Winners of the latest DAC-ISSCC and A-SSCC Student Design Contests discussed their work in two evening poster sessions on 4- 5 February at ISSCC in San Francisco. The DAC awardees will be formally recognized at the 45^th Design Automation Conference in Anaheim, California in June, 2008. A-SSCC prize winners were honored at the conference in November 2007.

2008 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest
DAC Student Design Contest co-chair Bill Bowhill said that 48 papers were submitted, with participation from over 35 academic institutions, spanning more than 12 countries around the world. “This year's entries were all very high-quality work, demonstrating innovation and sound engineering practice,” he said. “The designs spanned a wide range of technologies: wireless, microprocessors, sensors, analog circuits, data converters, media processing, and clock synthesis. It was impressive to see the creativity and technical competence of the students and gave an exciting vision of the future of the electronics industry. The nine winners demonstrated excellence in their design solutions and methodology," he said.

A MIPS R2000 Implementation
Nathaniel Pinckney, Thomas Barr, Michael Dayringer, Matthew McKnett, Nan Jiang, Carl Nygaard, David Money Harris, - Harvey Mudd College;Joel Stanley, Braden Phillips - The University of Adelaide

Undergraduate Project a First Exposure to VLSI Design
Thirty students from Harvey Mudd College and four from the University of Adelaide, Australia cooperatively developed a 32-bit mips CPU for an undergraduate course last year. They built all the components of their 160,000 transistor chip set entirely by hand in teams of four and five students, communicating mostly in video chats via IM and SKYPE, said Michael Dayringer, a project spokesman. 

Undergraduates Michael Dayringer and Nathaniel Pinckney of Harvey Mudd College (at left) look on as Thomas Barr presents the group’s work.

Recounting how the project got started, Mr. Dayringer said, “more people than expected had signed up for Prof. Harris’s class. So he decided it might be an interesting learning experience for everyone to build one big chip instead of multiple small ones.” The group was broken up into specialized cross-college teams - the memory team, for instance, had four people in the US and four in Australia. “We actually visited them over spring break,” Mr. Dayringer said.  “We didn’t get to see anything, but it was a lot of fun.”

How did they decide to submit to the Conference?  “We had a pretty sizable project report,” said Mr Pinckney. “I started writing the paper and everyone else joined in. The students led the way.”

iVisual: An Intelligent Visual Sensor SoC with 2790fps CMOS Image Sensor and 205GOPS/W Vision Processor
Chih-Chi Cheng, Chia-Hua Lin, Chung-Te Li, Samuel C. Chang, Liang-Gee Chen - National Taiwan University

In the two or three months it took to put this single-chip sensor together, researcher Chi-Chi Cheng said he “ate and slept” the project. The device combines multiple parts on one circuit board to achieve better security and better performance. Waiting for the results from the chip implementation center, Mr. Cheng said, “I couldn’t work for three months, I was so nervous. But luckily it worked.”

XCXO: An Ultra-low Cost Ultra-high Accuracy Clock System for Wireless Sensor Networks in Harsh Remote Outdoor Environments
Thomas Schmid, Jonathan Friedman, Zainul Charbiwala, Young H. Cho, Mani B. Srivastava - University of California

Ph.D. students Thomas Schmid (above, left) and Jonathan Friedman explained that this UCLA project was supervised by Prof. Mani B. Srivastava, building on an idea proposed by Dr. Young H. Cho, a post-doc in their laboratory. In the area of sensor networks, the goal is to have very cheap but accurate time, Mr. Schmid  said. To achieve this, you can exploit the manuacturing differences between two AT-cut crystals by measuring the drift between the two of them. What you get is a calibration curve which works as a look-up table at run time. “Temperature is indirectly  measured through the drift and therefore, calibrating a temperature sensor  is not necessary anymore,"he said. “The advantage is you can evaluate it all in digital with just a little timer unit, which makes the whole system very cheap."

PicoCube: A 1cm3 Sensor Node Powered by Harvested Energy
|Yuen-Hui Chee, Mike Koplow, Michael Mark, Nathan Pletcher, Mike Seeman, Fred Burghardt, Dan Steingart,  Jan Rabaey, Paul Wright, Seth Sanders - UC Berkeley

Michael Seeman (right), a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley specializing in switched process power converters, said the objective of his project was to devise a wireless sensor node that runs off scavenged energy collected from the environment. As proof of concept, he explained how the rotation of a car wheel may generate enough energy to power a wireless sensor node residing inside the rim of the tire. The sensor's targeted size, he said, is a one-centimeter cube designed to use very lower power -- on average 6 microwatts, transmitting a packet every six seconds. “There is a lot of fancy technology in here, including a custom Pico Radio -- probably the lowest power transmitter to date - and a custom integrated circuit that rectifies the scavenger energy at about 93% efficiency to charge a battery, and also converts voltage for the loads at approximately 85 % efficiency,” he said.

A 3Gbps/30K-Rule Virus-Detection Processor Embedded with Adaptively Dividable Dual-Port BiTCAM for Mobile Devices
Chieh-Jen Cheng, Chao-Ching Wang, Kuan-Ching Chuang, Tai-An Chen, Tien-Fu Chen, Jinn-Shyan Wang - National Chung-Cheng University

Chieh-Jen Cheng and Chao-Ching Wang (left) represented a team from National Chung-Cheng University that developed a chip dedicated to low-power virus detection in wireless devices at the request of a local company.  Their device is distinguished by the inclusion of an on-chip database of virus signatures for fast filtering, with an off-chip database for exact matching, said Mr. Cheng.

A Low Power Carbon Nanotube Chemical Sensor System
Taeg Sang Cho, Kyeong-jae Lee, Jing Kong, Anantha P. Chandrakasan - Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Silicon Odometer: An On-Chip Reliability Monitor for Measuring Frequency Degradation of Digital Circuits
Tae-Hyoung Kim, Randy Persaud, Chris H. Kim - University of Minnesota 

Vision Platform for Mobile Intelligent Robot Based on 81.6 GOPS Object Recognition Processor
Donghyun Kim, Kwanho Kim, Joo-Young Kim, Seungjin Lee, Hoi-Jun Yoo - KAIST

MIT students Kyeong-jae Lee (left) and Taeg Sang (Tim) Cho at the ISSCC 2008 poster session.	A crowd discusses the silicon odometer devised by a team from the University of Minnesota.	Donghyun Kim with KAIST's mobile intelligent robot.

 
A 242mW, 10mm2 1080p H.264/AVC High Profile Encoder Chip
Yu-Kun Lin, De-Wei Li, Chia-Chun Lin, Tzu-Yun Kuo, Sian-Jin Wu, Wei-Cheng Tai, Wei-Cheng Chang,  Tian-Sheuan Chang - Institute of Electronics, National Chiao-Tung University

Award Winning A-SSCC Student Designs
A High S/N Ratio and High Full Well Capacity CMOS Image Sensor with Active Pixel Readout Feedback Operation
Woonghee Lee¹, Nana Akahane¹, Satoru Adachi², Koichi Mizobuchi² and Shigetoshi Sugawa¹
Affiliation: ¹Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, 6-6-11 Aza-Aoba, Aramaki, Aoba, Sendai 980-8579, Japan; ²DISP Development, Texas Instruments Japan, 2350 Kihara, Miho, Inashiki, Ibaraki 300-0496, Japan

A 195mW, 9.1M Vertices/s Fully Programmable 3D Graphics Processor for Low Power Mobile Devices
Jeong-Ho Woo¹, Ju-Ho Sohn¹, Hyejung Kim¹, Jongcheol Jeong², Euljoo Jeong², Suk-Joong Lee² and Hoi-Jun Yoo¹
Affiliation: ¹Dept. EECS, KAIST, 373-1, Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 373-1, Daejeon, KOREA; ²Corelogic, Inc., 6th FL., City Air Tower, 159-9, Samsung-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 135-973, KOREA

Woonghee Lee and Nana Akahane with Prof. Sugawa of Tohoku University.	Jeong-Ho Woo was spokesman for a joint university-industry 3D graphics processor project from Seoul.

A Linearization Technique for RF Receiver Front-End Using Second-Order-Intermodulation Injection
Shuzuo Lou, and Howard C. Luong
Affiliation: Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Bruce Hecht, SSCS Membership Chair, bruce.hecht@analog.com
Katherine Olstein, SSCS Administrator, k.olstein@ieee.org