Date: 20th Oct 2010

Cosmic Circuits opens its chip design contest

Cosmic Circuits has launched the 3rd edition of its analog design contest "Nebula". This contest is open to all Indian universities. This contest is launched to spread more interest in analog semiconductor domain, mainly in the student and academic community.

The two earlier edition of Nebula featured over 2000 registrations. Nebula is spread over three rounds and three months. The participant begins the journey at the fundamentals, and concludes it by designing an analog system to address a real-world challenge.

Commenting on the structure of the contest, "There are three stages to the contest that gets progressively tough and filters participants at each stage" explained Dr. Sundararajan Krishnan, the champion behind the event. "The contest kicks off with the 'Planetary Stage', a challenging one-hour online quiz on the fundamentals of analog design. This is followed by the 'Emission Stage' where the contestant's ability to use the fundamental principles to solve real-world problems will be tested. The contest culminates in the 'Stellar Nursery', a one-day event that will be held at the Cosmic Circuits headquarters in Bangalore where the contestants will present their design ideas. We believe that the experience of designing a real-world system from scratch will stay with the finalists for a long time, and to enrich it further, we also provide the finalists with an opportunity to interact with the founding members of Cosmic".

Cosmic Circuits work closely with leading semiconductor companies, mainly fabs. The number one semiconductor fab TSMC has awarded "Analog/Mixed Signal IP Partner of the Year" award for 2010 at the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Forum held in San Jose, California. TSMC were presented "IP Partner of the Year" awards in the Interface IP, Analog/Mixed Signal IP, Foundation IP and Specialty Embedded Memory IP categories.