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 Devices |  | |
| • Texas Instruments |  | |
| Communications Wired |  | |
| Wireless |  | |
| • Microchip • Adapteva |  | |
| • Mentor Graphics • Altium |  | |
| • Tektronix • Agilent Technologies • Keithley |  | |
| • Vishay Precision Group • TDK Lambda • OMNIvision • XL Hybrids |  | |
| • Samsung and Planar • Cree • OSRAM |  | |
| • Linear Technology |  | |
| • Intersil |  | |
| • Analog Devices • Texas Instruments |  | |
| • SeaMicro |  | |
| • Seagate |  | |
| • Cypress Semiconductor |  |
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
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.
