Dr.-Ing. Ralf Sommer was appointed professor at the Technische Universität Ilmenau on November 6, 2006 and head of the Electronic Circuits and Systems Group at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. At the same time he took over the position of the scientific managing director of IMMS.

After studying electrical engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig, he received his doctorate from the Institute for Network Theory and Circuitry at the university with a thesis on “Concepts and Methods for the Computer-Aided Design of Analog Circuits”.

In autumn 1993 he started working at the Center for Microelectronics at the University of Kaiserslautern (ZMK), where he established a group “Computer Aided Design of Analog Circuits”, which also developed the now commercialized symbolic analysis tool “Analog Insydes”.

In 1998, the group moved to the newly founded Institute for Industrial Mathematics, the first Fraunhofer Institute for Mathematics – FhG ITWM. Through numerous industrial and publicly funded projects, some of which were carried out in an interdisciplinary cooperation with the Center for Computer Algebra at the University of Kaiserslautern (Prof. Greuel, Prof. Pfister), a close contact to the company Infineon Technologies AG developed.

In 2000, he took over the management of the “Analog Simulation” group in Munich. At the same time he was co-responsible for the research complex “Design Automation” in the central CAD. In addition to introducing innovative methods and tools into the industrial design flow, which included symbolic and statistical analysis and yield optimization, he was also overall project manager of a large European joint project (ANASTASIA+).