Prof. Dr. Jakob Leise gained his first professional experience during his bachelor's studies. From 2013 to 2016, he pursued a dual study programme in Electronics Engineering at StudiumPlus in Wetzlar and worked at Siemens AG in Marburg in automation technology within the pharmaceutical sector. After successfully completing his Bachelor of Engineering degree, Leise studied for a Master's degree in Electrical and Information Engineering at the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM) in Giessen from 2016 to 2018.
He followed this with his doctorate in 2019. He conducted research in the joint doctoral programme of THM and the Spanish Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona on his doctoral topic “Charge-Based Compact Modeling of Capacitances and Low-Frequency Noise in Organic Thin-Film Transistors” – the modeling of the small-signal behavior and noise of novel transistors based on organic semiconductors.
Organic thin-film transistors are novel components because they are based on carbon as a semiconductor material and are therefore significantly easier to manufacture. They are particularly thin, flexible electronic switches that can be applied to paper or plastic substrates, for example.
To determine their behavior before being used, for example, in the automatic monitoring of the temperature of medication packaging, this is simulated in a programme. To use this simulation programme reliably, equations must be created that describe the behavior of the component—in Leise's case, organic thin-film transistors—in an electronic circuit. Leise has developed equations that show how the transistors behave when variable voltages are applied, i.e., the small-signal behavior, and how the current fluctuates when the component is operated at a constant rate, the so-called noise.
After completing his doctorate, Prof. Dr. Leise gained further professional experience from 2022 onwards at KEBA Industrial Automation Germany GmbH in Lahnau-Waldgirmes as a software engineer for functional safety. There he co-developed software that is used in hazardous applications with defined requirements for shutdown response paths, such as in injection molding machines.
Leise now brings this expertise to the Department Electrical and Information Engineering at THM in Giessen as a professor. His focus areas are software development, automation technology, functional safety, and programmemable logic controllers (PLCs).