HOUSTON (March 11, 1996) -- Texas Instruments today announced eight semi-finalists in the company's DSP Solutions Challenge, a contest to encourage engineering students worldwide to learn about and use digital technology. The contest will award a grand prize of US$100,000 to be shared by the winning team of students for the most innovative design using digital signal processing (DSP) devices. The eight semi-finalist teams are the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland from the Unites States, Canada's University of Saskatchewan, Ecole Francaise d'Electronique et d'Informatique (EFREI) and Tampere Institute of Technology from Europe, Osaka University and Musashi Institute of Technology of Japan, and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.
The insatiable worldwide demand for a workforce skilled in the development of advanced semiconductors, such as digital signal processing solutions, prompted TI to create the DSP Solutions Challenge. The contest is one of several innovative TI programs supporting higher education.
TI received entries from more than 230 teams representing 700 students from 26 countries. Among the eight winning entries, judged on their overall design creativity and applicability to real world needs, were an automotive sound system, a Doppler radar system, and a motion picture restoration system.
"The first and most critical phase of the TI DSP Solutions Challenge is complete," said Michael Hames, vice president, TI semiconductor group and worldwide DSP manager. "When we announced the contest, we said we were looking to the engineers of the future for the applications of tomorrow. We viewed the contest as a way to help students worldwide prepare to work with advanced technologies. The number of students who entered tells me we are on our way to successfully achieving our goal."
DSPs are high-speed, math-intensive, programmable integrated circuits or chips that are revolutionizing electronics in the '90s, much as the microprocessor did computers in the '80s. A DSP, which can add and multiply tens of millions of complex formulae per second, is 10 to 50 times more powerful than other computer central processing units (CPUs). Digital signal processing is the technology at the heart of the digital revolution. DSP technology today has changed the way people live, learn, work and play by enabling the electronics industry to develop radically new products and improve existing ones. DSPs are in cellular communications (digital cellular phones), computer storage devices (hard disk drives), modems and personal computer (PC) multimedia. Texas Instruments is the world's leading provider of digital signal processing solutions, with a 44 percent market share in DSP, according to industry analyst Will Strauss, President of Forward Concepts.
"The entries overall have exceeded our expectations, combining creative, innovative designs with practicality and usefulness," said Torrence Robinson, TI's university program manager. "One team, for example, took advantage of the contest to design a fast film-restoration system for restoring and saving classic old films. Another designed an automotive sound system that uses DSPs to give listeners a sense of theater-like sound in the confinements of a car interior. Choosing eight semi-finalists from so many excellent entries was a difficult task for our distinguished panel of TI experts."
Each of the eight semi-finalist teams won US$1,000. From these eight teams, three finalist teams will be chosen to compete for the grand prize. The team chosen for the grand prize for the best DSP-based design will win a US$100,000 prize that will be divided among the members of the winning team. In addition, the two remaining finalist teams will each win US$10,000. The grand prize winner will be announced in Atlanta on May 8, 1996, during live demonstrations of the three finalist projects.
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