Circuit Cellar Announces Winners of Philips ARM Design Contest

Circuit Cellar, The Magazine for Computer Applications, is pleased to announce the winners of the Philips ARM Design Contest 2005. The contest, which required engineers to design projects around Philips’s LPC213x family of microcontrollers, produced three top-prize winners along with three-dozen Honorable Mention and Distinctive Excellence designees.

The Philips ARM Design Contest 2005 allowed engineers around the world to experiment with the advanced LPC213x architecture. Circuit Cellar Inc., which managed the contest program for Philips, delivered LPC213x chip samples and Keil MCB2130 evaluation boards to hundreds of prospective contest entrants. This sampling effort enabled an incredibly diverse and international project submission response, with designs from 19 different countries.

Contest winners and the design community are now reaping another benefit of the Philips design contest. Circuit Cellar has posted all of the most notable contest projects online, which may be accessed through www.circuitcellar.com. These postings include project descriptions, documentation, schematics, source code, and everything an engineer needs to see the true design innovation of dozens of ARM-based applications.

First Prize winner Bernard Debbasch designed a sophisticated telephone answering machine around an LPC2138 microcontroller. “I enjoyed the fact that the LPC213x processors come with excellent documentation and are packed with on-chip peripherals and memory,” said Debbasch, one of the many who benefited from the contest sampling effort. “This level of integration allowed me to quickly develop a PCB using amateur-grade tools. My project was MIPS intensive, but I was able to develop it entirely in C without using a single line of assembly code since the chip can run at its maximum clock frequency without any wait-state. This considerably reduced my development time.”

Debbasch, who is a multiple Circuit Cellar design contest winner, also added, “There are many generic, ARM-based processors, but they are not all created equal. The LPC213x family should be seriously considered by embedded application developers calling for a 32-bit RISC processor with a high level of integration and high MIPS budget.”

Lindsay Meek, who won Third Prize for his flash card audio player, also took full advantage of the chance to look at Philips’s products first hand. “Apart from the prospect of winning prizes, I was interested in evaluating ARM for digital audio applications, as they seem to be widely used inside decoder ASICs and portable audio devices,” Meek shared. “I found the LPC2138 to have a good cost performance when compared to 8-bit micros, coming in at ~9 USD with half a meg of onboard flash and fast numerical code execution, even when using GCC.”

Debbasch and Meek’s complete contest entries for the Philips ARM Design Contest 2005, along with all the other winning projects, are posted as part of an expanded web presentation that may be viewed through www.circuitcellar.com.

Circuit Cellar Inc. manages and co-sponsors design contests for the embedded systems industry in addition to publishing Circuit Cellar magazine. Circuit Cellar magazine is published monthly in print and electronic formats. Each issue features hands-on applications of immediate value to professional design engineers and electronic enthusiasts alike. For a trial issue, please visit www.circuitcellar.com/trialissue/.

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