In April, some 600 engineers congregated at the Fairmont Hotel's Imperial Ballroom in San Jose for the EE Times 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."

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.

The Emerging Technology ACE Award went to Innovative Silicon 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/Fiat 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 among fuels according to driving conditions.

Spectrum readers picked the two best from among the five "winning" technology projects featured in the magazine's January 2007 special "Winners & Losers" issue. To get the full story, go to Associate Editor Erico Guizzo's account in our blog at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/comments/1772.