SDR FORUM ANNOUNCES WINNERS OF ITS INAUGURAL SMART RADIO CHALLENGE AND QUALIFYING TEAMS FOR THE 2008 CHALLENGE

DENVER, CO, Nov. 12, 2007 -- At its annual technical conference last week in Denver, the SDR Forum (www.sdrforum.org) announced the winning teams in its inaugural Smart Radio Challenge, a worldwide competition in which student engineering teams design, develop and test a software defined radio (SDR) or a cognitive radio addressing specific problems relevant to the advanced wireless community. The Forum also announced the qualifying teams for Smart Radio Challenge '08.

Qualifying teams for the Smart Challenge '07 needed to address one of three defined problems, each supporting a target waveform. The three winners were:

Virginia Tech CWT (Center for Wireless Telecommunications), which developed a smart radio system that will automatically find available spectrum within a predefined band and transmit voice or data over that band.
Pennsylvania State, for developing a smart radio terminal that can automatically provide interoperability between radios with different modulations, and which knows how to forward messages to the proper network, whether commercial or civil; and
The Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), which developed a smart radio system that can detect the location of many vehicles within the city, assess the velocity along common roadways, and then provide user-specific route guidance that will minimize total fuel consumption.

Grand prize winner was Virginia Tech CWT, with additional awards, for best paper and best design, presented to the University of Utah and Virginia Tech MPRG (Mobile & Portable Radio Research Group) teams, respectively. Award winning schools all received cash scholarships. Other teams in the finals were France's Supélec (Ecole Supérieur d'Electricité), Universiti Putra Malaysia, and Clemson.

The qualifying teams for Smart Radio Challenge '08 announced at the conference will also take on one of three defined problems:

Penn State and Virginia Tech CWT will each demonstrate a cognitive radio system (hardware and software) operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band with individual remote radios capable of knowing when they have been disconnected from the existing infrastructure which then automatically form a network to forward traffic ;
Carnegie Mellon and the University of Utah will each develop a secondary-user cognitive transceiver system that can detect primary-user signals operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band and, while operating within that band, determine the occupied spectrum, transmission times and geographical locations to sufficient resolution to avoid interference with legacy systems; and
Penn State and the University of Calgary (Canada), given a specification for an air interface standard supported by a Forum radio transmitting a message, will have to decode this message and transmit a suitable response, with the winner being the first team to do so.

The qualifying teams will now have 10 months to complete and submit their projects, and the winners will be announced at the Forum's 2008 technical conference in Washington, D.C.

The Smart Challenge is sponsored by Altera, Lyrtech, The MathWorks, Objective Interface, PrismTech, Synplicity, Texas Instruments, Xilinx, and Zeligsoft, and the Forum is accepting additional sponsorships from companies and government agencies worldwide. More details can be found on the competition website, www.radiochallenge.org

Also at the just concluded technical conference, Preston Marshal, program manager at the U.S. Defense Department's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), was honored with the SDR Forum Industry Achievement Award for 2007, and the Forum's Contributors Award was presented to Stephen R. Hope, international technology and research relations manager for France Telecom.

About the SDR Forum

Established in 1996, the SDR Forum is a nonprofit international industry association dedicated to supporting the development and deployment of software defined radio systems that enable flexible and adaptable architectures in advanced wireless systems. Currently numbering some 100 organizations, the Forum's membership spans commercial, defense and civil government organizations, including wireless service providers, network operators, component and equipment manufacturers, hardware and software developers, regulatory agencies, and academia from Asia, Europe, and North America. The SDR Forum's administrative office is headquartered in Denver.

Editorial Contacts

Lee Pucker, SDR Forum, 604-828-9846, Lee.Pucker@SDRForum.org or
Neal Leavitt, Leavitt Communications, 760-639-2900 or 760-212-9112, neal@leavcom.com

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