The TI Challenge is a competition that brings together university students from all over the world to develop new or innovative products utilizing digital signal processors (DSPs). The US$100,000 grand prize will be divided among the members of the winning team.
DSPs, credited with revolutionizing products to make lives easier, are impacting electronics like microprocessors impacted computers. A DSP is 10 to 50 times more powerful than other computer central processing units (CPUs) in handling mass intensive tasks, enabling data to be processed in real time and cost-effectively. DSPs are the brains of many products such as cellular phones, automobiles, computer hard disk drives, and digital answering machines. The complete DSP solutions provided by TI, the world's leading DSP provider, are changing the way people live, learn, work, and play.
The competition is one of the innovative ways in which TI is helping to train and build the global workforce of tomorrow to meet the insatiable need around the world for engineers versed in digital signal processing.
The competition entry requires an original TMS320 DSP-based design, which must operate as a functional application. This skills-based competition is open to full-time university students at the undergraduate, graduate, or Ph.D. level.
"TI's continued sponsorship of the '97 TI Challenge is an example of TI's strong commitment to the DSP industry's growth and the advancement of DSP technology in the university community," said Michael Hames, TI Semiconductor Group vice president and worldwide DSP manager. "We expect that this competition will motivate the best and brightest next-generation engineers to lend their talents to the field of digital signal processing which will lead to new, cost-effective products for the consumer."
The 1995 Challenge, the first-ever worldwide competition of its kind, received 230 entries from more than 700 students in 26 countries. Two students from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University shared the grand prize of US$100,000 in May, 1996, for their design of a video restoration system which can take old, poor quality films and digitally clean them for archiving and re-release. The other two finalist teams, each receiving $10,000, were from France's Ecole Francaise d'Electronique et d'Informatique and the University of Maryland.
"The '95 TI Challenge was a huge success. We believe the '97 Challenge will attract an even greater number of participants than we had for the '95 competition," said Torrence Robinson, TI's Semiconductor Group university program manager and competition coordinator. "As DSPs have become increasingly prevalent in end-equipments, digital signal processing has become a critical skill for students to possess in a more competitive job market. The competition provides a perfect venue for them to demonstrate their DSP talents," he added.
According to Robinson, winners of the '97 competition will be chosen with respect to the merit of the design and the educational level of the team members. Merit is based on, among others, inventiveness, practicality, and difficulty of the chosen application.
In addition to the US$100,000 awarded to the grand prize winner, the three teams which make their way to the finals will each receive US$10,000, and the nine regional semi-final teams will each receive US$1,000. The advising professor of the grand-prize winning team also receives US$15,000 and an opportunity to work at TI for a six-month sabbatical.
Also, just by being a participant in the competition, TI plans to include participating student resumes in a DSP resume database service. This service is expected to provide prospective employers with resumes of students with DSP experience who can fill summer, co-op, and full-time positions.
For complete rules and conditions, students should contact their
university electrical engineering department, or contact Texas
Instruments at 1-800-477-8924, ext. 4061 or via TI's World Wide
Web site at 
http://www.ti.com/sc/dsp_challenge. To request more
information about the competition, students can also send an e-mail
to univ@msg.ti.com.
Reader Inquiry: 1-800-477-8924, ext. 5300
Please refer to Profile #: SPR250
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