Ricardo Carmona Galán earned his Licenciado (BSc+MSc) degree in Electronic Physics and his PhD in Microelectronics from the University of Seville, Spain, in June 1993 and June 2002, respectively. For his graduation project, he designed his first chip: a smart CMOS image sensor capable of computing the Radon Transform of an input image, using a discrete-time cellular neural network and an automatic threshold for input binarization. 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. Between 1999 and 2005, he served as Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Electronics and Electromagnetism at the School of Engineering of the University of Seville, teaching courses on circuit analysis and synthesis and smart sensory processing microsystems for the degrees of Telecommunication and Electronics Engineering. He received a Certificate of Teaching Excelence from the University of Seville.

From 2005 to 2025, he was a Tenured Scientist at CSIC, working at the Institute of Microelectronics of Seville, and was promoted to Senior Research Scientist in 2025. His research focuses on smart CMOS image sensors, 2D and 3D vision chips for low-power applications such as robotics and autonomous navigation, single-photon detection, and time-of-flight estimation. He is also interested in CMOS-compatible sensing structures for LWIR and MWIR imaging, as well as detectors for X-ray and high-energy physics. His long-term goal is to develop analog and mixed-signal array processing for in-sensor and near-sensor learning and inference, leveraging distributed architectures, in-memory computing techniques, and emerging CMOS-compatible devices such as memristors. He has designed several vision chips, including a bio-inspired architecture that emulates retial dynamics with a multilayer cellular neural network.

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 is member of the Academic Comission of the Doctoral Program in Physical Sciences and Technologies at the University of Seville.

Dr. Ricardo Carmona has authored more than 180 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 CASS Technical Committee on Sensory Systems. He was co-recipient of an award of the ACET in 2002, and the HiPEAC Technology Transfer Award in 2020 and 2023. He has participated in many international projects, holds several patents, and has collaborated with start-up companies in Seville (AnaFocus) and Berkeley (Eutecus). He co-founded of Photonvis SL, a start-up dedicated to vision and imaging systems based in single-photon detection, established in July 2019. He also collaborated in Project Biodaiverse that resulted in the foundation of Biotfy.

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 he chaired from 2023 to 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 Guest Associate Editor in 2024-25, and for Springer's Journal of Real-Time Image Processing for a few years. He has been member of 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. He is now co-PI of a project in the consortium MemrisTec, funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschingsgemeinschaff) and dedicated to research on and development of memristive devices toward smart technical 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

  • Senior Research Scientist at the National Council of Research (CSIC), Institute of Microelectronics of Seville (IMSE-CNM), Spain, 2025-present
  • Tenured Scientist at the National Council of Research (CSIC), Institute of Microelectronics of Seville (IMSE-CNM), Spain, 2005-2025
  • 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

  • 2023 HiPEAC Technology Transfer Awards for project 'BiodAlverse: smart conservation technologies'. European Network on High-performance Embedded Architecture and Compilation. Brussels (Belgium).
  • 2022 Selecionados programa 'De Idea a Producto' con el proyecto 'BiodAlverse'. Andalucía Open Future - Telefónica I+D. Sevilla (Spain).
  • 2022 Finalista XVII Concurso de Ideas de Emprendimiento por el proyecto 'BiodAlverse'. Universidad de Sevilla (Spain).
  • 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.