The 45th Design Automation Conference (DAC) revealed the winning teams of the "DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest" on June 9th. NTU's student team from the Department of Electrical Engineering, under the guidance of Professor Liang-gee Chen, emerged triumphant in the fierce competition with their entry entitled "iVisual: An Intelligent Visual Sensor SoC with 1790 fps CMOS Image Sensor and 205GOPS/W Vision Processor", achieving a great feat. The team members include: Chih-chi Cheng, Chia-hua Lin, Chung-Te Li, and Po-ting Chang.

The DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest is an annual international chip design competition jointly organized by the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The purpose of the Contest is to attract first rate students all over the world to design the best chips. Owing to the high visibility of these two conferences and their long standing history (each has a history of more than 45 years), every year many top notch students vied to submit entries to participate in the Contest.

That NTU students are able to win this Contest, and to be ranked along internationally renowned universities such as MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, provides ample proof of the innovative strength and potentials of Taiwanese students. In addition, the research teams led by Professor Liang-gee Chen, already have five academic papers accepted for presentation at the DAC Conference within the last five years, of which three papers were rated as winners in their separate categories. This year marks the third time that Professor Chen's team wins the award, indicating that NTU's research capability has reached top international standards!!

The main purpose of intelligent video imaging technology is to automatically analyze video images. It is expected to become one of the mainstream technologies for the next generation surveillance system, man-machine interface, health care system, and intelligent vehicles. NTU's winning entry is the first SoC in the world that integrates CMOS image sensors and digital image processors. With the same power consumption, this new chip has the highest efficiency in the world, being able to analyze image data at the speed of 300 frames per second. The development of this new chip will effectively enhance the competitiveness of related products of Taiwan, while at the same time bringing in enormous business opportunities.