**The top ten student papers have been selected from the 121 accepted student papers.**

**Presentations were held on Monday, August 11, in front of a panel of judges in the Lecture Hall from 10:20-16:40.**

**Cash prizes were awarded: 1st place--$500; 2nd place--$300; 3rd place--$200**

[[http://www.ece.utk.edu/~bouldin/MWSCAS-2008-Student-Paper-Competition-Rules.pdf|Rules  (pdf)]]

The ten finalists and their presentation times are listed below:

**10:20** -- Introduction and Rules, **Prof. Ethan Farquhar**, University of Tennessee

**10:42** -- Minimizing Minimum Delay Compensations for Timing Variation-Aware Datapath Synthesis by ** Keisuke Inoue **, Mineo Kaneko, Tsuyoshi Iwagaki, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 

**11:05** -- Toward DNA-Based Security Circuitry: First Step - Random Number Generation by **Christy M. Bogard**, Benjamin Arazi and Eric C. Rouchka, University of Louisville -- **3rd Place**

**11:27** -- A Performance Metric for Discrete-Time Chaos-Based Truly Random Number Generators by **Ahmed Beirami**, Hamid Nejati and Yehia Massoud, Rice University

**11:50 -- 13:20**   Lunch

**13:20** -- Investigating the Impact of Carbon Nanotube-Based Driver Transistors on the Performance of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Interconnect by **Tamer Ragheb**, Arthur Nieuwoudt and Yehia Massoud, Rice University

**13:42** -- Optical Hybrid Processing Utilizing Photonic Crystals Incorporating Biological Materials by **Scott Masturzo**, Howard Jackson, Joseph Boyd, Robert Ewing, Hoda Abdel-Aty-Zohdy and Jan Yarrison-Rice, University of Cincinnati, Air Force Research Lab, Miami University

**14:05** -- A UHF Continuous-Time Current-Mode Band-Pass Delta Sigma Modulator Based on Active Inductor by **Qiuning Chen**, Kamal El-Sankary, Ezz El-Masry, Dalhousie University -- **2nd Place**

**14:27** -- A Temporal Matching Method for Pitch Determination from Noisy Speech Signals by **Celia Shahnaz**, Wei-Ping Zhu and M. Omair Ahmad, Concordia University

**14:50 —- 15:10**  Refreshments

**15:10** -- An Electrowetting Based Microgripper by **Abhay Vasudev** and Jiang Zhe, University of Akron -- **1st Place**

**15:32** -- A Combined Transfer Function and Neural Network Method for Modeling via in Multilayer Circuits by **Xin Zhang**, Yazi Cao and Qijun Zhang, Carleton University 

**15:55** -- Lateral Coupling in Silicon Cochlear Models by **Brandon Rumberg**, Kyle McMillan, Charles Rea and David Graham, West Virginia University

**16:17** -- Award Presentations, **Prof. Ethan Farquhar**, University of Tennessee