SAN FRANCISCO — Stories of inspiration and courage were heard on two fronts at an Electronic Design Automation Companies (EDAC) awards luncheon at the Design Automation Conference on Monday. Retired Navy Capt. James Lovell gave a first-person account of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, while designers from Acuson Corp. won a Design Achievement Award for a ground-breaking medical electronics system.

The EDAC Design Achievement Awards were initiated to honor design teams who have completed outstanding designs using EDA tools. "These are the guys who touch the silicon," said award presenter Jim Solomon, founder of SDA Systems and president and chief executive officer of Xulu Entertainment.

Lovell gave a riveting account of the perils of the Apollo 13 flight, which was aborted on the way to the Moon when an exploding oxygen tank caused myriad technical problems. He said that the Apollo 13 movie, in which his character was played by Tom Hanks, was "quite accurate and basically in all instances true."

Lovell related the horror of the multiple failures that struck the mission — a sudden bang, two of three fuel cells dying, the electrical system malfunctioning and oxygen escaping from the spacecraft. With no guidance system or computer, and almost no power or life support, Lovell's crew steered the crippled craft back to Earth using manual controls and a wristwatch.

"Mission control could not believe what was going on — they were not prepared to deal with multiple things going wrong at once," Lovell said. And that, he noted, is a message for anyone in business — "always expect the unexpected."

Lovell noted that new procedures that normally took weeks to develop and test had to be developed in hours to rescue the Apollo 13 crew. He attributed his crew's survival to "teamwork and perseverance."

Those same attributes can be applied to the team at Acuson Corp. that designed the Sequoia imaging system. This is a new type of real-time medical imaging instrument that allows less invasive procedures in general radiology, obstetrics, gynecology and cardiac and vascular exams. It's now in use in doctor's offices across the country.

The system took 10 calendar years and 9,000 man-months to develop. It includes 10 microprocessors, three analog ASICs, seven 50,000- to 150,000-gate digital ASICs and numerous FPGAs and PLDs.

In accepting the EDAC award, Mike Murray, CAE manager at Acuson, noted three challenges: seven ASICs designed on a very short schedule, 11 pc boards with extensive surface-mount components and analog circuitry with a large dynamic range.

Murray said that register-transfer-level Verilog, synthesis, functional simulation and static timing analysis helped with the ASICs and all worked on the first spin. Functional simulation and PLD design tools helped with the board design. Analog simulation helped prevent crosstalk with the analog circuitry.

"EDA tools were crucial to the success of Sequoia," he said. "You in the EDA industry can feel good about what your work is helping accomplish."

EDAC also gave two runners-up awards. These went to Intrinsix Corp. for its "Donna" telecommunications ASIC and Micronas Intermetall for its VDP3120B video-display processor chip.

The Intrinsix design was one of the first ASIC products to implement the Personal Wireless Telephony (PWT) standard. It's a 65,000-gate chip with a complicated clocking scheme.

The Micronas chip is a system-on-silicon design encompassing a RISC processor, DSP filters, analog/digital converters and random control logic. The content is 80 percent digital and 20 percent analog. Micronas reduced development time by using layout-migration tools from Sagantec.