Freescale holds car design competition in China

Showcasing embedded design among engineering students in China, Freescale Semiconductor staged the finals of its third annual Freescale Cup University Smart Car Racing Contest at Northeastern University in Sheyang, China.

This year's competition drew more than 600 teams from more than 270 Chinese universities, which is twice the number as in 2007. The final race narrowed the field to 104 competing teams from throughout China.

The racing contest at Northeastern University was the culmination of several months of student design and assembly of smart model cars built with Freescale's S12 microcontroller (MCU) technology - the most widely adopted 16-bit MCU architecture in the automotive market. The contest required designers to integrate road sensors, design motor control systems, program corresponding software and assemble the model car within two categories - camera and optical electronics. Model cars competing in the camera group used lens imaging for navigation, while the optical-electronics group used optical communication for navigation.

Competing teams displayed and then raced their smart model cars, which are designed to operate autonomously and identify their route through each race course. Team scores were determined by how fast each race car completed the course.

Team Leopard from Northeastern University in Sheyang came in first place in the camera competition with a time of 18.388 seconds. Team Shou An No. 1 from the University of Science and Technology Wuhan was first to cross the finish line in the optical-electronics competition with a time of 24.597 seconds.

"Freescale congratulates not only the winners of the smart car competition, but all the participants who worked so hard on their ingenious designs based on S12 MCU technology," said Peter Schulmeyer, director of strategy for automotive MCUs at Freescale. "China's engineering students represent the future of the nation's automotive electronics industry. Fostering top engineering talent requires collaboration between China's institutions of higher learning and leading suppliers of automotive technology, components and systems."

Freescale is working with several Chinese automotive manufacturers and most recently announced plans to establish a joint auto lab with China's Chery Automobile Co., aimed at co-developing silicon, software and system-level solutions.

Freescale Semiconductor is a designer and manufacturer of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking and wireless markets.