DAC Student Design Contest Winners Announced

     Record Number of Entries Vie for Top Honors in Prestigious IC Design
                                 Competition

    SAN DIEGO, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Winners were announced today at the 41st
Design Automation Conference (DAC) for the yearly Student Design Contest,
sponsored by DAC and the International Solid State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC), along with multiple industry and corporate sponsors.  This year's
contest broke previous records for number of entries (59), schools involved
(40), and participating countries (10).  Winning entries will be displayed on
the DAC show floor in the University Booth, and the winners will also be
invited to present at ISSCC in February 2005.
    Promoting excellence in electronic systems design, the contest is open to
graduate and undergraduate students at universities and colleges worldwide.
The contest's two categories are operational, in which a design is built and
tested; and conceptual, for circuits designed and simulated only.

    Honorees:  Operational
    First place in the operational category goes to Fred S. Lee, Anantha P.
Chandrakasan, and Raul Blazquez, all of MIT, and Puneet P. Newaskar of Silicon
Labs.  This team designed a Single-Chip, Ultra-Wideband Transceiver.  This
CMOS chip integrates a complete wireless transceiver system working in the
0-500MHz ultra-wide band.  The judges were impressed by the high level of
integration and demonstration of working transmission at 200kb/s.
    The second place winners are Hung-Chi Fang, Yu-Wei Chang, and Liang-Gee
Chen, all hailing from National Taiwan University, Taipei.  Their design was
for an 81 MS/s JPEG 2000 Single-Chip Encoder with Rate-Distortion
Optimization.
    Two teams tied for third-place honors.  Bo Yang and Ramesh Karri of the
Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, and David A. McGrew, Cisco Systems, won for
their 80Gbps FPGA Implementation of a Universal Hash Function-Based Message
Authentication Code.  The other winners are Maysam Ghovanloo and Khalil Najafi
from the University of Michigan for their design of a Modular 32-Site Wireless
Neural Stimulation Microsystem.

    Honorees:  Conceptual
    First prize in the conceptual category goes to Kamran Kashef and Matt
Hardy of the University of Michigan for their Economical Aphotic Sieving
Machine.  This design tackles methods for breaking public key encryption, such
as the RSA algorithm, in a much more efficient way than conventional
computers.
    Second-place honors go to Joseph Gebis, Sam Williams, and David Patterson,
all hailing from the University of California, Berkeley, and Christos
Kozyrakis of Stanford.  Their design is a VIRAM1: a Media-Oriented Vector
Processor with Embedded DRAM.
    The winners of third-place are Jason D. Bakos, Amit Gupta, Leo Salavo, and
Donald Chiarulli, all from the University of Pittsburgh, for their SiGe
Prototype Chip Design Implementing CMOS Fixed Bit-Load Drivers and Receivers
for Next-Generation High-Speed Board-Level Interconnect.
    $15,000 in prize money is shared between first, second and third place
winners in each category and winning submissions are displayed as posters at
the DAC University Booth on the exhibit floor.  In addition, winners will also
be invited to present at a special poster session at ISSCC 2005 to be held
February in San Francisco.

    Sponsors Promote Student Involvement
    A range of industry and corporate sponsors make the contest possible.
This year's industry sponsors include the Electronic Design Automation
Consortium (EDAC), Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest
Group on Design Automation (SIGDA), the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, the
Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), and the Microelectronics Advanced
Research Corporation (MARCO).  Corporate sponsors are Agere, Conexant, Mentor
Graphics Corporation, and Xilinx.

    Higher Education's Role at DAC
    The annual Student Design Contest was founded by the University of Utah's
Kent Smith in 1981, and has been run by DAC since 2000.  In 2002, DAC began
partnering with ISSCC to promote and manage the contest.
    A call for entry for the 2005 Student Design Contest will be posted on the
DAC website in mid-October 2004.  Past winners and more details are available
online:  http://www.dac.com/41st/studcon.html.
    The SIGDA Ph.D forum invites students proposing their Ph.D research to
present at a poster session that drew 40 participants and more than 400
attendees at last year's show.  The 2004 Ph.D forum will take place Tuesday
evening, June 8, at 6pm on the upstairs "Sails Pavilion."
    DAC also features a University Booth on the main exhibit floor.  Here,
university researchers from around the world present their work with live
demos at the booth, and present a range of posters on a variety of technical
subjects.

    About DAC
    DAC is the premier forum for the electronic design and design automation
industries 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 more than 200 exhibitors and offers a highly selective
technical program covering the electronics industry's hottest trends.
    The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing
Machinery/Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA), the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Circuits and Systems Society
(IEEE/CAS) and the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDA Consortium).
For more information, including registration, visit the DAC Web site at:
http://www.dac.com.  Or, contact DAC management at (800) 321-4573.

SOURCE  41st Design Automation Conference