The award and the fellowship have been instituted in the memory of Srikant Visweswariah, an alumnus of BITS Pilani. Srikant Visweswariah graduated with a degree in Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani in 1971. He lost his 2-year battle with cancer in April 2009.

Srikant graduated nearly at the top his class at BITS, chose a career in the Indian Air Force when the whole wide world was open to him. While serving in the IAF he did his M.Tech from IIT, Kanpur. He was persuaded to take early retirement from the IAF by no less a person than Mr Abdul Kalam, the former president of India so that he could lead a team of engineers to develop the avionics for the Light Combat Aircraft for the IAF. When Srikant was satisfied that he had done his bit for the LCA project and the nation, he took on a variety of assignments – from being a co-founder of a software company to the group R&D manager at General Motors, but most of all, he did, what he loved the most – travel the world.

While Srikant dabbled in business now and then, his real passion was academics and in particular microwave, radar and signal processing. During a visit to BITS in 2005, it was pointed out to Srikant that the study of high frequency analog electronics is relegated in recent times in favor of computer science and digital electronics at BITS. He felt that it was unfortunate that India (and to some extent, the world) is slowly but surely losing skills in this critical area. Appropriately, his family has instituted this award to help mitigate this problem to a small extent by encouraging talented youngsters at BITS to take up this field of study.

Structure of the award and the fellowship

The award and the fellowship shall be disbursed in two phases. The first phase shall be an analog design contest to be organized during or before APOGEE as deemed fit by the APOGEE Organizing Committe at BITS, Pilani. Total prize money of INR 10,000 shall be awarded in the first phase of the competition. The prize money shall be split as below:

a. 1st Prize - 5000 INR

b. 2nd Prize - 3000 INR

c. 3rd Prize - 2000 INR

The second phase of the award is a fellowship that shall be awarded to the student winning the analog design competition if he/she takes up a project on analog electronics and related fields in his/her final semester at BITS, Pilani. The fellowship consists of a cash award of INR 20,000. (The fellowship amount to be inflated in every 3 years to additional 2500 INR).

Eligibility criteria, selection process and other terms and conditions are listed here.

Srikariant Visweswah Analog Design Contest – 2013

Faculty Involved

1. Dr. Anu Gupta, Associate Professor, EEE Group
2. Dr. V K Chaubey,Professor, EEE Group

About the Event

The contest had two stages:
1. An elimination round to select the top 8students. This round tested the students on their basic concepts of Analog Electronics.

2. design round in which the selected students had to present their own design for a particular problem statement. The design round took place in the Oyster Lab (Technology Business Incubator)

For this year, the problem statement was based on designing a low power active low pass filter with certain specifications. The time allotted to the participants was 3 hours. The evaluation was done by the faculty panel. The number of participants for the first round was 30. Out of these, 8 were shortlisted for the second round in O-lab from which the final winners were selected.

Winners 2013

First Prize
Kalika Saxena (Third Year Student, BITS-Pilani)
Email: kalika.saxena304@gmail.com

Kalika is currently pursuing B.E.(Hons.) Electrical and Electronics Engineering from BITS Pilani. Her interests lie in Embedded Systems and VLSI design, particularly analog VLSI design. She is enthusiastic to have a research oriented career in this field. She enjoys the challenges in design problems and feels it as a challenging and attractive field to work in. 

SECOND PRIZE

Shruti Inamdar(Third Year Student, BITS PILANI)
Email : shrutiinamdar2010@gmail.com

Shruti is currently pursuing B.E.(Hons.) EEE. Her areas of interest are analog circuit design and signal processing for communications. She wishes to pursue a research oriented career in the area of RF circuit design. She plans to go for a MS/PhD program after gaining a couple of years of industry experience. She enjoys spending her leisure time exploring new circuits and design tools.

THIRD PRIZE

Ch Sampath (Third Year Student, BITS Pilani)
Email : sunny.sam369@gmail.com

Sampath's Research interest is in Analog and Digital VLSI design. His interest in VLSI design made him to participate in Competition like Cadence design contest. His 3 years of programming experience enabled him to learn VHDL quickly and hence become an efficient Digital VLSI designer. He intends to pursue a career in this field. R&D departments of TI or Intel are his dream jobs.

Click here to read about past winners of the award & fellowship.