Winners were selected in three categories: operational chip design (IC design was built and tested), operational system design (focuses on FPGA or other programmable architectures) and conceptual (project designed and simulated), DAC said. First, second and third place winners in each category will share in the prize money provided by industrial sponsors and awarded at DAC.

This year's first place in the operational chip design category, and best overall, was awarded to Pierluigi Nuzzo, Fernando De Bernardinis and Pierangelo Terreni of the University of Pisa and Bert Gyselinckx, Liesbet Van der Perre and Geert Van der Plas of IMEC. The award was given for their design of a 10.6mW/0.8pJ power-scalable 1 GS/s 4b ADC in 0.18um CMOS with 5.8GHz ERBW, DAC said.

In the operational systems design category, the first place award was given to Herwin Chan, Andres I. Vila Cadaso, Juthika Basak, Miguel Griot, Wen-Yen Weng, Richard Wesel, B Jalali, Eli Yablonovitch and Ingrid Verbauwhede of the University of California, Los Angeles for the demonstration of uncoordinated multiple access in optical communications, according to DAC.

In the conceptual category, the first place award was given to Kazunori Shimizu, Tatsuyuki Ishikawa, Nozomu Togawa, Takeshi Ikenaga and Satoshi Goto of Waseda University for ASIC implementation of LDPC decoder accelerating message-passing schedule, DAC said.

The second place winner in the operational chip design category was a tie between Mona Safi-Harb and Gordon W. Roberts of McGill University and Eric Marsman and Robert M. Senger of the University of Michigan with Richard B. Brown from the University of Utah, DAC said.

Chien-Chang Lin, Jia-Wei Chen, Hsiu-Cheng Chang, Chao-Ching Wang, Yi-Huan Ou-Yang, Ming-Chih Tsai, Yao-Chang Yang, Jiun-In Guo and Jinn-Shyan Wang of the National Chung Cheng University received the third place award in the operational chip design category, according to DAC.

The second place winners in the operational systems design category were Heemin Park, Jonathan Friedman, Mani B. Srivastava, Pablo Gutierrez, Vidyut Samanta and Jeff Burke of the University of California, Los Angeles, according to DAC.

Awards will be presented on July 26 at 10 a.m. in the DAC Pavilion.