April 10th, 2007 AT THE ACE AWARDS, ENGINEERS PARTY HEARTY
Associate Editor Erico Guizzo went to San Jose to cover the tech world's answer to the Oscars.
Erico Guizzo
Some 600 engineers congregated last Tuesday night at the Fairmont Hotel's Imperial Ballroom in San Jose, Calif., for EE Times's Annual Creativity in Electronics Awards Gala. The ACE Awards attempt to give engineers their fair share of the limelight—as one organizer put it, "It's not just Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith who deserve the world's attention."
At the ceremony, engineers sipped local red wine, chomped on chocolate-rum ganache, and networked (the old-fashioned way, by exchanging business cards). At one point, the chandeliers dimmed, colored lights lit up the room, and two models appeared on stage, alongside a tuxedoed presenter. Then, one by one, to the sound of Beyoncé and other "hip music"—as one host remarked—the 20-odd winners were announced.
Among the winners were Ruckus Wireless (Startup of the Year), NVIDIA (Company of the Year, large company category), CSR (Company of the Year, small/medium category), and Intel and University of California, Santa Barbara (Most Promising New Technology).
IEEE Spectrum, a partner in the event, offered two special awards, one for a technology with great potential for commercial success, the other for a technology likely to greatly benefit society.
Photo: ERICO GUIZZO
MASTERS OF MEMORY: From left, Innovative Silicon CEO Mark Eric Jones and cofounders Pierre Fazan and Serguei Okhonin receive the Emerging Technology ACE Award from IEEE Spectrum's executive editor Glenn Zorpette.
The Emerging Technology ACE Award went to Innovative Silicon, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, for its superdense memory. Called Z-RAM, for zero-capacitor dynamic random access memory, it lets you cram as much as 5 megabytes of RAM into the space occupied by a single megabyte of conventional embedded memory.
Magneti Marelli received the Technology in the Service of Society ACE Award for its TetraFuel engine control system. The controller lets cars run on any gasoline and ethanol mix and also natural gas, switching automatically between fuels according to driving conditions.
Photo: ERICO GUIZZO
ENGINE EXPERT: Silverio Bonfiglioli, CEO of Magneti Marelli's Brazilian unit, flew from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to San Jose, Calif., to receive the IEEE Spectrum Technology in the Service of Society ACE Award.
Spectrum readers picked the two best from among the five "winning" technology projects featured in the magazine's January 2007 special "Winners & Losers" issue.
The awards ceremony was part of the Embedded Systems Conference, which this year took place at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. There two dozen corridors crammed with exhibitors displayed the wonders of the unseen electronic guts—thus "embedded"—that power our cell phones, elevators, avionics controllers, and a whole lot more.
During the weeklong confab, visitors watched a Toyota Prius being torn apart, tried to win T-shirts by finding software bugs on source-code samples, attended technical sessions such as "How to Design Cost-Optimized Configurable Embedded Systems with ARM926EJ," and listened to Al Gore's keynote address, in which he summoned the audience—without a PowerPoint slide show—to help fight global warming.
At the ACE Awards ceremony, representatives from Innovative Silicon, in particular, were a cheerful bunch. But with half a dozen or more present, some from the Swiss headquarters, others from the local Silicon Valley office, who would get to keep the prize? One person suggested it should stay at the local office; another insisted it had to go to the headquarters. "Who do we ask to get more of this?" asked Rick Gaan, the company's director of marketing and communications, pointing to the crystal award.
Marelli was represented by Silverio Bonfiglioli, CEO of the company's Brazilian subsidiary, which developed the TetraFuel technology. Asked by a reporter how he felt, Bonfiglioli turned to serious matters: "This prize recognizes that Brazil is a country that can create great technology and innovation." Seeing the reporter in distress, Bonfiglioli's wife, Maria, intervened: "He is very, very happy."
AT THE ACE AWARDS, ENGINEERS PARTY HEARTY
Associate Editor Erico Guizzo went to San Jose to cover the tech world's answer to the Oscars.
Erico Guizzo
Some 600 engineers congregated last Tuesday night at the Fairmont Hotel's Imperial Ballroom in San Jose, Calif., for EE Times's Annual Creativity in Electronics Awards Gala. The ACE Awards attempt to give engineers their fair share of the limelight—as one organizer put it, "It's not just Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith who deserve the world's attention."
At the ceremony, engineers sipped local red wine, chomped on chocolate-rum ganache, and networked (the old-fashioned way, by exchanging business cards). At one point, the chandeliers dimmed, colored lights lit up the room, and two models appeared on stage, alongside a tuxedoed presenter. Then, one by one, to the sound of Beyoncé and other "hip music"—as one host remarked—the 20-odd winners were announced. Among the winners were Ruckus Wireless (Startup of the Year), NVIDIA (Company of the Year, large company category), CSR (Company of the Year, small/medium category), and Intel and University of California, Santa Barbara (Most Promising New Technology).
IEEE Spectrum, a partner in the event, offered two special awards, one for a technology with great potential for commercial success, the other for a technology likely to greatly benefit society.
MASTERS OF MEMORY: From left, Innovative Silicon CEO Mark Eric Jones and cofounders Pierre Fazan and Serguei Okhonin receive the Emerging Technology ACE Award from IEEE Spectrum's executive editor Glenn Zorpette.
The Emerging Technology ACE Award went to Innovative Silicon, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, for its superdense memory. Called Z-RAM, for zero-capacitor dynamic random access memory, it lets you cram as much as 5 megabytes of RAM into the space occupied by a single megabyte of conventional embedded memory.
Magneti Marelli received the Technology in the Service of Society ACE Award for its TetraFuel engine control system. The controller lets cars run on any gasoline and ethanol mix and also natural gas, switching automatically between fuels according to driving conditions.
ENGINE EXPERT: Silverio Bonfiglioli, CEO of Magneti Marelli's Brazilian unit, flew from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to San Jose, Calif., to receive the IEEE Spectrum Technology in the Service of Society ACE Award.
Spectrum readers picked the two best from among the five "winning" technology projects featured in the magazine's January 2007 special "Winners & Losers" issue.
The awards ceremony was part of the Embedded Systems Conference, which this year took place at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. There two dozen corridors crammed with exhibitors displayed the wonders of the unseen electronic guts—thus "embedded"—that power our cell phones, elevators, avionics controllers, and a whole lot more.
During the weeklong confab, visitors watched a Toyota Prius being torn apart, tried to win T-shirts by finding software bugs on source-code samples, attended technical sessions such as "How to Design Cost-Optimized Configurable Embedded Systems with ARM926EJ," and listened to Al Gore's keynote address, in which he summoned the audience—without a PowerPoint slide show—to help fight global warming.
At the ACE Awards ceremony, representatives from Innovative Silicon, in particular, were a cheerful bunch. But with half a dozen or more present, some from the Swiss headquarters, others from the local Silicon Valley office, who would get to keep the prize? One person suggested it should stay at the local office; another insisted it had to go to the headquarters. "Who do we ask to get more of this?" asked Rick Gaan, the company's director of marketing and communications, pointing to the crystal award.
Marelli was represented by Silverio Bonfiglioli, CEO of the company's Brazilian subsidiary, which developed the TetraFuel technology. Asked by a reporter how he felt, Bonfiglioli turned to serious matters: "This prize recognizes that Brazil is a country that can create great technology and innovation." Seeing the reporter in distress, Bonfiglioli's wife, Maria, intervened: "He is very, very happy."