Students complete for $100K prize in TI’s worldwide DSP challenge

Students
compete for $100K prize in TI’s worldwide DSP challenge
…………………………………………………………………

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News Staff

A five-member
team of graduate and undergraduate students from Rice University
has advanced to the final round in the worldwide competition
of the Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processor and Analog
Challenge 2001 with its entry, “Paladin: Personal Mobile
Wireless Video.”

The worldwide
competition challenged engineering students to create innovative
and functional designs using one of TI’s digital signal
processors (DSP). The Rice team will compete against Taiwan
National University and Technion, Israel Institute of Technology,
Aug. 7 in Dallas for the grand prize of $100,000. The team
already has received $10,000 in prize money after beating
out 258 teams in the regional and U.S./Canada/Latin America
competitions.

Paladin is a
DSP-based system designed to enable real-time video and
audio communication in wireless devices. The Rice team members
are graduate students Vinay Bharadwaj and Kanu Chadha and
undergraduate students Patrick Murphy, Jacob Rhodes and
Jasper Yen.

Patrick Frantz,
the group’s sponsor and executive director for the
Center for Multimedia Communications at Rice, said they
“aimed to build DSP-based hardware that would allow
for the capture, compression and transmission of video over
low-bandwidth wireless links.”

“We were
able to successfully design, build and demonstrate a system
that may find its way into applications such as video on
cell phones,” he said.

Rice has been
a leader in DSP research since Sidney Burrus, now dean of
the George R. Brown School of Engineering, and Thomas W.
Parks, now professor of electrical and computer engineering
at Cornell University, began teaching a DSP course here
in 1968.

The challenge
required that the team use the TI chip in their application,
and the goal of the project was to build hardware that could
compress, decompress, transmit and receive video over a
new, emerging wireless standard called Bluetooth, said Yen,
a senior majoring in electrical engineering.

“I figured
we had a good chance to win because our project combined
the hot technologies of multimedia processing and wireless
communication,” he said.

Starting from
scratch, the team wrote the software and designed the hardware,
resulting in four custom-designed circuit boards attached
to a computer, said Rhodes, a senior majoring in electrical
engineering.

“It was
quite a bit of work,” he said. “I really did enjoy
it. It’s some of the most practical stuff I’ve
learned since I’ve been in college.”

The project
required not only every spare moment from the students during
the spring semester, but also their complete dedication,
especially when it came to debugging elements that did not
work.

“You have
to use your probing system to probe the hardware to see
where the bug is,” said Bharadwaj, who participated
in the challenge in 1997 in India.

The focal point
occurred about three weeks before the deadline for the competition.
Yen said they learned that the DSP chip, which is about
the size of a finger joint, could not be placed onto their
hardware. With three weeks left to go, the team had to alter
their entire game plan, find existing hardware and configure
it to their needs.

In the end,
Yen said the final product was not as sleek and trim as
the team had hoped it would be.

“But it
proved our concept that video could be transmitted over
a Bluetooth connection,” he said.

The final product
used a video camcorder, a Web server with downloadable clips,
wireless videophone, advanced baby monitor and a wireless
camera.

“It was
an awesome feeling when we could walk around with our laptop
with no wires and see on the screen what the camera was
capturing in the other room,” Yen said.

More information
about the challenge can be found at <www.ti.com/sc/docs/general/dsp/programs/challenge/index.htm>.