Texas Instruments Announces Nine Semi-Finalists for $100,000 Digital Signal Processing Solutions Challenge Grand Prize
HOUSTON (April 1, 1998) -- Research that could bring dramatic improvements to sound, television, wireless communications, computer graphics, medical diagnostics and sports training were among the winning designs by university students who were named finalists in Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) DSP Solutions Challenge. The worldwide competition rewards the championship team with a grand prize of US$100,000 for the most innovative design using digital signal processing (DSP) devices, the chips behind the electronics revolution.
The nine semifinalists, each of whose teams will divide $1,000 and continue competition, are teams from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia), University of San Diego (California), Centro Federal de Educacao Tecnologica do Parana (CEFET) (Brazil), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), Tianjin University (China), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), University of New South Wales (Australia), Katholieke Universiteit-Leuven (Belgium) and Universit di Perugia (Italy).
From the nine semifinalists, three finalist teams will be chosen to compete for the grand prize. The winning team will divide the $100,000. The other two finalists each will win US$10,000. The winner will be announced May 12 at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Seattle, Wash.
In addition to student prizes, advising professors for the grand prize winning team will receive a cash prize of US$15,000 and an offer of a six-month sabbatical program at TI.
"TI designed this competition to encourage engineering students worldwide to learn about and use DSPs," said Michael Hames, vice president, TI semiconductor group and worldwide DSP manager. "With the number of engineering graduates in short supply and the DSP market growing more than 30 percent a year, we are making significant investments to encourage training that includes DSP solutions technology so students will be prepared to compete in the workforce of tomorrow."
DSPs are specialized microprocessor chips that crunch complex mathematical calculations and move data at amazingly fast speeds in order to process signals. When coupled with mixed-signal chips, DSPs analyze and make decisions about "real world" analog signals so fast that calculations occur in "real time," or as they occur in real life. These DSP solutions make access to the Internet faster and communication on digital cell phones clearer.
TI received 273 entries from more than 800 students in 26 countries. Submittals are judged by TI representatives for their overall creativity, practicality and repeatability, difficulty, completeness, professionalism, as well as operability.
"Our finalists have stretched their imaginations to create new applications with TI's industry-leading DSP solutions that pay off in prizes for them now -- and in hands-on experience for the future," said Torrence Robinson, TI's DSP solutions university program manager. "The China team, for example, demonstrated a system to reduce noise and improve the broadcast quality of television broadcasts for high definition television (HDTV). Although digital television products will soon be readily available, the quality of the images received at home will depend largely on the technology used by broadcasting stations and cable system providers."
Italy's team also focused on the new age of television with a design that could help implement a new television technology called Digital Video Broadcasting. DVB is expected to have higher and more stable quality than Standard Definition TV (SDTV).
The Singapore students converted 5.1 channel Dolby Digital sound (AC-3) into 2-channel sound with the same quality. Such a design would enable listeners to hear 3-D positional sound from any point in a room (without investing in five speakers to hear it) and will improve the sound technology for multimedia users.
The University of San Diego finalists designed technology to compress voice messages for a pager, eliminating the need for a user to seek a telephone to retrieve messages. Wireless communications also would benefit from the Virginia Tech team's adaptive antenna array design that allows service providers to expand coverage, increase capacity and improve signal quality. A low-cost moving object detection system designed by the Japan team collects real-time data on sports participants as an aid in their training. Other projects quickly and accurately extract three-dimensional structures from a sequence of 2D images (Belgium's entry) or solve complex problems with scalability to large sizes much less expensively than now possible on supercomputers (Australia's team). Research by Brazil's students could improve detection and diagnosis of heart abnormalities, because it enables round-the-clock data collection through data compression techniques on portable medical equipment.
The DSP Solutions Challenge 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.
More information about TI's DSP Solutions Challenge can be found at 
http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/dsps/univprog/dspchall/ti.htm
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