Chips That Feel: Fully-Integrated Bioinspired Electronic Skin Systems

Electronic skin (e-skin) is an emerging technology that can be applied in the fields of medical prosthetics and robotics: e-skin provides the sense of touch to mechanical systems. This book bridges the gap between existing e-skin technologies and the remarkable capabilities of human tactile perception. It presents end-to-end design strategies for next-generation fully-integrated e-skin systems that mirror essential properties of human skin, such as being multi-modal, multi-scale, and performing local processing. Building on a pragmatic, technology-aware neuromorphic design approach, that draws inspiration from biology without blindly replicating it, the book shows the system-level benefits of event-based approaches through temporal compression of tactile data via spikes, and it explains how spike-based representations support efficient neuromorphic processing with spiking neural networks, relaxing readout design constraints. Two validated e-skin chips, called INTUITIVE and DERMIS, are presented. They form a pathway toward e-skin systems with human-like tactile perception and embedded intelligence, combining high-resolution texture sensing with low-latency, large-area slip detection to bring electronic skin closer to the capabilities of the human skin.

Mark Daniel Alea was born in Batangas, Philippines. He obtained his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2013 and 2019, respectively. In January 2026, he obtained the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the MICAS group of KU Leuven in Belgium, under the supervision of Prof. Georges Gielen. He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the INTUITIVE project from 2020 to 2023. As part of his PhD research, he spent time as a visiting scholar at leading institutions such as the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, and BMW’s RoboTac Lab in Germany. He played a key role in co-authoring the KU Leuven–C3 DERMIS project proposal, which received funding from the Flemish Industrial Research Fund. Before joining KU Leuven, he was an Analog IC Design Engineer at Analog Devices Philippines from 2016 until 2020, and was a Science Research Specialist on the SmartWire Chip project under the Philippine Department of Science and Technology (DOST). His research interests include event-driven sensor interfaces, neuromorphic circuits, ultra-low-power voltage references, and gate-leakage-based circuits.

Georges G.E. Gielen received the MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, in 1986 and 1990, respectively. Currently, he is Full Professor in the MICAS research division at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) at KU Leuven. From 2013 until 2017 he served as Vice-Rector for the Group of Sciences, Engineering and Technology. In 2018 he was visiting professor at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) at KU Leuven.

His research interests are in the design of analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, and especially in analog and mixed-signal CAD tools and design automation, including modeling, simulation, optimization and synthesis as well as testing. He has graduated over 55 PhDs so far. He is a frequently invited speaker and serves/served as Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He is coordinator/partner of several academic and industrial research projects in the above fields, including having awarded the ERC Advanced Grant AnalogCreate. He has (co-)authored 14 monograph books and more than 800 publications in edited books, international journals and conference proceedings. He is a 1997 Laureate of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences, Literature and Arts in the discipline of Engineering. He is Fellow of the IEEE since 2002, and received the IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg award in 2015, the IEEE CAS Charles Desoer award in 2020, as well as the EDAA Achievement Award in 2021. He is an elected member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium in the class of Technical Sciences, and of the Academia Europaea.