Celebrating engineering: EDN names 2010 Innovation Award winners

EDN Staff -- EDN, May 3, 2011

San Jose, CA—In a ceremony here Monday evening, EDN bestowed its 21st Annual Innovation Awards, honoring a diverse group of electronics engineers and the ground-breaking products they have produced.


"Over its lifetime of more than 50 years, EDN has witnessed many distinguished achievements. In 1990, we embarked on a special mission to honor the most innovative technological advancements and the designers who invent them," David Blaza, vice president of UBM Electronics, EDN's parent company, said. "The EDN Innovation Awards program is now in its 21st year and proudly continues its tradition of recognizing rich talent in our industry in several categories."

A complete list of the winners follows. EDN congratulates all of the winners and finalists.


Category: Application-Specific Standard Products

The finalists in this category—Broadcom, Integrated Device Technology, Lantiq North America, Lattice Semiconductor, and Mindspeed Technologies—have developed standard-product systems-on-chips that combine processing power, peripheral functions, analog circuits and firmware to solve a particular application's problems.

"Tonight's winner illustrates integration of diverse technologies onto one die," Ron Wilson, editorial director for EDN, said. "It includes an LVDS spread-spectrum timing controller, power management, and a four-channel LED driver for LED backlighting."

Winner: Integrated Device Technology


Category: Analog ICs

This category recognizes innovation in the art and science of analog integrated circuits. Finalists included Avago Technologies, Intersil, Linear Technology, and NXP Semiconductors.

"Tonight's winner is a company that has used its technical prowess to combine complex analog and digital electronics into one chip," Technical Editor Paul Rako said. "They allow customers to perform sophisticated analog functions on a standards-based development platform."

Winner: NXP Semiconductors


Category: Digital ICs

This category is particularly broad, encompassing chips ranging from memory controllers to FPGAs. The finalists—Anobit, Microsemi Corp, Octasic, and Rambus—all show novel concepts, new digital techniques, or remarkable success in pushing the boundaries of performance.

"Tonight's winner combines three of the most diverse technologies in IC electronics—processors, FPGAs, and analog. The result is a single chip that can replace entire digital and analog subsystems in many embedded designs, while maintaining the flexibility to make changes to the digital circuitry, the analog circuits, or the software at any time," Wilson said.

Winner: Microsemi


Category:  Power ICs

This category recognizes technical achievement in the broad field of power integrated circuits. Finalists included EPC, Linear Technology, Powercast, and Power Integrations.

"Tonight's winner is a company that is well known to every power engineer," Rako said. "Their product provides a revolutionary solution to a problem that has plagued power engineers for decades."

Winner: Linear Technology


Category: Processors

This category recognizes the microprocessor, the software-processing nexus of a system design and arguably the system's most critical digital IC, as well as acknowledging the companies (and their requisite IC design teams) who develop CPUs and associated development hardware and software tools. The finalists for this category included ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, Intel Corp, and Texas Instruments.

"Tonight's winner almost single-handedly created the intellectual property licensing business and, in the process, has become a dominant core developer and provider to semiconductor vendors big and small," Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert said. "The company's CPU cores find use in ICs such as the system-on-chip devices that Ron talked about a few minutes ago, where they are harnessed in implementing mobile phones, tablet computers, portable multimedia capture and playback devices, and innumerable other systems products."

Winner: ARM


Category:  EDA Tools and ASIC Technologies

The finalists in this category—Apache Design Solutions, GateRocket Inc, GlobalFoundries, and Mentor Graphic—are recognized for innovations in design automation tools that reduce cycle time, increase manufacturability, and improve the reliability of integrated circuits.

"Tonight's winner has achieved two of the most difficult feats in the EDA industry," Technical Editor Mike Demler said. "First, it has a history of developing innovative, differentiated products. This latest innovation addresses the problem of simulating electro-static discharge that has challenged designers for many years. The second distinction is to leverage that success into a proposed IPO."

Winner: Apache Design Solutions


Category: Human-Machine Interface Technology

This category recognizes new ways of electronically interacting with systems beyond the traditional keyboard-and-mouse input and display output. Examples include trackpads and displays that embed touch interface capability, an area in which three of our four finalists are involved, as well as the no-touch interactivity exemplified by the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation Move and Microsoft Kinect, haptics vibrational and other feedback, and immersive display arrangements. Finalists include Atmel Corp, Fujitsu Semiconductor, Microchip Technology, and Ocular LCD.

"Tonight's winner is a company that, via both internal development and a late-2008 acquisition, has augmented a long-standing popular series of embedded microcontrollers with both touch panel and touch key-and-slider interface support," Dipert said. "Advanced innovations include the ability for users to activate touch circuitry through metal and other intermediary material layers, when wearing gloves, in moisture-rich and other traditionally touch-unfriendly environments, and even when in proximity to but not necessarily touching the sensor."

Winner: Microchip Technology


Category: Software

This category recognizes innovations in software that address a range of issues—in network security, reliability and lifecycle management, to the optimization of power for components and applications in embedded systems. Finalists included Backbone Security, IAR Systems, National Semiconductor, and Ridgetop Group Inc.

"Tonight's winner is a company that, along with a long history of achievements in components, was also an early innovator in the development of web-based software to assist engineers in developing applications," Demler said.

Winner:  National Semiconductor


Category: Passive Components, Sensors, Indicators, and Interconnects

This category recognizes innovation and excellence in the field of passive components as well as devices that interface and make sense of the outside world. Finalists included Aptina, Austriamicrosystems, CUI Inc, and InvenSense Inc.

"Tonight's winner is a company that has shown creative and technological innovation in sensing the visual world," Technical Editor Margery Conner said.

Winner: Aptina


Category: Development Kits, Reference Designs, and SBCs

Development kits have always been a key way for vendors to communicate the function of their new products to engineers. If you want to understand it, play with it. Reference designs, increasingly, are a way for vendors to prefabricate whole chunks of a design and pass it on to customers-reusable IP in hardware and software. This category recognizes achievements in both areas. Finalists included Arrow Electronics, Freescale Semiconductor, MontaVista Software, and Xilinx.

"Tonight's winner is a company whose history with development kits stretches back into the dark ages of ICs," Suzanne Deffree, managing editor for EDN's news desk, said. "This winner has combined very powerful processing, flexible I/O configurations, and a rather whimsical mechanical assembly into a kit that is instructive, useful as a real prototype, and just plain fun."

Winner: Freescale Semiconductor


Category: Test and Measurement Systems and Boards

This category recognizes innovation and excellence in the field of test and measurement equipment, including bench instruments, modular instruments, and complete systems. Finalists included Agilent Technologies, LeCroy Corp, National Instruments, and Tektronix.

"Tonight's winner is a company that over the past year has entered the modular instrument business in a big way with a portfolio of PXI and AXIe offerings," Conner said.

Winner: Agilent


Category: Power Supplies

This category recognizes practical innovation in the field of power systems.

Finalists included Agilent Technologies, Bellnix America, CUI Inc, and Ericsson Power Modules.

"Tonight's winner is a product that targets low-voltage, high-current point-of-load power for FPGAs," Deffree said.

Winner: Bellnix


Category: Innovators of the Year

This award recognizes not a product, but an individual or a team that has made a remarkable advance in electronics design. That advance may involve setting off in an entirely new direction. It could mean developing a new methodology that solves previously intractable problems. Or it could mean pushing the state of the art further than anyone thought it could go.

Finalists for this category included Paul Darbee of DarbeeVision; Robert Dobkin and Tom Hack from Linear Technology; Brad Doerr, Steve Draving, Dave Dascher, Nick Fernandez, Ryan Carlino, Steve Tursich, and Dave Gissel From Agilent Technologies; and Mario Paniccia of Intel Corp.

"Tonight's winners tackled a stubborn problem in power distribution in a novel way," Wilson said. "The problem is that the voltage at the pins of your regulator isn't necessarily the voltage at the terminals of your load-wiring impedance forms a voltage divider that keeps the load from ever receiving the full voltage you generate. Some designers have solved this problem by separately sensing the voltage across the load. But tonight's winners recognized that they could get the same information by subtly varying the regulated voltage and inferring the wiring impedance, then using that information to generate a voltage just high enough at a given current level to place exactly the right voltage on the load. The idea is novel, and the execution challenging. That impressed our editors, and it impressed the engineers who voted in this category, as well."

Winners:  Robert Dobkin and Tom Hack from Linear Technology


Visit this page to read about the finalists and their products.