Electronic Design Announces 2011 Best Electronic Design Award Winners

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

Dec. 8, 2011

4 min read

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.