ITHACA, N.Y. -- A team of Cornell University graduate students has taken third place in the 2002-03 SiGe (Silicon Germanium) Design Challenge, sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC).

The team of Daniel Kucharski, Drew Guckenberger and Jing-Hong Conan Zhan, graduate students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was awarded a prize of $10,000 for an optical fiber transceiver designed to operate at frequencies up to 10 gigabytes per second. The device combines on a single chip the jobs currently done by three chips in converting electrical signals to and from optical pulses in fiber-optic transmission.

Winners were announced Aug. 26 at SRC's TECHCON 2003 student conference in Dallas. First and second place, respectively, went to teams from the University of Minnesota and the University of California-San Diego. SRC, a research consortium sponsored by the semiconductor industry, sponsors the contest to further innovation in the use of silicon-germanium semiconductors, which can operate at the very high frequencies common in modern communications systems, including cellular telephones and fiber-optic transmission lines.

The contest was conducted in two phases. It began in May 2002, when 59 student teams submitted designs. Fifteen teams were selected to continue. The chips they designed were fabricated by IBM and returned to the students for testing and evaluation. The new challenge was to demonstrate that the chips worked as predicted.

The team of Kucharski, Guckenberger and Zhan placed third in Phase 1. A second Cornell team, David M. Fried, Ian A. Rippke and Guckenberger, came in fourth with a design for a chip that allows a wireless device, such as a cell phone, to adjust the amount of power it draws, using less power when the device is closer to a base station, resulting in longer battery life. Both teams are made up of Ph.D. students in a research group supervised by Kevin Kornegay, Cornell associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and founder and director of the Cornell Broadband Communications Research Lab, which specializes in the design and testing of high frequency circuits for wireless and wired applications.

.The SRC plans and manages the largest continuous, industry-driven, basic and applied university research program in semiconductor technology. Since 1982, SRC has invested more than a half-billion dollars in university research on behalf of its member companies.

Additional sponsors of the 2002-03 SiGe Design Challenge included Artisan, Cadence Design Systems, IBM, National Semiconductor and MOSIS.

Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.

o SRC: http://www.src.org

o Kevin Kornegay: http://aims.ece.cornell.edu/kornegay/