Related Product Information

In This Issue

Meeting the DSP challenge

Italian team wins $100,000 from TI's DSP Solutions Challenge

Imagine interacting with a professor, actively participating in a game show or shopping at favorite stores in the comfort of your own home -- and through your television.

Research into the technology -- Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) -- that could make these activities possible captured a $100,000 (U.S.) grand prize for four students from the University of Perugia in Umbria, Italy, who recently won the Digital Signal Processing Solutions Challenge sponsored by Texas Instruments.

Euro Sereni, a graduate student, along with Stefano Gai, Alessando Dini and Stefan Pielmier, all undergraduates when their entry was submitted and all telecommunications majors, used a TMS320C6000 programmable digital signal processor (DSP) solution to enable DVB units to provide good quality video across varying hardware configurations and channel conditions.

DVB has higher and more stable quality than Standard Definition TV (SDTV). Using DVB allows delivery of interactive services to the home, as well as digital sound and video. The interactive services may be entertainment, health care or educational courses, for example, and should strengthen the relationship between computers and television.

TI's DSP Solutions Challenge, created to address the industrywide shortage of design engineers with DSP experience, is a worldwide competition geared toward undergraduate and graduate students to develop the most innovative and functional designs using TI DSPs. The 1997 contest drew 273 entries from more than 800 students in 26 countries. Entries were judged by TI representatives for overall creativity, practicality and repeatability, difficulty, completeness, professionalism, as well as operability.

The contest is one of several TI programs supporting higher education. Recently, TI announced it would invest $25 million to encourage top-level DSP research at some of the world's leading engineering schools. In 1996, TI also presented a $7 million cash donation to Rice University, the largest corporate cash contribution the university has ever received, to fund long-term cooperative research projects in DSP and information engineering, particularly in digital wireless and other telecommunications applications used by TI customers.