| Agilent technologies all india best b.Tech. Project award 2005 was an attempt to inspire engineering students to think beyond their textbooks |
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Consider these following themes for your thesis :
- EOG (full form) signal acquisition, processing, practical applications and ocular bio-system modelling
- Ultra wide-band monolithic CMOS (Full form) operational amplifiers
- Novel switched capacitor digital-to-analogue converters
- Design and implementation of smart conference tag
- Design and implementation of a low bit-rate phonetic vocoder
Phew! It may be beyond the comprehension of many but the above subjects made a lot of tech minds rattle at the Agilent Technologies All India Best B.Tech. Project Award 2005.
Hands on talent
The competition, announced early January this year, was the first, national level academic initiative by Agilent Technologies, a global, diversified technology company. Says Agilent President Kewal Khanna, "Just take a look at all the electronic gadgets you use. Where is your cell phone made? Not in India! What about your laptop, or even your calculator? Its the same sad case. None of these electronic devices that you use in your daily life are manufactured in India. But do we ever stop and ask why not? Dont we have the talent to make all these things in our country? Of course, we do! India has a huge pool of talented minds but they are all designing software programmes. Whats needed is a conscious effort to promote hands-on engineering in the country. Thus, we hope that this contest will act as a catalyst to promote a hands-on culture amongst students from technical fields." The contest was open to B.Tech. and the dual degree
(B.Tech. ' M.Tech.) students doing their projects in Electronics and Telecommunications. Says Soundararajan, a member of the winning team, "It was very exciting for me to participate in this event and since I was always interested in biomedical engineering, it provided me with the right platform to be innovative. I worked in CMC Vellore last year where I discovered the pitiable conditions of paralytic patients who cannot communicate even their basic needs. That was the time when I was inspired to design and develop an EOG Bio-amplifier that can be useful for both pragmatic biomedical applications and theoretical signal analysis."
Soundararajan further explains his gadget, as a novel hospital alarm system, keeping reliability, easy usage and cost effectiveness in mind. Eyeball tracking systems and blink detection systems for use in rehabilitation and patient monitoring applications have also been developed. The second phase of the thesis explores the Gaze Plane technique, which attempts to make the non-invasive diagnosis of weak ocular muscles possible. Since it was a very close competition and this particular project touched the emotional chord of many judges, it was decided at the last minute to announce a runner-up as well. Gangopadhyays thesis described efficient architecture and techniques to design ultra high bandwidth operation amplifiers. He explains, "This becomes essential with the ever increasing demand for low voltage, high speed analogue and mixed signal circuits such as in ADCs and sigma modulators, high pixel rate video line drivers, precision medical instrumentation and even tuneable IF amplifiers." "A novel op amp circuit has been devised, that is tuned both manually and by powerful algorithm optimisation tools, yielding significant
enhancement in performance, thus extending the current cutting edge even in devices like mobile phones," he adds. In fact, Gangopadhyays product is being fabricated by the National Semiconductor Corporation, Santa Clara, USA and packaged by Pantronics International Corporation. USA.
Go get it
And what do these winners walk away with? Informs Khanna, "They will get the opportunity to work in Agilent laboratories or factories in the US/UK for one month. They will be given hands-on training either in the field of RF and Microwave Engineering or Digital Design Verification. Another field we may consider training them in is data communication hardware design." So, if you missed this opportunity, dont lose heart as Agilent may hold this contest again next year.
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