B.Tech. students from the Amritapuri Campus proved their mettle once again, by winning US $2000 in the Mentor Graphics University Design Contest 2011.

Vineeth Mohan, Paul Leons, Ajay Mohan and Rizwan Shooja, all final-year students of Electronics and Communication Engineering competed with top teams from IITs and NITs to be declared runners-up in the prestigious contest.

The award will be given to the students on December 2 at Taj Hotel in Bengaluru during the International Mentor Graphics User Conference.

Mentor Graphics Corporation makes Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. The contest is their way to not only promote their products, but also provide engineering students an opportunity to enhance their technical and problem solving skills.

The winning Amrita students designed a satellite image transceiver using HDL (hardware description language).

The proposed system is designed to receive meteorological images with optimization of data transmission over the communication channel.

The receiver is meant to obtain 64-pixel bitmap images at regular intervals. The satellite images are received and processed at the Transmitter Subsystem and finally the differential data is transmitted to the Receiving Subsystem at the lab.

The students will continue work on the system as part of their final-year project. The goal is to further optimize the system, so that it can be embedded in a satellite.

“Then we can use this system for providing alerts in case of natural calamities like floods and cyclones,” explained the students.

“This will be an important solution for countries such as India where natural calamities cause untold suffering. Unpredictable weather events due to global warming combined with high population densities and poor infrastructure makes our population particularly vulnerable.”

The students plan to possibly include advanced compression and source coding algorithms and implement an IEEE standard for the high speed serial bus they used.

“These students worked hard, dedicating countless hours and taking ownership of the project,” stated their guide and mentor, Br. Rajesh Kannan, Assistant Professor, School of Engineering.

“Before undertaking the project, the students only knew about Design Methodology in theory; now they received the opportunity to apply the methodology,” he added.

The students were thankful for the support they received.

“We probably would not have had an opportunity like this in any other institution. We faced so many hardships along the way, but Rajesh Sir’s experience helped us solve all problems. During the four months we worked on this project, we were fully engaged every single day.”

November 24, 2011
School of Engineering, Amritapuri

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