Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1518649
12 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2024 and read the design, schematic, specs, and requirements." We received several in Gerber and the associated manufacturing files, but in theory, they could have given us IPC-2581 as well. IPC India has its own competition designed a little differently than ours, but we invite t h e i r t w o f i n a l i s t s . The y 're e s s ent ial ly assessing the same cri- teria in a different format. We invite the IPC India win- ner and runner-up, but we only invite three of the top-placing competitors from the prelims to the final heat. Last year, the final heat fea- tured five competitors: two in the room at IPC APEX EXPO and three people calling in. is year, based on travel budgets and some competitors requiring a visa, it won't surprise me to have full virtual attendance. Last year, Sathish Vijayakumar from India won the IPC India competition and eventually the whole shebang. He couldn't be in India's competition this year, so he signed up for our competition. We'll see if he can take the top prize again. is year, the finals competition will take place on Tuesday, April 9 during IPC APEX EXPO. It's free to attend; you can just walk in. We'll have screens set up for contestants from India, who will be dialing in. We do the judging onsite, and the winner is announced the next day. It's a four-and-a-half-hour com- petition. We provide them with an Altium Designer file package, and the board geome- try is already finished. e nets are all defined, so they don't have to worry about the sche- matic or electrical engineering stuff. ey are just responsible for component placement, topology, routing, etc. ey're not starting from scratch. Kris, you are one of the judges, and you created the preliminary design and the final heat design. How do these designs compare to last year's? Kris Moyer: I won't give away anything about the final competition because the competitors don't find out until the day of the finals. We give you a schematic and say, "Here you go." For the prelim, we came up with a simple design: It's a driver circuit, like you have in your home theater speaker. You have two subwoofers, two mid-range speakers, and two tweeter speakers, and this driver circuit takes your audio signal and splits it across the three fre- quency ranges. Your high frequency goes up the tweeters, the mid- range goes to the mid-range speakers, the base goes down to the woofers, and so on, along with some amplification circuitry to actually drive the speakers. It's something a do- it-yourselfer might want to figure out—how a home theater speaker system works. is was a fun design. Patrick Crawford We give you a schematic and say, "Here you go."