SAN JOSE, Calif.—Microcontroller and analog chip vendor Microchip Technology Inc. was presented the award for "Company of the Year" at a ceremony here Tuesday (March 31) honoring winners of the 2009 EE Times Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards.
All told, 11 ACE Awards were bestowed as well as four Insight Awards presented by Semiconductor Insights and four awards presented by IEEE Spectrum.
Paul Miller, co-moderator of the event and CEO of TechInsights (the division of United Business Media which operates EE Times and Semiconductor Insights), described Microchip (Chandler, Ariz.) as one of the true success stories in electronics while presenting the award, which celebrates professionalism, staff development and retention, customer focus, technical excellence and profitable growth.
In winning the "Company of the Year" award, Microchip bested fellow finalists EMC Corp., Qualcomm Inc., SiGe Semiconductor and Silicon Laboratories. Winners were selected by a panel of 15 judges with expertise in electronics.
Morris Chang, founding chairman of silicon foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., was recognized with an ACE Lifetime Achievement Award. A video was shown of Chang, who could not accept the award in person, thanking EE Times and saying that he was deeply honored.
The ACE Awards were presented as part of the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley. Other winners recognized included:
"Design Team of the Year"—Motorola Design Integration Center
"Innovator of the Year"—Stanley Williams, Hewlett-Packard Co. Senior Fellow and director of information and Quantum Systems Lab
"Executive of the Year"—Necip Sayiner, president and CEO, Silicon Laboratories
"Startup of the Year"—Blade Network Technologies
"Most Promising New Technology"—SiBeam
"Best Enabler Award for Green Engineering"—Cymbet Corp.
"Most Innovative Renewable Energy Award"—Advanced Energy Industries Inc.
"Student of the Year"—David Yanoshak, senior EE student/intern, University of Texas-Austin.
"Educator of the Year"— Leah Jamieson, dean of engineering, Ransburg distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, Purdue University.
Semiconductor Insights honored Micron Technology Inc. with the award for "Most Innovative Process Technology" for its MT29F32G08 34-nm, 32-Gbit MLC NAND flash offered by IM Flash Technologies, its joint venture with Intel Corp. Other Insights Award winners included Intel's 45-nm Atom processor ("Most Innovative Mobile Processor"), Toshiba Corp.'s TC58NVG4D2ETA10 43-nm,
16-Gbit NAND flash ("Most Innovative Non-Volatile Memory") and Micron's MT47H64M16HR 50-nm 1-Gbit DDR2 SDRAM ("Most Innovative DRAM.")
IEEE Spectrum, the event's media sponsor, presented an "Emerging Technology Award" to Geodynamics, an Australian company which extracts thermal energy from deep below the Australian outback. Darpa, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago received the IEEE Spectrum "Technology in the Service of Society Award" for a joint project creating an artificial human arm.
RSS
RSS| 
Digital| 
Mobile
