In the winter semester 2021/22, the interdisciplinary course “Virtual and Augmented Reality for Digital Medicine” was offered. Here, students of medicine, medical technology, psychology as well as computer science were lectured together to merge the expertise from these fields and to promote mutual understanding. After a virtual theory phase, a practical phase took place on site. During the following hands-on phase, students collaborated in two different groups to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) and a Virtual Reality (VR) application with a medical context. After a presentation of the applications in front of an expert audience, the acquired knowledge was assessed by a written digital exam. The course was evaluated very positively by students from all fields and the good exam grades also indicate that the project was a success.

The classic SkillsLab is a training environment in which medical students can train procedures, examinations, hand movements, therapy, and treatment on anatomically correct models or simulated body parts. This training takes place in a stress-free environment, as there is no responsibility, risk, or time pressure. In addition, detailed explanations and instructions are provided by medical experts. SkillsLab+ is a digitalized version of the classic SkillsLab and currently implemented as proof of concept. The course concept is transferred into an augmented reality application, which currently includes nine stations of approaches to medical teaching. These include, among others, the injection into an arm and clinical abdominal exam. The purpose of this application is to allow medical students to work on the learning content independently at their own pace and even from home. Furthermore, the additional integration of haptic gloves allows students to feel and touch virtual objects. A distinction between different surface structures such as hard bones or soft skin can be made via vibrational and force feedback. The evaluation of a user questionnaire shows that a majority of the students felt supported in the preparation and follow-up of the medical content and can imagine using SkillsLab+ in distance learning and in medical teaching to deepen their knowledge in the medical application field.

This paper presents an innovative approach to teach biomedical engineering from a practical oriented perspective. Undergraduate students from an interdisciplinary background-medical data science, biomedical technology, and digital public health-simulate founding their own MedTech start-ups in teams by using a business planning concept. From a didactic perspective it turned out that real-life challenges like business start-ups are intrinsically motivating and can be well supported by using business planning as a didactic tool. The results show that students from interdisciplinary fields can achieve outstanding learning results in interdisciplinary teams with a qualitative shift from teaching to learning, which supports the evolution of an entrepreneurial identity.

Extraordinary times demand innovative ideas and solutions - in this way many lecturers and teacher had to think in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global shutdown of schools and universities. Courses had to be transformed into an online format, which can be rather difficult depending on the original course structure, especially regarding practical elements. The practical university course ”Basics in Computer Sciences” is taught to a heterogeneous group of students from different disciplinary backgrounds such as Medical Technology, Biomedical Engineering and Public Health. Main topics include the basics of circuit technology, programming and modern design patterns. In this paper, we want to present a non-traditional approach to transfer our lab course into a digital format using elements such as the Tinkercad platform, teleconsultation hours and email support. The thorough evaluation shows that the transformation, which is based on extensive research regarding the theoretical background on distance teaching, was highly successful, and recommendations for similar approaches are given at the end of the paper.

Emotion recognition is a increasingly popular topic because of its potential applications in the field of affective learning. It allows the development of systems able to adapt themselves to the users' emotional state to improve the learner's experience and learning. In this paper, we introduce a new biomedical multi-sensor platform for realtime acquisition of physiological data comprising Temperature, Electroencephalography (EEG), Electroocculography (EOG), Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), Heart Rate and Blood Oxygen Saturation. We describe experimental scenarios for the induction of emotions relevant in a context of affective learning (happiness, frustration, boredom) to build a set of emotionrelated data. We carry out a basic classification study by computing hand-crafted features on the time and frequency domains of signals, and training a Support-Vector-Machine (SVM) classifier to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

This paper investigates how learning objectives can be complemented by employing a remote system to improve teaching low-power digital circuits design. The low-power design laboratory system that has been developed at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences is composed of two laboratory types: the on-site (hands-on) and the remote laboratories to teach low-power techniques with laboratory exercises. This laboratory system enables online experiments that can be performed using physical instruments and obtaining real data. Digital circuit designers can observe the most influential factors in power dissipation during laboratory exercises in the on-site system and then use the remote laboratory to supplement investigating other factors. This contribution describes teaching activities performed during the Summer Semester 2015 using only the on-site system, and during the Summer Semester 2016 using the on-site and the remote systems. The assessment studies the achieved learning objectives, evaluates the laboratory reports with and without the support of the remote system, and analyses the students' use of the remote system. The assessment and the students' opinions provide positive feedback on this approach and verify that the remote laboratory system is a successful and effective complementary learning tool for remotely reusing the on-site laboratory and achieving additional learning objectives that cover most conceptual theories in low-power digital circuits design.

Laboratories and project work are widely used in the engineering curricula around the world. Such hands-on trainings allow the students to learn hard-as well as soft-skills and can be used to prepare them for the work in the industry. In microelectronics education laboratories are often offered. For such a laboratory the authors present a set-up to teach microelectronic design using a top-down design approach. In contrast to other work in the field, the laboratory is designed using a problem-based learning approach to foster the students' problem solving skills and enabling them to develop individual learning procedures. Without detailed, tutorial-style instructions the students shall design a digital component from behavior description to layout. Self-directed learning is used to figure out a design-flow and realize their digital design. To motivate the students, the task for the laboratory is to design an artificial intelligence player (AI) as a digital circuit for the classic arcade game Pong. The designs are written in VHDL and implemented in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology, connected to a given implementation of Pong, and taped out. After delivery of the fabricated design, the integrated circuit was tested by the students. The described laboratory was initially run as a block course in 2013. After the course the participants of the laboratory were interviewed to evaluate the course.

In the last years the smartphone became an important tool for deaf and hard of hearing people. It's no wonder that many different smartphone based assistive tools were introduced recently, among them tools for environmental sound awareness. Even though smartphones seem to be a good way to implement such tools, with the smartwatch a new class of mobile computing devices became available. In this paper results from interviews with six deaf people about the use of a smartwatch as environmental sound alert are presented. The interviews showed that a smartwatch based environmental sound alert is promising as the participants were highly interested in using such a device.

This paper describes a project carried out at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University to teach low-power digital design structures in a laboratory. Low-power design has become one of the most essential constraints in digital systems, especially in portable devices. For this purpose, low-power design is a topic addressed in electrical and computer curricula, but it also requires applications in a laboratory. Therefore, this project focuses on preparing students for current trends in low-power design by examining realistic applications of its basic theories and principles, either hands-on or remotely. The laboratory's experiments use a field programmable gate array (FPGA) as a design platform for implementing the students' digital designs. This contribution reports on our first experiences in teaching low-power design in the lab. This paper focuses on the educational impact on students regarding the following: (1) overall objectives in the laboratory, (2) experimental exercises with low-power techniques, and (3) using educational FPGA boards and the EduPow board. The EduPow board is a developed hands-on board at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University that is relatively specific on using various signal image-processing applications to directly observe the power dissipation of a student's digital algorithm. Our assessment of the low-power design lab shows that the requirements and objectives of this project are fairly well satisfied. In addition, students' feedback indicates that using the EduPow board is more attractive and motivational in their work.

System Integration using 3D technology is a very promising way to cope with current and future requirements for electronic systems. Since the pure shrinking of devices (known as “More Moore”) will come to an end due to physical and economic restrictions, the integration of systems (e.g. by stacking dies, or by adding sensor functions) shows a way to maintain the growth in complexity as well as in diversity which is necessary for future applications. This so called “More than Moore” approach complements the conventional SoC product engineering. This paper gives insights in System Integration design challenges from different perspectives, ranging from design technology over MEMS product engineering and 3D interconnect to automotive cyber physical systems.

This paper describes a statistical approach for online yield analysis for multisite testing of highly reliable automotive ICs as well as the implementation of the system for testing mostly analog circuits. The core of the approach is the yield analysis of the different sites based on statistical measures. The system has been implemented as part of the production environment of Elmos Semiconductor. It is in daily use. Although the analysis tool has been accepted reluctantly, it soon became an excellent tool with a significant impact on test quality and cost saving.

We are presenting strategies for an undergraduate practical hardware laboratory for computer science students. They have a very heterogeneous prior knowledge. Based on a traditionally organized hardware lab we have developed a set of new strategies that all together help to overcome the known problems, in particular those stemming from the heterogeneous prior knowledge. We will describe the concept, including the preparatory work, the organization of the lab experiments themselves and the post processing of our lab experiments. Finally, we will summarize the experience gained.

Genetic algorithms are a common option to solve optimization problems. In this paper a decentralized approach to calculate a charging schedule for electric vehicles based on a genetic algorithm is presented. It is predicted, that the number of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) will increase to 5 million vehicles by the year of 2020. The increase of electric vehicles will have an impact on the existing power infrastructure, especially at specific times of day. Equipping all electric vehicles with a power controlling unit (PCU) in a so-called consumer grid, and connect the PCUs to each other, will allow to calculate an optimized schedule. This schedule ensures that all electric vehicles are charged and that a given maximum power peak will not be exceeded. First, the proposed approach was implemented in a Java program and its performance was evaluated for different scenarios. Afterwards, a VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language) implementation was created and verified by using simulation and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array).

In this paper, we describe the results of an expert survey conducted within the project “Competence development with embedded micro- and nanosystems”. This survey was designed in order to refine our previously derived normative competence structure model for developers of embedded micro-and nanosystems towards an empirically refined competence structure model. Today the size of structural parts of nanosystems has scaled down to as few as a couple of molecules. This results in a lot of challenges regarding permanent and transient faults. Therefore bottom-up development techniques for nanostructured systems are now included into our competence model to prepare future developers to the specific challenges of designing at the nano scale. The evaluation of the content validity of the empirically refined competence structure model was accomplished by the presented expert rating.

Teaching the development of embedded micro- and nanosystems needs a well structured foundation. In this paper, we show how we refined our normative competence structure model (NCSM) to an empirical competence structure model (ECSM) by incorporating the results of a survey of German experts in the field of embedded systems. In addition, we introduce a course concept for a new internship which takes the results of the ECSM into account.

The daily work of an engineer in industry is affected by project work; often more than one project at a time. Consequently, time and self-management is an important part of the education of future engineers and scientists. Students of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Siegen have a student project work in their curricula to deepen hard skills and to learn soft skills, like teamwork, organization and time-management. Often these groups consist of students with heterogeneous requirements in terms of working hours. In this contribution, the authors present a good practice for time-management of groups with heterogeneous working-time.

In our poster, we present the research project "Competence development with embedded micro- and nanosystems (KOMINA)" promoted by the German Research Foundation and its first step, the development of a normative competence structure model. As a result, we clustered the derived competencies in the following dimensions: (C1) Competencies as preconditions (Basis), (C2) development competencies of embedded micro- and nanosystems (EMNS), (C3) competencies for multi-level development of EMNS and (C4) non-cognitive competencies. While we chose a purely thematic division for braking down C1 and C2 to sub dimensions, we recommend dividing C3 into solution approaches. We exemplify the deduction from a sub dimension to a concrete task of a practical course.

Teaching practical ASIC design, one faces a lot of problems, such as high manufacturing costs, long workflow, and heterogeneous previous knowledge of the students. On one hand, it is difficult to find topics that motivate students and, at the same time, are not too complex. On the other hand, the industry requires students who are trained not only theoretically, but also have practical experience in team work and project management. We regard these problems as a challenge and are going to create a concept of a project-oriented ASIC design course that focuses on teaching hard and soft skills. In this paper, we describe our concept for a student project work, which leaves to the students a lot of degrees of freedom in the design process and offers the possibility to realize an own idea as integrated circuit.

Improvements in IC technologies make existing layout libraries obsolete. In order to reuse these layouts, adaptation to the requirements of new technologies have to take place. In this paper a system is presented that automatizes this task using a locally two dimensional compaction algorithm. The system is able to handle arbitrary geometries and arbitrary technologies (including bipolar and mixed ones).

An approach for the synthesis of highly complex controllers is presented. As source description a concurrent algorithm is used. It is assumed that usually such a description is organized in a modular manner or can be partitioned into modules by the synthesis algorithm. The synthesis algorithm produces cooperating clocked FSMs with an asynchronous global communication mechanism. Modified Petri nets are used for the specification of the concurrent algorithm to be implemented and as implementation method. In this paper we describe how the FSM modules are identified by the implementation algorithm and mapped onto standard realizations. Furthermore, our implementation method of the asynchronous inter-module communication is presented.