Railway Collision Avoidance System Wins the TI $100,000 Analog Design Challenge

Winners Selected from Thousands of Registrants

DALLAS (June 29, 2001) -- With overwhelming interest from around the world, and thousands of registrants, Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) today announced the winners in the $100,000 Analog Design Challenge. Indranil Majumdar of India was awarded the top prize for his Railway Collision Avoidance System design. His winning design incorporated a variety of high-performance power management, interface, RF, logic and microcontroller products exclusively from TI. (See www.ti.com/sc/analogdesignchallenge for more information)

Winners were awarded from Asia, Europe and the Americas regions. The winner in each region received US $10,000 and the overall winner received a $100,000 total grand prize. The design challenge was an opportunity for analog design engineers to stretch their imagination and create a real world analog design using TI analog solutions.

The highest number of designs focused on audio applications, including multiple designs of an all-digital audio system. Medical, video and imaging, wireless, test and measurement, and transportation applications, such as a wearable electromedical home monitoring system and a PAL video system that supports closed captioning in sign language, also received a high number of design submissions. The overwhelming interest in the $100,000 Analog Design Challenge is a true testament to TI's focus on high-performance analog products, and the many applications and solutions customers can develop utilizing TI's analog product portfolio.

Recognizing the need for additional safety precautions in the railway system, Indranil Majumdar of India was awarded the $100,000 WW top prize for developing the Railway Collision Avoidance System 2001, or RACAS. RACAS is an Anti-Collision system that prevents collisions in a railway network. It uses paired digital transponders operating in the ISM for radio ranging and quasi packet connectivity.

Andrew Matykin of Russia used TI's high-performance analog products to design an Ultrasonic Binaural Radar System for the blind that received top prize for the European region. The system is intended to aid the blind to better orient themselves relative to their environment and the objects that surround them. The system allows a person to determine the disposition of objects in a space through audible signals based upon changing frequency and the phase shift of reflected acoustic waves. Andrew's design included a variety of instrumentation and signal amplifiers, audio power amplifiers, power management and interface products for TI.

The top prize for the Americas region went to Kwokon Ng of the USA. Kwokon designed wireless electronic equipment for the sport of fencing. In the lightning-fast sport of fencing, electronic equipment is used extensively to detect hits and misses. Currently, bulky cable reels and floor cables are expensive and require high levels of maintenance. This new wireless system uses an ISM band to replace the cables while remaining compatible with the standard weapons and body-cords. Kwokon's design utilized a number of data converter/codec, comparator, logic, RF, microcontroller and DSP products, all from TI, in his winning design.

The winning entries were selected by independent judges chosen by CMP Media. The property of all design submissions is retained by the individual entrants. TI only received a 50 word abstract from each entrant to be used for promotional purposes. The $100,000 Analog Design Challenge was a joint promotion between TI and CMP Media, LLC.