UNH Graduate Students among Winning Teams in the National Semiconductor Research Corporation Design Challenge
DURHAM, N.H. –Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world’s leading university research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, named eight teams of graduate students as winners in the SRC/SIA IC Design Challenge held March 19, 2008 at Research Triangle Park, N.C. The UNH team’s winning design was for a serializer/deserializer (SERDES) that converts the low rate parallel data into high rate serial data or vice versa. More than 40 universities and 120 engineering students competed to design circuits with potential future electronic applications.
“Thanks to the hard work of my three students, we are fortunate to be one of eight teams selected for Phase II,” remarked Kuan Zhou, UNH assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“This is a great opportunity for the industry as SRC and SIA member companies cultivate future designers for the semiconductor business,” said SRC’s Dale Edwards, an AMD assignee and contest organizer.
The Design Challenge theme is “Performance at the Limits” and the UNH team winning design exemplifies this theme, pushing the data link rate to 40Gb/s and possibly even 60Gb/s. The SERDES design presented by Prof. Zhou and his students exhibits many advantages compared to existing technologies. The bandwidth of circuit blocks is extended and the power consumption is reduced. Several unique circuit technologies were used in the SERDES design. SERDES can be used in many applications such as biological imaging, radio astronomy, upper atmosphere study, plasma diagnostics, and future terahertz broadband communication systems.
The first objective of this SRC/SIA High Performance Design Challenge is to create designs that can overcome the existing bottlenecks. The second objective is to stimulate greater interest in IC (integrated circuit) design career among students, both in the undergraduate and graduate levels.
The UNH team was awarded fabrication with the Jazz Semiconductor 180nm SiGe BiCMOS technology (worth approximately $56,000). Three electrical and computer engineering students James Brandt, M.S.’08, Gang Chen, Ph.D.’12 and Yifei Luo, Ph.D.’10, and team leader, Professor Zhou, made up the UNH team.
In addition to receiving free fabrication in Jazz SBC18, these finalists have qualified to compete in the final phase of the Design Challenge where they will fabricate these designs in Jazz Semiconductor’s SBC18 180nm SiGe technology. All eight teams will present posters at SRC’s TECHCON 2008 in Austin, TX September 15-16. The eight finalists will vie for $50,000 in cash prizes, to be announced in December.
Thanks go to the Design Challenge sponsors who provide the awards that are made as gifts to the winning universities to be used in support of IC design education programs at their university. These include Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Analog Devices, Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Intersil Corporation, Jazz Semiconductor, LSI Corporation, Mentor Graphics Corporation, National Semiconductor Corporation, NVIDIA Corporation, Quik-Pak Division of Delphon Industries, Texas Instruments Incorporated, SRC and SIA. Special thanks go to Jazz Semiconductor for donating the fabrication support.
About SRC
Celebrating 26 years of collaborative research for the semiconductor industry, SRC defines industry needs, invests in and manages the research that gives its members a competitive advantage in the dynamic global marketplace. Awarded the National Medal of Technology, America’s highest recognition for contributions to technology, SRC expands the industry knowledge base and attracts premier students to help innovate and transfer semiconductor technology. For more information, visit www.src.org.
About SIA
The SIA is the leading voice for the semiconductor industry and has represented U.S. semiconductor companies since 1977 and SIA member companies comprise more than 85% of the U.S. semiconductor industry. Collectively, the chip industry employs a domestic workforce of 232,000 people. More information about the SIA can be found at www.sia-online.org