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Italian Team Wins $100,000 from Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processing Solutions Challenge

SEATTLE, Wash. (May 13, 1998) -- Students from University of Perugia in Umbria, Italy, captured a US$100,000 grand prize after their research into digital video broadcasting won the Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE:TXN) DSP Solutions Challenge, a worldwide competition to develop the most innovative design using TI digital signal processing (DSP) devices. The winner was announced during ceremonies here last night at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

Digital Video Broadcasting has higher and more stable quality than Standard Definition TV (SDTV). Using DVB enables 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.

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 at UP, used a programmable DSP solution to enable DVB units to provide good quality video across varying hardware configurations and channel conditions.

"Moving from analog to digital video will change the world of broadcasting and home entertainment," said Michael Hames, TI vice president and worldwide DSP manager. "The students' application of a programmable DSP in this innovative arena is a great example of students pushing the envelope via the DSP Solutions Challenge. At the same time, the students and university community participating in the DSP Solutions Challenge are getting a head start on forthcoming career opportunities in digital signal processing, a high tech market growing at 30 percent a year."

DSPs are specialized microprocessor chips that crunch mathematical calculations and move data at amazingly fast speeds in order to process signals. The devices analyze and make decisions about "real world" analog signals so fast that calculations occur in "real time," or as they occur in real life. DSPs make access to the Internet faster and communication on digital cell phones clearer, among other uses.

"The adoption of a 32-bit fixed point architecture in terrestrial DVB leads to a very low implementation loss, allowing it to obtain short processing delays," said Fabrizio Frescura, advising professor. Short processing delays become meaningful in interactive, multimedia applications of DVB-T because the user is in the loop, clicking the mouse or other controller and waiting for a response. As the time delays become shorter, user enjoyment and patience with an interactive program tends to grow.

"Even if the performance achieved may suggest applying the proposed configuration to high end applications, the decreasing cost of DSPs will allow its adoption in consumer devices, particularly for interactive operation of DVB-T," Frescura predicted. "This means that low-cost 'last-mile' end-user wireless devices could be built using Texas Instruments technology to provide services such as entertainment, healthcare or education to a wide range of residential or mobile users."

"By winning this competition, the students from the University of Perugia have demonstrated that DSP research can pay off in prizes for them now and in providing useful experience to help find jobs in the future," said Torrence Robinson, TI's DSP solutions university program manager.

More importantly, the students expect the experience to increase their marketability for jobs in the digital signal processing industry. They all plan to seek jobs involving DSP design. Typical of the responses was that of Dini: "I consider this experience a starting point for my expertise in technical design of DSPs."

The Italian students intend to give a portion of their cash prize to the Institute of Electronics of the University of Perugia to finance teaching and research activities in the DSP field. They intend to use the balance to start a new company that will cooperate with the Institute of Electronics and others in the design and development of DSP applications. Frescura also intends to dedicate his prize winnings to the improvement of the Digital Signal Processing Lab of the Institute of Electronics.

TI received 273 entries from more than 800 students in 26 countries. Other finalists included a team from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, Va., who designed an antenna for wireless communications, and a team from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore for their 5.1 channel "surround sound" from two speakers.

Submittals were judged by TI representatives for their overall creativity, practicality and repeatability, difficulty, completeness, professionalism, as well as operability. In addition to student prizes, advising professors for the grand prize winning team receive a cash prize of US$15,000 and an offer of a six-month sabbatical program at TI.

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.

Information on TI's University Program is available online at: http://www.ti.com/sc/university