WashU IEEE team wins at competition
The WashU chapter of IEEE took first and third place in both categories at the IEEE St. Louis Section Blackbox Competition
The student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) at Washington University in St. Louis won at the IEEE St. Louis Section Black Box Competition at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The competition consisted of two categories, digital and analog, in which the WashU team placed first and third.
“I was very happy with the performances of all four teams,” said Peter Jakiela, president of the IEEE chapter. “A lot of our members are underclassmen and are new to circuit analysis. I was impressed with how quickly they learned to use the test equipment.”
Team members who competed were:
- Eric Biernacki, a junior majoring in computer engineering and computer science
- Evan Fitzgerald, a Joint Engineering Program student majoring in electrical engineering
- Razi Khan, a first-year student majoring in computer science and economics
- Ben Ko, a first-year student majoring in computer science
- Thomas Lang, a first-year student majoring in computer science
- Bruce Li, a first-year student majoring in computer science
- Thomas Schuster, a first-year student majoring in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering
- Nick Tu, a junior majoring in computer science and mathematics
In the analog category, Fitzgerald and Schuster came in first place, while Khan and Ko came in third. Biernacki and Li came in first place in the digital category, while Lang and Tu came in third.
The analog teams were given a circuit concealed in a black box and asked to determine its components by performing tests on its exposed terminals, while the digital teams were asked to describe the logical properties of a circuit programmed into field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development boards.
As winners of the competition, WashU will host the next black box competition in the spring of 2023.
