Amrita IEEE students prepare for Singapore

Br. Rajesh Kannan’s students continue to be invited to present research papers at major conferences around the world.
 
Three groups of students will have the opportunity to travel to Singapore to present their work at the International Conference of Mechanical and Electrical Technology in September 2010.
 
“All three papers resulted from final-year BTech projects,” stated Br. Rajesh.
 
The papers are listed below.
 
Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Prasanth Krishna, Pratheesh Somarajan, Vishnu A. Pillai, Reswan Ul Hakkim, Extraction of License Plate Region in Automatic License Plate Recognition
 
Rajesh Kannan Megalingam , Gayathri Gopakumar, Jyothi K Sasidharan, Anju Ajit and Deepthi Luke, A VLSI Implementation and Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms for Security and Privacy in Communication Networks

Rajesh Kannan Megalingam, Ashwin Mohan, Shekhil Hassan Thavalengal, Tanmay Muralidhar Rao, Vivek Periye, Low Power Single Core CPU for a Dual Core Microcontroller
 
The papers will be listed in IEEE Xplore and indexed by both EI (Compendex) and ISI Proceedings (ISTP).
We asked one group of students to describe the work undertaken. They enthusiastically shared details of their research.
 
“We ran a Dual Core Microcontroller (two computers on a single chip) using a low-power Single Core CPU,” they explained. “Our main aim was to save power. Microcontrollers are used in many electronic devices such as a refrigerators, TVs and iron boxes that are regularly used in most homes.”
 
“When people buy an electronic device, they place more emphasis on its cost and running speed. They select devices that are cheap and those that run with a high speed. But they forget that most of these devices consume a lot of power, resulting in high electricity bills.”

 “Our research was conducted to investigate how microcontrollers could run on low power and consume less electricity, and at the same time, ensure the performance/efficiency of the system at a comparable speed and affordable prices.”
 
How was the reduction in power consumption obtained?
 
“By various methods. We gated clock signals for a period of time, when components such as registers and flip-flops did not need to work. Due to this, components could be disabled without affecting the working of the circuit and a lot of power was saved.”
 
“We also tested devices at various voltage levels to check for the minimum voltage required at which the system could function. This voltage scaling can also help reduce power consumption.”
 
“Finally, we also tried serialization of the data bus. Serialisation refers to the transfer of one bit of data at a time.”

This group of students was preceded by several other students groups who also studied the problem of enabling CPU function on low power. Earlier student groups have presented their research at the International Conference of Computer Science and Information Technology (August 2009, Beijing, China), International Conference of Parallel Processing (September 2009, Vienna, Austria) and International Conference and Workshop on Emerging Trends in Technology (March 2010, Mumbai).

2 projects shortlisted for AIYEHum 2010 from Amritapuri campus

IEEE SB at Amrita is proud to announce that 2 out of the 26 projects selected for the AIYEHum 2010 are from Amritapuri campus. The shortlisted projects are :

1.Smart Traffic Controller using Wireless Sensor Networks  ( Vineeth Mohan, Rizwin S, Paul Leons, Ajay M : S5 ECE A)
2.Gesture-Based Wheelchair Control System for Physically-Challenged ( Nived Krishnan, Arun, Daniel C J, Arjun : S8 ECE )

All India Young Engineers’ Humanitarian Challenge 2010 (AIYEHum 2010 (http://youngengineers.ieeebangalore.org  ) is an initiative of IEEE Bangalore Section supported by IEEE India Council to fund, mentor and nurture the ideas of young engineers to benefit humanity. They invite project proposals from the science and technology students of India, that are intended to solve humanitarian challenges. Out of the 80 proposals received, an expert committee  had shortlisted 26 for funding upto Rs.10,000 each.

PIC Ex’el ’10 : a success saga

IEEE SB of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, Kollam conducted a 2 day national level microcontroller workshop on PIC 16F877A on March 27-28 2010. There was a great response from the students as 60 participants turned up from all over India which included 2 faculties from NIT Calicut anda  faculty-student pair from Military College Of Electronics And Mechanical Engineering, Secunderabad. Each of the participants was provided with an ‘Amrita PIC microcontroller Kit’ which consisted of PIC base, PIC burner unit, PIC 16F877A, breadboard and other essential components needed for both workshop and future development of projects. The classes were taken by Mr. Rajesh Kannan, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of ECE, who is also the SB counselor. The classes were between 9 am to 5 pm on both days. The workshop was inaugurated by Dr.Sankaran, Principal, Amrita School of Engineering.

Dr.Sankaran, Principal, ASE

Prof. Sriram Ananthanarayanan, HOD, Dept. of ECE also spoke on the occasion. The seminar was held at the E-learning center and the Lab sessions were held in the VLSI Lab & Digital Lab. Day 1 morning session consisted of 3 seminars – Introduction to Microcontrollers and PIC microcontroller, Introduction to PIC I/O ports & Introduction to PIC assembly programming.

Rajesh sir engaging a theory class

afternoons were dedicated for hardware sessions

The afternoon session were dedicated for practical sessions. The students were given introduction to MPLAB software for programming PIC and they could also try out the hardware part of it. Day 2’s morning session also consisted of 3 seminars – PIC Interrupts, PIC Analog to Digital Converter & PIC Pulse Width Modulator. There was a photograph session after this. The afternoon session consisted of hardware experiments

and also a mini-project. Most of the participants completed all the experiments. All were enthusiastic to learn the various aspects of PIC. Amrita IEEE SB members served as teaching assistants during the lab. All the participants were given certificate of participation. Feedback forms were distributed among the participants in which they were asked to rate the workshop out of 10. The average score given by the participants was 9, which is a remarkable success to our IEEE SB.

PIC Ex'el 2010 : a grand success

Amrita SB students sweep HTC 2010

We are extremely happy to inform that, by Amma’s grace, IEEE student members of our institution have brought laurels to our institution by bagging the top two prizes at the “Humanitarian Technology Challenge Student Poster Competition”, conducted by IEEE GOLD KERALA SECTION & R10 as part of “International Conference on Humanitarian Technology Challenges of the 21st Century” which was held during 20th and 21st February, 2010 at Trivandrum.
 
There were 83 entries in total from all over Kerala from different student branches. 17 entries were shortlisted and was sent to the judges for final evaluation. 10 entries were selected for the final round.
Among the eminent personalities were Dr. Richard J Gowen, President, IEEE Foundation, Dr. John Vig, 2009 IEEE President, Dr. Janina Mazierska, IEEE Region 10, Ms. Helene Hoi-Ying Fung – IEEE R10 GOLD.

Yet another winner in paper presentation

Congratulations to Arjun (S8 ECE ) who won the 1st prize at Xplore 2010, a tech fest at Govt College of Engg, Kannur, in the paper presentation contest. He presented the paper on the title, “Highly Power Efficient, Uncompromised Performance Cache Design Using Dual-Edged Clock”.

Our students shine at Brahma 2010

A group of talented students from our campus rocked the paper presentation contest -’the Navapravarthana’, that marked the commencement of technical events at Brahma 2010, the Annual culturo-tech fest at Adi Shankara Institute of Engineering & Technology, Kalady. Venkat Krishnan, Vineeth Sarma, Mithun M and Rahul Srikumar, all IEEE student members, made the IEEE student branch proud by winning top honours at Navapravarthana in variuous categories. 

The event is sub-divided into 3 categories: each for electrical science,computer science and mechanical science. The team of Venkat Krishnan and Vineeth Sarma bagged first prize in Electrical science category. They presented a paper on their research topic ‘Hardware Implementation of Low Power, High Speed DCT/IDCT Based Digital Image Watermarking’. ( Prize Money :Rs 5000/- )

The team of Mithun and Rahul won the second prize in the same category. They presented their paper based on ‘Performance Comparison of Novel, Robust Spatial Domain Digital Image Watermarking with the Conventional Frequency Domain Watermarking Techniques’.( Prize Money :Rs 3000/- )

Venkat Krishnan and Mithun teamed up together to present their paper on ’Gating and Serializing the Data Path of CPU for Low Power Consumption’ that won them the 1st prize in the Computer Science category. ( Prize Money :Rs 5000/- )

Congratulations to the winners for their marvellous effort.

The POSTER for PICex’el 10

PICex’el 2010

IEEE Students Branch of Amrita is conducting a 2 day National Workshop on PIC Microcontrollers on Mar 27th and 28th, 2010.

This hands-on PIC Workshop covers the fundamentals of the PIC microcontroller family’s architecture (specifically PIC 16F87XA) and instruction set. Basic concepts are reinforced through the writing of simple assembly language programs. The knowledge gained from this class forms a solid base from which the attendee can explore more advanced concepts with the PIC microcontrollers. This Workshop also covers the basics of getting started with Microchip development tools. Hands-on exercises are conducted using the MPLAB® IDE. Attendees go through a step-by-step creation of a project, editing and compiling a program, running a program and using the MPLAB IDE. Also they learn step-by-step process of programming the PIC, debugging and verifying their assembly code in real time.

For more details please visit www.amrita.edu/picexel

Hello to everyone out there :)

Welcome to the official blog of the IEEE student branch at Amrita School Of Engineering, Kollam. The blog will keep you updated about all the latest buzz going on in and around the campus. IEEE special events, contests, workshops and all such activities will be posted here. Wish you all a great time out there  

Regards
Vineeth