Dr. Koushik Maharatna

Dr. Koushik Maharatna received his B.Sc. in Physics and M.Sc. in Electronic Science (Semiconductor science and technology) from Calcutta University, Calcutta, India in 1993 and 1995 respectively. From 1996 till 2000 he was involved as a key member in a number of Indian Govt.-funded projects such as Design and Development of Gate Arrays, development of a low-cost Doppler Ultrasonography system and designing a regenerative transponder based satellite system. All these projects were undertaken at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India. He received his Ph.D. degree from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, in 2002 for his thesis, “CORDIC-based signal processors for biomedical applications”.
In February 2000 he joined the Institute for High-Performance Microelectronics (IHP), Frankfurt (Oder), Germany as a Research Scientist where he was involved in the BMBF-funded projects “Wireless Broadband Networks” (WBN) and IBMS2, both of these projects targeted low-cost low-power implementations of the IEEE 802.11a and Hyperlan/2 standards. He took the leadership in integrating the entire system which is now functional. At the same time he was appointed as the Project Leader for the project “Design and development of high-performance Analogue to Digital Converter”; which was a collaborative effort between IHP and IIT (Kharagpur). As the project leader his job was to allocate manpower, funding and to coordinate between research activities in IHP and IIT. His work in IHP resulted into four patents and several research publications in prestigious IEEE journals and conferences. He achieved the status of A-grade scientist; the topmost achievable scientific grade in IHP.
In August 2003, Dr. Maharatna was appointed as a Lecturer in the Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EE), University of Bristol, UK. He developed a VLSI research infrastructure and research team in Bristol and collaborated with the Toshiba Research Lab in Bristol to initiate a visionary research in the field of Analogue Signal Processing. He also played an instrumental role in establishing a research link between Bristol and IHP. At the same time he acted as the key person to form a group in Bio-inspired circuit design for implantable therapeutics: a vision; which included doctors, chemists, physicists and engineers. He also acted as the EE representative to the design advisory committee for the multidisciplinary course Engineering Design. He was also appointed as the leader from the EE (along with his counterpart form dept. of Computer Science) for a specialised IC design M.Sc. course initiated by UK semiconductor industry (like ICERA, STMicorelectronics, Motorola etc.) and University of Bristol in 2005.

In October 2006, he joined the Electronics Systems Design (ESD) group of School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton as a Senior Lecturer. At present he is a Reader in ECS and belongs to the Electronics and Software Systems (ESS) group. He is currently pursuing his research vision for next-generation mobile healthcare system development and bio-inspired nano-scale circuits design while at the same time successfully maintaining/establishing his existing/growing research collaborations both in industry and academia around Europe and USA.  

As pioneering research in next-generation mobile healthcare system development, Dr. Maharatna is acting as the Principal Investigator from Southampton for the ARTEMIS-JU funded collaborative project CHIRON that includes 27 parneters all over the Europe. He is also the UK coordinator of the project. As part of the project his team is developing sophisticated and yet low-complexity signal processing algorithms and VLSI architectures for on-body clinical feature extraction from wearable ECG in mobile environment. He is pioneering the research in treating Autistic children through development of brain connectivity-guided neurofeedback system employing pervasive EEG capturing device and analysing the EEG pattern through advanced signal processing techniques. This project is (MICHELANGELO) is recently funded by the EU FP7 programme. The ultimate aim is to develop a home-based system that will allow intensive intervention in Autistic children in pervasive way. In addition, he is also leading a tem for developing a novel and wearable Stroke rehabilitation system that is expected to have significant impact on the speed of rehabilitation process. This project (StrokeBack) also is recently funded by EU FP7 programme. The main aim is on-body computation of movement parameters accurately and generating automated feedback to the Physiothrapists and Patients for aiding accurate execution of rehabilitation exercises with minimal supervision.  He is also a co-investigator for the EPSRC platform grant on System-on-Chip: Design methods and Tools (SoC), awarded to University of Southampton.  
Dr. Maharatna has been a member of a number of prestigious conference programme committees and acted as a session chair in conferences such as IEEE ISCAS 2005, 2007, 2008, VLSI design conference 2006, IEEE SiPS 2012 etc. He is a member of the review committee management under the VLSI track chair for IEEE ISCAS 2007 till date and is a member of IEEE VLSI System Application (VSA) Technical Committee. He is a member of EPRSC College, 2006 till date. He has published over 60 research papers in internationally reputed Journals and Conferences.

Teaching IC design, digital systems and Systems on Chip courses

Undergraduate admission tutor for Electronics

B.Sc. (Physics), M. Sc. (Electronic Science), PhD

EPSRC college member 2006 - 2009
Review management comittee member ISCAS 2007 till date
Review committee member VLSI design 2006

Programme committee member IEEE SiPS 2012, ICIT 2012 (Track chair), ICCD (2010 till date)

Member of IEEE VLSI System Application Technical Committee

ISCAS, DAC, VLSI design, EPMDS, ICVC