Monday, May 28, 2012:

TI MCU Design Contest Concluded, Team Maven Wins

Aimed at inspiring and challenging top design engineers across the country to demonstrate their skills and innovation to drive the future of electronics, the contest saw a participation of more than 1200 teams from different walks of life including companies, design houses, engineers in individual capacity and hobbyists across India. The top 120 teams were provided with TI Microcontroller toolkits and an access to TI Experts' advice throughout the design development phase.

Team Maven won the first iteration of the contest conducted this year. The team comprising of Dnyandeep Buwa and Suhas Jain from Maven Systems Pvt Ltd won a whopping prize money of US$ 15,000 and lifted the TI MCU Design Contest shield, for their innovative project, titled Wireless Security Hub.

"We are very happy! J Maven Systems is honoured to get recognition for our innovation at this India-wide technical forum. Maven Systems has always been into innovative product development. The success in this contest validated our conjecture about the innovative solution. Next step for us is to successfully commercialize it through partnership with OEMs," said Suhas Jain, assistant manager--projects.

The team Eltech Electrodesigns walked away with the second prize worth US$ 5000 for their project titled High Frequency Bidirectional Sine Wave Home Inverter using TI's C2000 portfolio. A third prize of US$ 3000 was shared by Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology for their project titled SEGWAY, based on TI's Stellaris microcontrollers and GreenOcean for their project titled Medtronic SwissKnife based on TI's MSP430 microcontrollers.

"The primary motive for TI to hold this event lies in the fact that we want to make sure that all design engineers are made aware of TI's change in focus. Until recently, we were known as a business that targeted only other companies and firms. What we want them to know is that we also actively target design engineers and consumers with our products. This event also shows that people could start experimenting with our wide range of MCUs to get really innovative results," said Shailesh Thakurdesai, general manager--business development, Texas Instruments, at the venue.

The contest invites design engineers to submit unique applications (projects) designed with any TI MCU (MSP430/Stellaris/Hercules/C2000). Participants are also encouraged to use the vast portfolio of TI Analog products, which have been further enhanced by the recent acquisition of National Semiconductor.

The criteria for making it to the winning list include:

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  Innovation of the application (or the implementation of an existing application)

  
  
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  Prospect for commercialization

  
  
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  Quality of implementation on board

  
  
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  How advanced in the prototype

  
  
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  Optimum use of TI parts

The contest took place in three phases- The first phase witnessed participation of over 1200 entries. The ideas that came in for this contest were targeted at solutions ranging across Medical, Industrial, Automotive, Consumer electronics, Communications and Infrastructure and Rural applications. In the second phase, 120 project ideas were selected and supported with free tools and expert advice by Texas Instruments. The third phase involved inviting 14 project ideas from across the country that were showcased at the Texas Instruments (India) Pvt Ltd campus in Bengaluru on 25 May 2012.