Thread Based Transistors

Thread Based Transistors (TBTs) are transistors built on threads that can be woven into fabric. They take advantage of threads' inherent flexibility, as demonstrated by Rachel Owyeung's paper.

I'd never thought transistors could be made without clean room processing, with my own hands. But that's what I did in my thesis project at Tufts University with Professor Sameer Sonkusale.

Here, I came up with a high-throughput fabrication method to create hundreds of TBTs in one batch. This whole process takes about 2 hours including curing time. Earlier, only one TBT could be fabricated at a time.

Interestingly, these TBTs can be used to make analog circuits, something I'm trying my hand at right now!

Neuromorphic Engineering

Neuromorphic engineering is system design that is inspired by the design of neuronal systems, such as the human brain or the octopus retina.

At CentraleSupélec in Paris, France, I had a lot of fun while designing a Neuromorphic ADC. After the project on DPA, it was interesting to see how the fields of biology and electronics interface.

The human brain is awe-inspiring when you read about it, and it is even more amazing to see a neuron simulated in an electrical circuit itself. With Professors Caroline Lelandais-Perrault and Emilie Avignon-Meseldzija, I also worked out the signal reconstruction of these Neuromorphic ADCs, and I found an interesting result - The maximum possible error of these ADCs decreases with time!

Team Anant

In BITS Pilani's own nanosatellite team, I worked on the On-Board Computer. My work spanning 3 years involved learning and implementing a Hyperspectral Compression algorithm in C, designing the flight plan of the satellite, and writing device drivers to interface sensors.

Writing device drivers was the most fun project during this time, as I learned what exactly goes on at the hardware-software interface, something I had been curious to learn since the beginning of college.

During my last semester with the Team, I founded the Publicity & Sponsorship division with the goal of making the team's work known to the Space Community. As of now, we've been published in two articles (Financial Express, The Asian Age) and are currently working with a well known YouTube creator.

Hardware security

Side Channel Attacks are non-software vulnerabilities. One such SCA is Differential Power Attack (DPA). DPA analyzes the power consumption of a system to figure out, say, a cryptographic key in the system. This can be as easy as seeing the voltage across a 50 ohm resistor on an oscilloscope, connected to a system's power supply.

DPA can be countered by ensuring that the power consumed across all input-output combinations of our system is same, or nearly the same. With that, a hacker is required to take (tending to) infinite observations to crack the cryptographic key.

With Professor Anu Gupta, I designed a current flattening circuit with dynamic power scaling to attach with a DPA-immune AND-NAND gate. With this, I was able to achieve a 0.03% variation in the current.