UB team wins second place in international hardware design contest

students receiving award.

A UB team of graduate students from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences took second place in the International Hardware Design Contest. Three members of the team are shown holding the award certificate at the ACM/IEEE design automation conference. From left are Aravind Polkam, Jerry Ajay and Sree Dunnala.

by Emily Sugarman

Published July 3, 2017 This content is archived.

Five University at Buffalo students took second place in the 2017 International Hardware Design Contest, held at the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas this past month. 

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“This work is extremely important and timely, given that 3D printing security is an under-explored yet increasingly recognized topic.”
Wenyao Xu, assistant professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Jerry Ajay, Aosen Wang and Yuyang Chen, from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Sree Dunnala and Aravind Polkam, from the Department of Electrical Engineering, received the award for their project, "IoMT Pilot: Towards FPGA-based Collision Detection Accelerator for 3D Printing Safety." The team was awarded $1,500 for their endeavor.

The flagship conference, devoted to the design and automation of electronic systems (EDA), embedded systems and software (ESS), and intellectual property (IP),  put some of the most skilled minds in the academic world of engineering to work on a global level. This year’s theme was the Internet of Things (IoT).

According to the competition's website, "IoT is the internetworking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings and other items-embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these "things" to collect, exchange and operate on data. How these "things" are designed is of critical importance to the efficacy and efficiency of IoT. In this contest, we will explore the use of low-power FPGAs to implement new concepts and designs in IoT edge computing." The competition is sponsored by ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA) and Lattice Semiconductor.

Wenyao Xu, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Chi Zhou, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, provided guidance and encouragement to the team-members for this unique opportunity. 

“The UB team developed an innovative FPGA-based solution to tackle the security challenge in networked 3D printers,” said Wenyao Xu. “This work is extremely important and timely, given that 3D printing security is an underexplored yet increasingly recognized topic.”

This highly successful group set the tone for years to come for future UB teams at this influential competition.