The aim of the contest is to promote excellence in the design of electronics systems in educational, research and industry establishments by providing a venue for professionals in the field of "VLSI and Embedded Systems" to showcase their designs. The contest is open to all. But, we particularly encourage students pursuing project in the colleges and universities to participate.

Criteria for entry to the Design and Systems contest in VLSI Conference 2010

For VLSI 2010, we solicit entries for the design contest from full-time graduate and undergraduate students and engineers from industry and research establishments. The design and implementation should have taken place within 24 months prior to the submission deadline as part of a course, research, or development work. No prior submission of this work should have been made in any conference. It is expected that participants will take necessary clearance from their institutes or organizations. They will need to give a declaration in this regard in specified format.

Design and Systems Contest scope

Designs can be for analog, digital, or programmable circuits and systems. Submitted designs can be embodied as digital or analog integrated circuits, programmable processors, SoCs, platform-based or embedded systems designs. Design/project fields include (but not limited to):

• Digital Integrated Circuits
• Analog Integrated Circuits
• FPGA based designs
• Computer Architectures/ Processors
• Reconfigurable Computing Systems
• SoC / Platform-based designs
• Embedded Systems
• MEMS/Optics/Bio-Chips
• Innovative Design Methodologies and Verification Techniques.

Design Categories

Entries can be in the categories of integrated circuits and electronic systems (board-level designs). There will be two categories for evaluating the entries: Operational and Conceptual Designs.

• Operational designs will have been built and tested. For these entries, proof of implementation must be provided in the form of die and board photographs along with measurement data.
• Conceptual designs need not have been implemented but must be thoroughly simulated and should include a detailed test plan.

Award-winning entries will be given attractive cash prizes. Also, each selected design will be given an opportunity to make a demo and a short presentation at a special session of VLSI 2010 conference to be held in Jan. 2010 in Bangalore. However, no travel subsidy is available for this purpose. Contestants need to bring the necessary hardware and support(power supplies, laptop) required for the demonstration.

What is the difference between the design and systems contest and the regular paper sessions?

The Design and Systems contest is not another track for paper submission. The contest emphasises building a working system as opposed to coming up with a new concept or theory. The system may use discrete components and well known modules to generate new/improved/interesting functionality. By definition, it must be geared towards a sufficiently interesting application. For example, a general technique to realize more efficient rectifiers and dc-dc converters is suitable for a paper submission, but not a design contest. On the other hand, a voltage conversion system that works everywhere in the world and can charge batteries of all voltages belongs in the design contest but probably will not make it to the paper sessions if it uses existing circuits at its core.

Evaluation Criteria

A panel of experts from industry and academia will judge the submissions. Submitted designs will be reviewed in a process similar to the review process for the technical papers. If deemed appropriate, the panel may award entries from students and industry professionals separately. The following list provides some of the criteria that will be applied in the selection of designs:

• Motivation/Justification for design
• Description of the design process
• Reliability of design and implementation
• Quality of implementation
• Ease of actual implementation, in case of conceptual designs
• Performance of the design
• Novelty of application, algorithm, architecture
• Testing strategy (or Simulation for the conceptual category) and results

You should address some of the following questions and issues in your Project Report. If your project uses modules/codes that are available from others, e.g. if VHDL code for a part of your FPGA module is taken from the public domain, you should clearly mention it in your report:

System Overview:

• Motivation for designing the chip or system.
• Is the implementation medium appropriate?
• Does this design satisfy the system requirements?
• What is unique about this project?
• What novel ideas or elegant solutions does the design include?

Implementation and Engineering Considerations:
(The ones listed below are examples for a digital chip/system. You should report the ones relevant to your design)

• Specifications: functional, timing, electrical, and environmental (temperature).
• Trade-offs: architectural and circuit trade-offs, I/O considerations, floorplanning and interconnect approaches. Emphasis should be placed on "why" part.
• Timing and Critical Paths. What clocking scheme is used? Why?
• Which paths are critical? Have you simulated or measured their delays?
• Block Diagram, Logic / Circuit Diagrams, and Algorithms.
• Photo or Final Layout Plot (annotate so various blocks can be identified).
• Verification/Simulation (keep it brief): how did you assure that the chip would work as specified?

Testing:

• How did you, or will you, test this part with I/O pins only?
• What test equipment did you use?
• Actual test results, if available, should be summarized.

Statistics:

• Module/Die size, total power, number of transistors, density of layout, maximum clock speed, cost, and/or other relevant parameters.

Submissions

VLSI conference does not require transfer of any intellectual property rights. However, it assumes that any submitted design can be publicly shared and any right protection required is done by the participants or their organizations prior to the submission.

Your submission should meet the following requirements:

1. The cover page should include
   • title of the design
   • authors and affiliations
   • speaker
   • mailing address, Phone No., Fax No., and e-mail address of the contact author
   • area of the application and implementation method
   • contribution of each group, if the prototype is jointly developed with non-academic parties
2. The summary is requested to be written within 4 single spaced pages, including figures, tables, and references.
3. It is strongly recommended that measured experimental results and a chip micrograph or a photograph of the hardware prototype should be included. If the experimental results and the photograph have not been prepared before the deadline of submission, the authors can send the revised paper including them later.
4. Date of Submission: 16^th August, 2009
   
   For further questions, please contact the Design Contest Chair: Nagendra Krishnapura ([email protected])