Date:19/09/2005 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2005/09/19/stories/2005091901670200.htm

Back IIT Guwahati team emerges winner at Agilent contest

L.N. Revathy

Coimbatore , Sept. 18

THE five-month long suspense on who would eventually triumph in the Agilent Technologies `All India Best B.Tech Project Contest (2005)' came to an end with the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Guwahati team emerging winners for their project `EOG Signal Acquisition, Processing, Practical Applications and Ocular Bio-System Modelling.'

The winning team has been awarded a month-long summer internship at any one of Agilent's international facilities.

Agilent introduced this three-tier contest early this year to encourage the student community to take more interest in hands-on engineering and think beyond the textbook. Being the first year of such a contest, the invitation was extended to just 25 colleges. In the first round, the 19 participating engineering institutes internally short-listed one project to be sent to Agilent. The second round comprised these short-listed projects being screened by a panel of judges for selection. Six of these, short-listed by the panel, moved to the final round.

In a day-long intensive session, the finalists made presentations and gave a live demonstration to the panel, which comprised eminent professionals from both the public and private sector.

Agilent Technologies believes that the future growth of the Indian electronics and telecommunication sector would depend on in-country development and manufacturing and to achieve this, India needs many more engineers with practical vision.

The winner from IIT Guwahati, Venkataramanan Soundararajan said that he had always envisioned a project on hardware, while most opted for software project. "I was always interested in bio-medical engineering; and this provided me the right platform to be innovative. At the Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore, where I worked last year, I noticed the deplorable conditions of paralytic patients. They could not communicate even their basic needs. This inspired me to design and develop an EOG (ElectroOculoGram) bio-amplifier, useful for both pragmatic biomedical applications and theoretical signal analysis."

The runner-up, from IIT Kharagpur, Daibashish Gangopadhyay's thesis described efficient architecture and techniques to design ultra high bandwidth operation amplifiers. "This becomes essential with the ever-increasing demand for low voltage, high speed analogue and mixed signal circuits such as in ADCs and sigma modulators, high pixel rate video line drivers and precision medical instrumentation."

Gangopadhyay's product incidentally is being fabricated by the National Semiconductor Corporation, Santa Clara, USA and packaged by Pantronics International Corporation, USA.

Having made a start, Agilent hopes that the momentum would pick up in the coming years.