CHENNAI, INDIA: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. India has announced the winners of its PSoC® Innovator Design Challenge India, a multi-discipline design contest open to engineering students in India. The winners were selected live by a panel of judges at an event held on March 30 at Anna University. Each of the 19 finalist teams presented their projects to the judging panel, which included representatives from Cypress.

The grand prize of 100,000 Indian rupees was awarded to Sriram V S of DOEACC Centre, Calicut. His project advisor, Professor R. Nanda Kumar was awarded Rs. 50,000 for the VLSI Design Group at the institute. The winning project was a micro web server using PSoC. The second place award of Rs. 50,000 went to N. Chandra Sekhar of Kuppam Engineering College, Kuppam for his 'feather-touch switches' design. Third place award of Rs. 25,000 went to Udayan U. and Gautam Das G. of R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore. Ten runners up received Rs. 5,000 each. A list of all the winners and photos of the final contest, will be made available at www.psocidcindia.com.

"We are amazed at the creativity and innovation shown by these projects," said Pashupathy Gopalan, Vice President of Strategic Marketing for Cypress. "The level of participation and the quality of the projects surpassed our expectations. These projects clearly demonstrate the tremendous design talent among the Indian student community, as well as the unmatched flexibility of the PSoC programmable system-on-chip platform to allow many creative solutions."

"I am very grateful to Cypress for this fantastic award," said Sriram V S, the winner of first place. This experience was invaluable for my development as an engineer, and the prize money will allow me to pursue my dreams going forward. Whatever career I choose, I am sure that it will include working with the PSoC platform in the designs I create."

The ceremony took place at Anna University Chennai, the site of a new laboratory which resulted from a partnership between Cypress and the University. As part of the MoU signed in November 2008, Cypress agreed to provide hands-on training to the faculty and students, in addition to free hardware kits and software tools valued at over $200,000 USD.  Anna University Chennai agreed to provide the facilities for the laboratory.

PSoC: Because change happens
PSoC devices employ a highly configurable system-on-chip architecture for embedded control design. PSoC devices integrate configurable analog and digital circuits, controlled by an on-chip microcontroller, providing both enhanced design revision capability and component count savings. They include up to 32 Kbytes of Flash memory, 2 Kbytes of SRAM, an 8x8 multiplier with 32-bit accumulator, power and sleep monitoring circuits, and hardware I2C communications.

The flexible PSoC resources allow designers to future-proof their products by enabling firmware-based changes during design, validation, production, and in the field. The unique PSoC flexibility shortens design cycle time and allows for late-breaking feature enhancements. All PSoC devices are also dynamically reconfigurable, enabling designers to morph internal resources on-the-fly, utilizing fewer components to perform a given task.

A single PSoC device can integrate as many as 100 peripheral functions, saving customers design time, board space and power consumption while improving system quality. Customers can save as much as $10 in system costs.