Student IC Designs Accepted for Contest

BOULDER, Colo., Dec. 5, 2005 -- Designs for analog, digital or programmable circuits and systems are being accepted through Thursday, Dec. 8, as submissions for the annual student design contest jointly sponsored by the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Total prize money for the competition is expected to reach $15,000 this year.

The winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony during DAC, a major annual event of the electronic design automation industry, to be held July 24-28, 2006, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. More than 10,000 developers, designers, researchers, managers and engineers from electronics companies and universities around the world attend the event.

The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on design automation, the Circuits and Systems Society and computer-aided network design technical committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Electronic Design Automation Consortium. This year's Student Design Contest co-chairs are Bill Bowhill, senior principal engineer at Intel Corp. in Hudson, Mass., and Alan Mantooth, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

"The DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest is unique in the industry for the opportunities it offers to its winners and sponsors," said Mantooth. "The contest provides competition between graduate and undergraduate students at universities and colleges worldwide, while also giving them a chance to demonstrate their experience to sponsor company representatives who serve as judges."

The contest accepts designs for analog, digital or programmable circuits and systems. Submissions can be embodied as integrated circuits (ICs), reconfigurable processors, systems on chips, platform-based or embedded systems designs. Submissions are invited from full-time graduate and undergraduate students in three categories: operational, which means that an IC design was built and tested; system design, which focuses on FPGA (field-programmable gate array) or other programmable architectures; and conceptual, where a project was designed and simulated. The design must be part of the students' course or research work at the university and must have been completed within 18 months prior to the Dec. 8 submission deadline.

The total prize money is expected to be close to $15,000, shared between first-, second- and third-place winners in each category. Winners will be notified prior to the 43rd DAC and offered travel assistance to attend, and winning submissions will be displayed as posters at the DAC University Booth on the exhibit floor. Selected winning entries may be included in the technical program, at the discretion of the technical program committee. Winners will also be invited to present at a special poster session at ISSCC 2006, to be held in February in San Francisco.

In 2005, the student design contest had 48 submissions from 14 countries and 34 schools. Last year's corporate sponsors included Cadence Design Systems, Intel, Microelectronics Advanced Research Corp., Mentor Graphics, Semiconductor Research Corp., Synopsys, Tanner EDA and Xilinx, along with industry support from the Association of Computing Machinery, Electronic Design Automation Consortium, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and Special Interest Group on Design Automation.

For more details about the contest, visit: www.dac.com