Electronic Design Announces 2011 Best Electronic Design Award Winners

December 8, 2011 (New York, NY): Winners of the best technology, products and standards for 2011 were announced today in Electronic Design’s annual Best Electronic Design issue. Also announced are the year's best Ideas For Design and six new inductees into the Engineering Hall of Fame, which the publication founded in 2002.

Staff editors selected the award winners for the best technology, products and standards, while readers selected the best Ideas for Design published in the past 12 months. Readers also selected the Hall of Fame inductees from a list created by the editorial staff.

“We rely on the expertise of our staff and contributing editors to ferret out the best of the many new technologies, products and standards that we have seen and wrote about over the past 12 months,” said Editor-in-Chief Joe Desposito. “These guys are in the trenches every day covering this industry and they know about all the great new innovations that have been introduced in the last year.”

The Best Electronic Design awards are segmented into editorial “beats” as well as vertical markets, such as industrial and medical. The editors are free to choose what they consider to be the best in these areas. The staff editors include Don Tuite for analog and power, Lou Frenzel for communications, David Maliniak for EDA and test and measurement, Bill Wong for digital and embedded and Mat Dirjish for components.

In the vertical markets, Desposito selected the automotive winners, Frenzel the industrial winners, Tuite the medical winners, and Bill Wong the winners for Computers and Consumer Electronics.

All winners are listed below with links to the articles that appeared in the December 8, 2011 issue of Electronic Design. Winners receive a Best Electronic Design crystal trophy, as well as a logo that they can post on their own Web site.

2011 Best Electronic Design Winners

Analog & Mixed Signal • Analog Devices ADIS16407 inertial measurement unit
Power • Texas Instruments BQ25504 battery management IC
Communications Wired • Marvell Semiconductor 88LX3142 and LX2718 G.hn chipset
Wireless • Neul and Carlson Wireless Commercial white space products for rural broadband and M2M wireless applications
Digital • Microchip PIC10F32X with configurable logic cell • Adapteva Epiphany 16-core accelerator
EDA • Mentor Graphics Calibre RealTime/Springsoft Laker layout system • Altium Altium Designer 10
Test & Measurement • Tektronix MDO4000 mixed-domain oscilloscope • Agilent Technologies M8190A arbitrary waveform generator • Keithley Model 4225-PMU I-V module
Components • Vishay Precision Group  HTH series resistors • TDK Lambda GWS250 series 250-W, green ac-dc power supplies • OMNIvision OV10810 CMOS image sensor • XL Hybrids Commercial vehicle power conversion technology
Displays & Indicators • Samsung and Planar SM’ART Gallery Panels • Cree LMH6 LED module • OSRAM OSLON Black Flat and OSTAR Headlamp Pro LED
Automotive • Linear Technology LTC6803 EV battery monitoring chip • Diodes Inc. Super Barrier Rectifier (SBR) family for automotive use
Industrial • Intersil ISL3247xE/78xE/9xE series transceivers
Medical • Analog Devices ADAS1000 electrocardiogram front end • Texas Instruments ADS1298R electrocardiogram front end
Computers • SeaMicro SM10000-64HD 10U multicore server
Storage • Seagate Momentus XT hybrid disk drive
Consumer Electronics • Cypress Semiconductor TrueTouch Gen 4

Best Ideas For Design

Best IFD
Use A DAC To Bias Your Varactor Diode by Jefferay Lawton

IFD Runner-ups:
Ten Cent Charge Pump Provides LCD Bias by Bob Stevens
OR Gates Slash Noise Coupling In Digital Potentiometer Applications by Michael Gambuzza

Engineering Hall of Fame

This year’s Hall of Fame inductees are Bob Adams whose audio prowess has led him to a fellowship at Analog Devices; Robert Anderson invented the direct-view bistable storage CRT; James Early observed and described the shrinking width of a bipolar transistor’s base area caused by the expansion of the base-collector junction with increasing base-collector voltage, known as the Early effect; Richard W. Hamming invented the error detecting and correcting codes that bear his name; Ken Olsen founded Digital Equipment Corp., which Compaq bought back in 1998; and, Fred Terman, during his tenure at Stanford University, encouraged brilliant minds to set up shop at the school’s industrial park, which eventually grew into Silicon Valley.

Profiles of these exceptional engineers and their outstanding contributions can be found by clicking http://electronicdesign.com/departments/halloffame.aspx.