Texas Instruments' MCU (microcontroller) Design Contest provided an opportunity for the young engineers to showcase their creativity and talent in novel product development with an objective to drive the future of electronics in the country.

In this regard, the company organized a first such event in Bengaluru which had team Maven Systems Pvt. Ltd. bag the first ever TI MCU Design Contest represented by Dnyandeep Buwa and Suhas Jain received a cash prize of US$ 15,000 and the contest shield for an innovative project titled ‘Wireless Security Hub’ based on TI’s MSP430 microcontroller.

The team Eltech Electrodesigns won the second prize of US$ 5000 for a project titled ‘High Frequency Bidirectional Sine Wave Home Inverter’ using TI’s C2000 portfolio.

The third prize of US$ 3000 was shared by Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology for a project tiled ‘SEGWAY’ based on TI’s Stellaris microcontrollers and GreenOcean for the project titled ‘Medtronic SwissKnife’ based on TI’s MSP430 microcontrollers.

The contest was a platform for the engineers to display the product development capability using TI microcontrollers. Currently, there are no commercial activities planned with the winners or the participants at the event which attracted over 1200 entries. Out of these 120 were shortlisted who were given the TI microcontroller tool kits and an access to TI Experts’ advice throughout the design development phase. Out of this, 14 projects were finalized of which three were declared as winners, stated the company.

Concepts for the contest targeted at solutions ranging across medical, industrial, automotive, consumer electronics, communications and infrastructure and rural applications Each entry was judged basis innovation, technical merit, originality, usefulness, cost-effectiveness and design optimization by an independent panel of judges.

“The contest has given us the opportunity to interact with design engineers across the country. The breadth and depth of innovation that has come through this contest is amazing. We had a tough time in selecting the winners from an exhaustive list of 1200 innovative ideas,” said Shailesh Thakurdesai, business development manager, microcontrollers, Texas Instruments India.

“This contest reiterates our confidence in the great pool of talent within India,” said Brian Crutcher, senior vice president and general manager, Embedded Processing, Texas Instruments Inc.

With the market for high-volume, low-cost products in India evolving at a rapid pace, the role played by microcontrollers (MCUs) in electronics design is set to grow multi-fold. Emerging trends like energy harvesting, LED lighting, smart metering, consumer electronics and cutting-edge medical applications are now emphasizing on low cost, smaller size and higher performance while retaining ability for greater analogue integration and faster time-to-market. These open up promising opportunities for both product designers and MCU vendors, stated the company.

In India, Texas Instruments offers developers and design engineers with ultra low-power microcontrollers to address memory, peripheral and packaging configuration needs. These include MSP430 MCUs and high-performance TMS320C2000 real-time controllers, Hercules 32-bit ARM-based safety MCUs and Stellaris ARM Cortex-M4F MCUs, which are embedded control products.