All doctoral candidates within GS-IMTR are required to participate in an individual qualification program, which includes technical (subject-specific) courses from the list below and soft-skill courses. Moreover, GS-IMTR plans to attract further education content by inviting guest scientists (announced in the "News" section of this website).
List of eligible courses:
- Advanced mathematics for signal and information processing (Bin Yang)
- Advanced Software Testing and Analysis (Stefan Wagner)
- Circuit design in nanometer scaled CMOS (Jens Anders)
- Deep learning (Bin Yang)
- Detection and Pattern Recognition (Bin Yang)
- Electronic Design Automation (Ilia Polian)
- Hardware Oriented Security (Ilia Polian)
- Information Visualization and Visual Analytics (Steffen Koch)
- Introduction to Modern Cryptography (Ralf Küsters)
- Physical Design of Integrated Circuits (Manfred Berroth)
- RF CMOS (Jens Anders)
- Robust System Design (Ilia Polian)
- Scientific Visualization (Thomas Ertl)
- Security and Privacy (Ralf Küsters)
- Statistical and Adaptive Signal Processing (Bin Yang)
- Statistische und Stochastische Grundlagen (Dirk Pflüger)
- System and Web Security (Ralf Küsters)
- Theoretical and Methodological Foundations of Visual Computing (Daniel Weiskopf)
- High-Dimensional Data Approximation and Learning“ (Dirk Pflüger)
Graduate and postgraduate teaching:
Our doctoral researchers and their PIs actively supervise student projects and theses at Bachelor’s and Master’s level, exposing students from across the faculty to the challenges of hardware testing. As of July 2026, the GS-IMTR has supervised 68 B.Sc. and M.Sc. theses, not counting 47 research projects and project works, reaching students from Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
Student interest has been remarkable: for the first student excursion to Advantest in Böblingen (February 2024), all 20 slots filled within 37 minutes of the announcement; the second excursion (February 2025) sold out just as quickly. Both generated strong interest in internships and thesis topics.
A lasting impact on teaching — the new IMTR Major:
In June 2022, a new Major “Intelligent Methods for Test and Reliability” was approved and installed alongside the three existing majors in the international M.Sc. programme “Information Technology” (InfoTech), run jointly by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The Major bundles lectures on test and reliability in an interdisciplinary manner and now builds on the GS-IMTR’s completed tape-out and the measurement data it provides.
Doctoral training — seminars, milestones, retreats, and summer schools:
Beyond a bi-weekly PhD seminar and monthly in-person meetings at Advantest in Böblingen — including an ntroduction to Advantest’s ACS Edge platform, a test-cell tour, and SmarTest 8 trainings — the GS-IMTR has established recurring retreats and summer schools. A two-week Summer School co-located with the Ferienakademie in South Tyrol (September 2023) brought the two cohorts together; PhD Retreats followed in Ellwangen (2025) and Chania (2026, directly after the IMTR Workshop at ETS). All Phase I researchers, and by mid-2026 nearly all of Phase II, have passed their Milestone Presentation.
Stays abroad:
Research stays have taken our doctoral researchers to Duke University and Arizona State University (USA), EPFL Lausanne (Switzerland), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Nokia Bell Labs Antwerp (Belgium), the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Japan), and New York University (USA); further stays at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) and KU Leuven (Belgium) are planned for late 2026.
Schedule overview for PhD Seminar
GS-IMTR doctoral students meet biweekly for their PhD seminar.
Please refer to the table below for the currently scheduled dates and topics.
Jens Anders
Prof. Dr.Institute of Smart Sensors