Jan 30, 2008 - Claremont, Calif. - A team of Harvey Mudd College students under the direction of Associate Professor of Engineering David Money Harris won the 2008 Student Design Contest sponsored by the Design Automation Conference and the International Solid State Circuits Conference.

The team won for their project titled "A MIPS R2000 Implementation" (a photomicrograph of the fabricated MIPS chip is shown at right). The student paper authors included Nathaniel Pinckney '08, Thomas Barr '08, Michael Dayringer '08, Matthew McKnett '08, Nan "Ted" Jiang '07 and Carl Nygaard '07. They share a cash prize and will be presenting their work at the conferences.

The authors describe work performed in spring 2007 by a team consisting of 30 students taking Harris's class, Engineering 158: Introduction to CMOS VLSI Design, and working in tandem with four students from the University of Adelaide under the supervision of Professor Braden Phillips. The team fabricated their chip over the summer and built a working computer system around it. The other winners of this prestigious student chip design contest include teams of Ph.D. students from MIT, UC Berkeley, National Chung-Cheng University, and other world-class universities.

For more information about their chip, see:
http://www3.hmc.edu/~harris/research/mipsstudentdesign08.pdf