The DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest promotes excellence in the design of electronic systems through competition between graduate and undergraduate students at universities and colleges worldwide. The Student Design Contest was founded by the University of Utah's Kent Smith in 1981, and has been managed by DAC since 2000. In 2002, DAC began partnering with ISSCC to promote and manage the contest.
Operational Chip Design Category Winners
This year's first place in the operational chip design category, and best overall, was awarded to Pierluigi Nuzzo, Fernando De Bernardinis and Pierangelo Terreni of the University of Pisa and Bert Gyselinckx, Liesbet Van der Perre and Geert Van der Plas of IMEC. The award was given for their design of a 10.6mW/0.8pJ power-scalable 1 GS/s 4b ADC in 0.18um CMOS with 5.8GHz ERBW.
The second place winner in the operational chip design category was a tie between Mona Safi-Harb and Gordon W. Roberts of McGill University, for increasing the time dynamic range of pulse measurement techniques in digital CMOS; and Eric Marsman and Robert M. Senger of the University of Michigan and Richard B. Brown from the University of Utah, for a DSP enabled microsystem for cochlear implants with hybrid LC clocking.
Chien-Chang Lin, Jia-Wei Chen, Hsiu-Cheng Chang, Chao-Ching Wang, Yi-Huan Ou-Yang, Ming-Chih Tsai, Yao-Chang Yang, Jiun-In Guo and Jinn-Shyan Wang of the National Chung Cheng University received the third place award in the operational chip design category for the design of a 160K gates/4.5KB SRAM H.264 video decoder for HDTV applications.
Operational Systems Design Category Winners
In the operational systems design category, the first place award was given to Herwin Chan, Andres I. Vila Cadaso, Juthika Basak, Miguel Griot, Wen-Yen Weng, Richard Wesel, B Jalali, Eli Yablonovitch and Ingrid Verbauwhede of the University of California, Los Angeles for the demonstration of uncoordinated multiple access in optical communications.
The second place winners in the operational systems design category were Heemin Park, Jonathan Friedman, Mani B. Srivastava, Pablo Gutierrez, Vidyut Samanta and Jeff Burke of the University of California, Los Angeles for the design of Illumimote, a high performance light sensor module for wireless sensor networks.
Denis Daly, Daniel Finchelstein, Nathan Ickes, Naveen Verma and Anantha Chandrakasan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were the third place award recipients in the operational systems design category for the design of an ultra-low power wireless micro-sensor node.
Babu L. Saincha of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, received an honorable mention in the operational systems design category for phase delay-based collision avoidance RADAR for smart automobiles.
Conceptual Category Winners
In the conceptual category, the first place award was given to Kazunori Shimizu, Tatsuyuki Ishikawa, Nozomu Togawa, Takeshi Ikenaga and Satoshi Goto of Waseda University for ASIC implementation of LDPC decoder accelerating message-passing schedule.
Industry and Corporate Dedication to Continued Education
Each year, the successful tradition of the Student Design Contest is made possible by a group of industry and corporate sponsors. In addition to DAC and the ISSCC, this year's industry sponsors include the IEEE Council on EDA, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). This year the corporate sponsors are Cadence Design Systems, IBM Corp., Intel Corporation, Mentor Graphics Corp., Mindspeed Technologies, Inc., Synopsys, Inc. and Tanner EDA.
For those interested in the 2007 Student Design Contest, the call for entries will be posted on the DAC Web site in mid-October 2006. Past winners and more details are available online: http://www.dac.com/43rd/studcon.html. For more information on the Student Design Contest contact the co-chairmen, Professor Alan Mantooth (mantooth@uark.edu) or Bill Bowhill (bill.bowhill@intel.com).
DAC Registration
The 43rd DAC will be held July 24-28, 2006 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Advance online registration for the conference is open until Friday, July 21 at www.dac.com. Attendees can also register at the conference.
About DAC
DAC is the premier forum for the electronic design industry to exchange information on products, methodologies and processes. Attended by more than 10,000 developers, designers, researchers, managers and engineers from leading electronics companies and universities around the world, DAC includes nearly 250 exhibitors and offers a robust technical program covering the electronics industry's hottest trends to bring people to the event.
The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA), the Circuits and Systems Society and Computer Aided Network Design Technical Committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE/CASS/CANDE), the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA), and the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDA Consortium). More details about DAC are available at: www.dac.com.
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Public Relations for DAC: Weber Shandwick Emily Taylor, 503-552-3733 Email Contact