Congratulations to the team honored as one of the winners of the international 2009 DAC/ISSCC (Design Automation Conference/Int. Solid-State Circuits Conference) Student Design Contest! Their winning project and paper, Phoenix: An Ultra-Low Power Processor for Cubic Millimeter Sensor Systems, was submitted by the following students (at the time): Mingoo Seok, Scott Hanson, Yu-Shiang Lin, Zhiyoong Foo, Daeyeon Kim, Yoonmyung Lee, and Nurrachman Liu, and their advisors, Professors Dennis Sylvester and David Blaauw.

As announced in a press release issued by DAC, a total of nine winning teams were selected from more than 60 entries in three categories: operational chip design, for an IC design which was built and tested; system design, for FPGA or other programmable architectures; and conceptual design, in which a project was designed and simulated, but not necessarily implemented. The Phoenix Processor belonged to the operational chip design category.

The purpose of the DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest is to promote excellence in the design of electronic systems by providing competition between graduate and undergraduate students at universities and colleges.