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:
- 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
- The summary is requested to be written within 4
single spaced pages, including figures, tables, and
references.
- 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.
- Date of Submission: 16th August, 2009
For further questions, please contact the Design Contest Chair: Nagendra Krishnapura ()
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