October 19, 2005 -- A team of six electrical engineering graduate students from U.Va. won first place in Phase One of an annual contest sponsored by the semiconductor industry to improve the design of integrated computer circuits.

The U.Va. team members are: Garrett S. Rose, Wei Huang, Yan Zhang, Adam Cabe, Zhenyu Qi and Wenqian Wu. All are graduate students in the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Mircea Stan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and the dissertation advisor for five of the six team members, led the team. John Lach, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and Wu’s advisor, Kevin Skadron, associate professor of computer science, and Scott Acton, professor of electrical and computer engineering provided additional technical advice.

The U.Va. team placed ahead of a team from Harvard University, which took second, and Michigan State University, which came in third. Thirty-nine teams from 27 universities entered the SRC/SoC Design Challenge sponsored by a group of computer chip manufacturers and industry organizations.

The goal of the SRC/SIA Design Challenge is to encourage university faculty and students to create novel, low-power, designs for highly integrated circuits, packing as much performance as possible onto circuit boards. The design areas that teams had to address for the contest included speed, image resolution, power consumption and power management. Teams all used the same materials supplied by the contest design kits.

The U.Va. System on Chip (SoC) entry, "An SRAD Image Processor as a Reconfigurable, Temperature-Aware SoC Designed for Low-Power Operation," won a cash prize of $7,000 for U.Va.’s Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The U.Va. entry was based on "Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion," a mathematical algorithm developed by Acton and others. It is used to process and clarify ultrasound images and can be used to develop portable, low-power ultrasound imaging devices. Phase One prizes will be awarded at the TECHCON 2005 Conference on Oct. 25 in Portland, Ore. Phase One winners also have been invited to participate in Phase Two of the SoC Design Challenge, which involves submitting detailed designs for manufacturing the chips designed in Phase One.

The competition is sponsored by Semiconductor Research Corp., Semiconductor Industry Association, Advanced Micro Devices, AMI Semiconductor, Analog Devices, Cadence, Freescale, IBM, Intel, MOSIS, National Semiconductor, and Texas Instruments.