Edoardo Charbon

Nationality: CH

EPFL STI IEM AQUA
Rue de la Maladière 71b
2000 Neuchâtel

Expertise

Ultra High-Speed and 3D Optical Sensors
LIDAR, FLIM, PET, FCS, NIROT
Cyo-CMOS for Quantum Computing
Computer Aided Design for VLSI
Virtual Human-Computer Interfaces
Edoardo Charbon (SM'00 F'17) received the Elektrotechnik Diploma from ETH Zurich, the M.S. from the University of California at San Diego, and the Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, 1991, and 1995, respectively, all in electrical engineering and EECS. He has consulted with numerous organizations, including Bosch, X-Fab, Texas Instruments, Maxim, Sony, Agilent, and the Carlyle Group. He was with Cadence Design Systems from 1995 to 2000, where he was the architect of the company's initiative on information hiding for intellectual property protection. In 2000, he joined Canesta Inc., as the Chief Architect, where he led the development of wireless 3-D CMOS image sensors. Since 2002 he has been a member of the faculty of EPFL, where is a full professor since 2015. From 2008 to 2016 he was full professor and chair at the Delft University of Technology, where he spearheaded the university's effort on cryogenic electronics and cryo-CMOS for quantum computing, as part of QuTech.
He has been the driving force behind the creation of deep-submicron CMOS SPAD technology, which is mass-produced since 2015 and is present in smartphones, telemeters, proximity sensors, and medical diagnostics tools.
His interests span from 3-D vision, LiDAR, FLIM, FCS, NIROT to super-resolution microscopy, time-resolved Raman spectroscopy, and cryo-CMOS circuits and systems for quantum computing. He has authored or co-authored over 500 papers and two books, and he holds 31 patents. Dr. Charbon is the recipient of the 2023 IISS Pioneering Achievement Award, he is a distinguished visiting scholar of the W. M. Keck Institute for Space at Caltech, a fellow of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft, a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Photonics Society, and a fellow of the IEEE and Optica.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Available at
http://aqua.epfl.ch/publications.html

Awards

Fellow of Optica

Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America)

2026

Best Paper Award, IEEE Quantum Week (with Vladimir Pesic)

IEEE

2025

IISS Pioneering Achievement Award

International Image Sensor Society (IISS)

2023

Best paper award, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC)

IEEE

2022

Best European Paper, IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)

IEEE

2021

Predoctoral Achievement Award, IEEE Electron Device Society (Andrea Ruffino)

IEEE

2021

Best Paper Award, IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium (NSS)

IEEE

2020

Best Paper Award, IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium (NSS)

IEEE

2019

Europe's Best Academic Research Team

ISE

2019

Best Paper Award, IEEE Nuclear Science Sumposium (NSS)

IEEE

2018

Fellow of the IEEE

IEEE

2017

Selected publications

SPAD Sensors Come of Age

E. Charbon and S. Donati
Published in Optics & Photonics News (OPN), Vol. 21, pp. 35-41 in 2010

Cryo-CMOS for quantum computing

Edoardo Charbon, Fabio Sebastiano, Andrei Vladimirescu, Harald Homulle, Sander Visser, Lin Song, Rosario Incandela
Published in IEEE international electron devices meeting (IEDM), pp. 1351-1354 in 2016

Single-photon avalanche diode imagers in biophotonics: review and outlook

Claudio Bruschini, Harald Homulle, Ivan Michel Antolovic, Samuel Burri, Edoardo Charbon
Published in Light: Science & Applications, Vol. 8, N.1, pp. 87 in 2019

Cryo-CMOS circuits and systems for quantum computing applications

Bishnu Patra, Rosario M Incandela, Jeroen PG Van Dijk, Harald AR Homulle, Lin Song, Mina Shahmohammadi, Robert Bogdan Staszewski, Andrei Vladimirescu, Masoud Babaie, Fabio Sebastiano, Edoardo Charbon
Published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Vol. 53, N. 1, pp. 309-321 in 2017

Megapixel time-gated SPAD image sensor for 2D and 3D imaging applications

Kazuhiro Morimoto, Andrei Ardelean, Ming-Lo Wu, Arin Can Ulku, Ivan Michel Antolovic, Claudio Bruschini, Edoardo Charbon
Published in Optica, Vol. 7, N. 4, pp. 346-354 in 2020

CMOS-based cryogenic control of silicon quantum circuits

Xiao Xue, Bishnu Patra, Jeroen PG van Dijk, Nodar Samkharadze, Sushil Subramanian, Andrea Corna, Brian Paquelet Wuetz, Charles Jeon, Farhana Sheikh, Esdras Juarez-Hernandez, Brando Perez Esparza, Huzaifa Rampurawala, Brent Carlton, Surej Ravikumar, Carlos Nieva, Sungwon Kim, Hyung-Jin Lee, Amir Sammak, Giordano Scappucci, Menno Veldhorst, Fabio Sebastiano, Masoud Babaie, Stefano Pellerano, Edoardo Charbon, Lieven MK Vandersypen
Published in Nature, Vol. 593, N. 7858, pp. 205-210 in 2021

Design and Characterization of A CMOS 3D Image Sensor based on Single Photon Avalanche Diodes

C. Niclass, A. Rochas, P.A. Besse, E. Charbon
Published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 40, N. 9, pp. 1847-1854 in 2005

A 128x128 Single-Photon Image Sensor with Column-Level 10-bit Time-to-Digital Converter Array

C. Niclass, C. Favi, T. Kluter, M. Gersbach, and E. Charbon
Published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 43, N. 12, pp. 2977-2989 in 2008

Scaling silicon-based quantum computing using CMOS technology

MF Gonzalez-Zalba, S De Franceschi, E Charbon, Tristan Meunier, M Vinet, AS Dzurak
Published in Nature Electronics, Vol. 4, N. 12, pp. 872-884 in 2021

Watermarking-Based Copyright Protection of Sequential Functions

I. Torunoglu and E. Charbon
Published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 35, N. 3, pp. 434-440 in 2000

Infoscience

Research

Current Research Fields

SPAD imaging
Ultra-fast imaging
Quantum imaging
Quantum computing
CMOS design
Cryo-CMOS design

Teaching & PhD

PhD Students

Kodai Kaneyasu, Yating Zou, Suraj Bhimrao Gaikwad, Vladimir Pesic, Won Yong Ha, Samuele Bisi, Batuhan Keskin, Cyril Alexis De Vaucleroy, Prabhleen Singh, Halil Kerim Yildirim, Alexandre Germain Philippe Domenech, Aryan Pandey

Past EPFL PhD Students

Cristiano Niclass, Huan Du, Marek Gersbach, Ties Jan Henderikus Kluter, Claudio Favi, Mahdi Aminian, Juan Mata Pavia, Samuel Burri, Scott Lindner, Kazuhiro Morimoto, Andrea Ruffino, Preethi Padmanabhan, Arin Can Ülkü, Francesco Gramuglia, Fulvio Martinelli, Andrei Ardelean, Andrada Alexandra Muntean, Jiuxuan Zhao, Simone Frasca, Pouyan Keshavarzian, Francesco Piro, Ekin Kizilkan, Utku Karaca, Jad Benserhir, Hung-Chi Han, Ming-Lo Wu, Tommaso Milanese, Chufan Zhou, Paul Mos, Baris Can Efe, Chang Liu, Yang Lin

Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector

Yigit Halil Andac

Courses

Introduction to quantum science and technology

QUANT-400

A broad view of the diverse aspects of the field is provided: quantum physics, communication, quantum computation, simulation of physical systems, physics of qubit platforms, hardware technologies. Students will grasp the field as a whole and better orient themselves on specialized topics.

Metrology

MICRO-428

The course deals with the concept of measuring in different domains, particularly in the electrical, optical, and microscale domains. The course will end with a perspective on quantum measurements, which could trigger the ultimate revolution in metrology.

Metrology practicals

MICRO-429

The student will get familiar with the techniques learnt in class (MICRO-428) and will put them to practice with experiments in the laboratory. There will be a practical training for each theme covered in class; the students will also learn good practices during measurements (lab notebook included).

Products design & systems engineering

MICRO-406

This course will cover all the aspects of product design and system engineering from learning relevant methods to the actual implementation in a hands-on practice of product development.

Quantum and nanocomputing

MICRO-435

The course teaches non von-Neumann architectures. The first part of the course deals with quantum computing, sensing, and communications. The second focuses on field-coupled and conduction-based nanocomputing, in-memory and molecular computing, cellular automata, and spintronic computing.

Past Phd As Director (TU Delft)

Mohammad A. Karami, Matthew W. Fishburn, Shingo Mandai, Chockalingam Veerappan, Pengfei Sun, I. Michel Antolovic, Esteban Venialgo, Harald Homulle, Chao Zhang, Augusto Ximenes, Augusto J. Carimatto, Jeroen v. Dijk, Bishnu Patra.