Life in Silicon Valley

The EETimes ACE awards - awards for creativity and leadership in the field of electronics - were held last night at the Fairmont in San Jose. I had the honor of judging and getting a close up look at all the nominees and products.

Every year I attend this event I experience a reawakening. the pace of innovation is so strong and so consistent here, that after a few years, it's easy to mistake it for a background hummmmmm like the one I forget to hear when driving my 20 year old BMW.

At the awards I WAKE UP and am excitedly reminded of how unusual this place really is - and why I came here in the first place. Where else in the world will you find 1,000 people screaming and cheering louder than fans at a rock concert for an a 500 megasample per second A/D converter? or a squiggle motor? WHAT A GREAT PLACE THIS IS!!!! Thanks, EETimes for reminding me of why I came here in the first place.

Check out the nominees (grab the slider to pan & zoom) :

Large Company Innovator of the Year - NVidia
Small Company Innovator of the Year - Cambridge Silicon
Startup of the Year - Ruckus Wireless
Innovator of the Year - Wan Thai Hsu, discera

Most Likely to have impact
Commercial Technology - Innovative Silicon's ZRAM
Societal Impact - Magenti Morelli's flex fuel controller

Design Team of the Year - Clearshape Technologies
Most Promising New Technology - Intel & UCSB silicon photonics
Student of the Year - Michael Callahan U of Illinois
Educator of the Year - Belle Wei, SJSU

"Game Changing Product" awards :
E2V, Inc. - 500 Megasample/sec 12 bit a/d converter
Sandisk's - iNand
New Scale Technology - the SQUIGGLE motor
Actel - IGLOO programmable gate array
APC - pcmcia password manager
Qualcomm - qsc1100 chip
Pico technology - picoscope 2104/5

Exec of the year - chia song hwee, chartered semiconductor
Editors choice for creativity - Lee Felsenstein
EETimes President's award - Marty Gold
Lifetime Achivement award - Eric Lidow,International Rectifier