Invent a Chip 2011 to improve electric vehicles

A chip for efficient charging of electric vehicles has been awarded as the best idea and implementation. The task of the IC is to control the non-contact charging process via coils and thereby to use the energy from the grid with the highest possible efficiency.

For the tenth time the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies (VDE) for the "Invent-a-chip" have called. He started in spring 2011 with a record attendance of 2900 participants (30% girls). A total of 600 project ideas were submitted. This time, demand was also ideas on electric mobility. Now are the winners of this competition for students from the 8th Grade fixed.

"Young people design their own microchips and shape the future," says Dr. Georg Schütte, Secretary of the BMBF at the award ceremony at the Microsystems Technology Congress in Darmstadt. "They have exciting ideas and enthusiasm for innovation," says Schutte, "it was the electric mobility is currently a very attractive topic for this."

The wealth of ideas and helps the industry to progress

Room for this situation is not uncommon: "We have in recent years have experienced time and again that the winners go on. Start a study undertaken in this area and their prospects, make contacts with industry and bring forward their ideas, and hence the technical progress, "That's the goal of competition, which started ten years ago. The offspring should for innovation and new technologies will love.

Twelve teams this year had the chance to learn in a three-day workshop at the Leibniz University of Hanover with professionals to the chip design. On the way to their own microchip, the winners have invested much time, they also learned the basics of the Verilog hardware description language.