iSLI student wins European Elektra award

The European Electronics Industry Awards ceremony took place at the Hilton Park hotel in Munich where Nazish was presented with her award by Sky Sports Presenter, Jeff Stelling. This is the second year in a row that a student from iSLI has won the prestigious award, beating off competition from students at academic institutions all over Europe.

Nazish Aslam is currently studying at iSLI for an Engineering Doctorate (EngD), the flagship doctoral qualification of the government-funded Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The EngD pairs a student with a sponsoring company to develop innovative, commercially relevant, research projects lead by the company and supervised by academic and industrial tutors. The student gains PhD-level skills in a commercial environment and the sponsor owns the generated IP. Nazish has achieved an average mark of over 70% and progressed to the research phase with her sponsor, Spiral Gateway Ltd, a fabless semiconductor chip vendor.

Winner of Student Engineer of the Year, Nazish Aslam, comments, "The concentration of high quality Universities makes central Scotland a fertile breeding ground for semiconductor start-up companies, in which keen and able students can excel. I'm proud to be marked out as one of them by winning this award."

CEO of iSLI, Tony Harker, commented on the award, "I am delighted that Nazish has received such a prestigious award and has been recognised for her academic achievements and contribution to her industry sponsor, Spiral Gateway. This is the second year running that an EngD student from iSLI has won this award and we are extremely proud that Nazish is representing the high quality of students at iSLI on the EngD programme."

For the past 3 and a half years, all of Nazish's work has been of immediate relevance to her sponsor, Spiral Gateway, who are providing a new, state-of-the-art dynamically reconfigurable platform to replace ASICs in many cost-sensitive mobile multimedia products. The areas Nazish has worked on include program memory compression and decompression for the new processing platforms. Nazish has also been porting applications to the reconfigurable architecture to gain the highest performance. During this process she was involved in generating ideas on useful features for the reconfigurable architecture, and associated supporting tool flow, that could be incorporated to ease the porting process for future applications. Nazish's research is also pending 2 potential patents. One of the big advantages offered by the structure of the EngD programme has been that Nazish has also gained exposure to other aspects of business such as the marketing and customer interaction, over and above her research.

Professor Tughrul Arslan from the Institute for Integrated Micro and Nano Systems commented on the recognition of Miss Aslam's achievements, "Nazish is an outstanding, model student, who has excelled in academic research and played a vital role in the early stages of a successful start-up, Spiral Gateway Ltd, where she is still continuing her Engineering Doctorate work."
 
Nazish has also had several impressive papers published in high quality international conference publications and professional journals. One of her major academic achievements is the publication of a full regular journal paper in the IEEE Journal, Transactions on VLSI, entitled "Code Compression and Decompression for Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Architectures", produced in conjunction with Mark Milward, Ahmet Erdogan, and Tughrul Arslan.
 
For more information about iSLI or Spiral Gateway Ltd, please visit www.sli-institute.ac.uk and www.spiralgateway.com.