BANGALORE, INDIA: Freescale Semiconductor India, in collaboration with the Center for Electronic Design and Technology (CEDT) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), hosted the finals of the ‘Smart Car Race India – 2010’, a first of its kind competition aimed at engineering students in India.

During the competition, students assembled an intelligent model racing car that automatically recognized the specially designed racing track at the final competition venue. Freescale provided the model car kit and the required development tools to develop a model racing car based on Freescale microcontroller (MCU) technology, along with mentoring support to the teams.

‘Freescale’s University Program’s goal is to foster creativity and cultivate embedded design expertise among engineering students,” said Ganesh Guruswamy, vice president and country manager of Freescale Semiconductor India Pvt. Ltd.

“Today, with the rapid changes in the global semiconductor industry, it is essential that students are updated about the latest technologies so they can be partners in an organization’s success from the day they join. Thus, it’s important for universities and the industry to collaborate and build a strong technical foundation,” Guruswamy added.

The participating teams in the competition were judged by a panel of experts from the automobile industry, embedded systems domain and academia.

"Our endeavor has always been to maintain association with the industries so that benefits from the developmental work happening in industry and academia can be utilised. Initiatives such as ‘Smart Car Race India – 2010’ not only provide students a chance to work on the next-gen technologies but also widen their horizon and give them an opportunity to showcase their creative abilities and CEDT is happy to be part of this collaboration,” said Prof. K. Gopakumar, chairman, CEDT, IISc.

Details of the winning teams:

* First prize-Team PARAM (Sardar Vallabhai National Institute of Technology, Surat)
* Second prize- Team THE TITANS (Delhi Technological University, Delhi)
* Third prize- Team ELECTRO RACERZ (PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore)
 
Consolation prizes:

* Team ZEALOUS (Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh)
* Team ACCEL (VIT University, Vellore)
* Team GANDIN SHRI (Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai)