Circuit Analysis and Synthesis" and "Circuit Synthesis Laboratory" for the degree on Telecommunication Engineering and "Smart Sensory Processing Microsystems" for the degree on Electronics Engineering. He was awarded with a Certificate of Teaching Excelence by the University of Seville.

Since 2005 he is a Tenured Scientist of CSIC at the Institute of Microelectronics of Seville. His main research areas are vision chips, in particular, smart CMOS imagers for low-power vision applications like robotics, vehicle navigation and vision-enabled wireless sensor networks. He is also interested in CMOS-compatible sensing structures for LWIR and MWIR imaging, single-photon detection, and detectors for X-ray and high energy physics. He has designed several vision chips, some implementing bio-inspired nonlinear dynamics emulating the behavior of the retina. He also held a PostDoc at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (2006-07), at Prof. Porod's laboratory, were he studied the interfaces for CMOS-compatible nanostructures for multi-spectral light sensing. He currently teaches "Interface Circuits for Integrated Sensors" at the Master in Microelectronics and the Doctoral Program in Physical Sciences and Technologies at the University of Seville.

Dr. Ricardo Carmona has authored more than 160 papers in refereed journals and conferences and several book chapters and has received best paper awards from the Int. J. of Circuit Theory and Applications, the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference on Image Sensors and the IEEE ISCAS Technical Committee on Sensory Systems. He was co-recipient of an award of the ACET in 2002. He has participated in many international projects, holds several patents, and has collaborated with start-up companies in Seville (AnaFocus) and Berkeley (Eutecus). He is co-founder of Photonvis SL, a start-up dedicated to vision and imaging systems based in single-photon detection, established in July 2019.

He has been the Secretary of the Association of the Research and Teaching Staff of the University of Seville (ADIUS). He was member of the University Senate, in representation of the Assistant Professors and Graduate Students. He was also a member of the University Council and of its comissions. He has been Secretary of the Scientific Staff Assembly of IMSE.

He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and belongs the Circuits and Systems, Solid-State Circuits and Computer Societies. He is also Member of ACM and HiPEAC, the IEEE-CASS Technical Committees on Cellular Nanoscale Networks and Memristor Array Computing and on Sensory Systems, that whe will be chairing until 2025. He belongs also to the IEEE Sensors Council. He has served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-I: Regular Papers for the period 2012-13 and for Springer's Journal of Real-Time Image Processing for a few years. He is now incorporating to the Senior Editor Board of the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems.

He is member of the steering committee of the Workshop on Architecture of Smart Cameras. He has been the General Chair of the 9th International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras (ICDSC 2015) in cooperation with ACM SIGBED. He has been Technical Programme Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems 2020 (ISCAS 2020), first time organized in Spain (and first time online because of global health situation).

Ricardo Carmona has been the coordinator of ACHIEVE-ITN, an Innovative Training Network (H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action) dedicated to research on Advanced Hardware/Software Components for Integrated/Embedded Vision Systems.

Education

  • Ph. D. Microelectronics, University of Seville, 2002. Dissertation: Analysis and Design of CNN-based VLSI Hardware for Real-Time Image Processing. Advisor: Prof. Ángel Rodríguez-Vázquez.
  • Licenciatura (5-year degree) in Electronic Physics, University of Seville, 1993

Academic positions

  • Tenured Scientist (Associate Professor) at the National Council of Research (CSIC), Institute of Microelectronics of Seville (IMSE-CNM), Spain, 2005-present
  • Visiting Scholar at the Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), 2006-2007
  • Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics and Electromagnetism, School of Engineering, University of Seville, Spain, 1999-2005.
  • Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Microelectronics of Seville (IMSE-CNM), National Council of Research (CSIC), Spain, 1998-1999.
  • Assistant Researcher at the Electronics Research Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley (USA), 1996-1998.
  • Graduate student at the Institute of Microelectronics of Seville (IMSE-CNM), National Council of Research (CSIC), funded by Iberdrola S. A., Spain, 1994-1996.

Awards

  • 2020 HiPEAC Technology Transfer Awards for project 'PHOTONVIS: a pilot for a scalable solid-state LiDAR'. European Network on High-performance Embedded Architecture and Compilation. Brussels (Belgium).
  • 2019 Selection for the Programme on the Development on Research Transference Skills (COMTE-EBT) for the technology-based company project 'Photonvis'. Fundación General CSIC. Madrid (Spain).
  • 2016 Best paper award (co-author) at the meeting of the Technical Committee on Sensory Systems at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, for the paper "In-pixel Voltage-Controlled Ring-Oscillator for Phase Interpolation in ToF Image Sensors", Proceeding of ISCAS 2016, Montreal (Canada).
  • 2014 Best paper award (co-author) at the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging: Image Sensors and Imaging Systems Conference, for the paper "Smart imaging for power-efficient extraction of Viola-Jones local descriptors", Proceeding of SPIE, Vol. 9022, pp. 9022-09, San Francisco, California (USA).
  • 2013 3rd Best student paper award (co-author) at the 21st European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design (ECCTD 2013), for the paper "A 176x120 Pixel CMOS Vision Chip for Gaussian Filtering with Massivelly Parallel CDS and A/D-Conversion", pp. 45:1-45:4, Dresden (Germany).
  • 2010 Best student paper award (co-author) at the 12th International Workshop on Cellular Nanoscale Networks and Their Applications (CNNA 2010) for the paper "Robust Focal-Plane Analog Processing Hardware for Dynamic Texture Segmentation", pp.1-6, Berkeley, California.
  • 2002 Premio Salvà i Campillo to the most original Project (co-recipient), Asociació Catalana d’Enginyers de Telecomunicació. 7a Nit de les Telecomunicacions, 7th Edition of the Salvà i Campillo Prizes Barcelona, Spain.
  • 2001-2002 Certificate for Teaching Excellence, Vice-Chancellery of Quality and Information Technology, University of Seville.
  • 1999 Best Paper Award (first author) of the International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications for paper: "SIRENA: A CAD Environment for Behavioral Modeling and Simulation of VLSI Cellular Neural Network Chips", Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 43-76.