Research Electronics Facility

The diverse, outstanding projects at the frontier of MPIDS research require professional planning, development, manufacturing, installation, programming and maintenance of highly specialized electronic components and devices. In order to be able to better meet these challenges, we have a new research infrastructure at the institute since February 2018, which makes its expertise in electronics available to the entire institute. The Research Electronics facility bundles the institute's human and material resources in order to be able to offer them more efficiently and more broadly.

The staff of the Research Electronics facility develops and builds highly specialized, unique electronic circuits for measuring and control tasks incl. the electronic interfaces between computer and measurement technology for scientific apparatuses that cannot be commercially obtained. The circuits are designed with CAD engines and then build in house.

To do this, recently, the equipment pool has been expanded by a circuit board plotter, an electroplating machine, a stencil printer, a vapor phase reflow soldering machine, a laser structuring system and by an SMD placement machine. This opens the possibility to build practice-oriented printed circuit boards and ready-for-use devices from the developed circuit designs for the use in the experimental environment all in house.

At the present, two engineers and two technicians work in the Research Electronics facility. In the long-term perspective, we want to broaden our horizons in order to cope with new and interesting tasks. According to our ideas, in the future three engineers and three electronics technicians will work full-time in the group. In addition, we will continue to train electronics technicians for equipment and systems in the future.

With the installation of this new infrastructure for Research Electronics, we are meeting the strongly increased demand for individual experimental and scientific devices, which are unique and therefore have to be specially developed and built. Many of these tasks are performed by the Research Electronics facility. The staff closely collaborates with the scientists providing valuable advice and expertise in all stages of the construction process from the first idea to the finished component and the experimental application.

Our Expertise

Support for Scientific Projects

  • Hardware Design and Development
  • Measurement, Control and Data Acquisition Devices
  • High and Low Frequency Electronics, Optoelectronics and Power Electronics

Assembly of Scientific Instruments

  • Hardware (Electronics, Sensor Interfaces)
  • Electronics-Computer Interfaces (Python, C, C++, LabVIEW,Matlab)

Fabrication of Printed Circuit Boards

  • Analog, Digital and Mixed Circuits
  • CAD Design of Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) with Altium Designer, Eagle or Diptrace
  • Microcontroller Software (High and Low Level Programming) on Platforms MBED (NXP, ARM, Maxim, ST, AD), Arduino & Atmel Studio (Atmel), Microchip (PIC)

Repair of Devices

  • Power Supplies
  • Controllers

Media Technology Installations

  • Equipment for Lectures
  • Video Conferences, Streaming and Recording

Vocational training

We train to become an electronics technician for devices and systems. In our research workshop for electronics you will learn how to develop and manufacture assemblies and devices as well as how to set up and use them in the experimental environment of our research facility. This is done on professional CAD and production equipment. You will acquire knowledge in digital and analog circuit design, circuit board production and the programming of microcontrollers in measurement and control technology according to IHK standards.

Equipment and Facilities

  • Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) facility
    • Drilling, Milling, Throughplating
    • Conventional Milling Machine
    • Laser PCB Structuring
      • Copper/FR4, Copper/Polyamide, Copper/Ceramics, Gold/Glass, ITO/Glass, Stainless Steel
      • Multielectrode Arrays, Transparent Electronics
  • Electroplating Device
  • SMD Pick-and-Place Machine (BGA and QFN)
  • Reflow Soldering (Steam)
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