Anveshan is a program to solve real world problems by enabling academic and industry partnership

Analog Devices recently announced the winners of its Anveshan 2019 Design Fellowship Program. Anveshan Design Fellowship is one of its kind focused fellowship program in the semiconductor industry by Analog Devices India. The sixth edition of Anveshan saw double-digit growth in registration with 90 teams participating from 35 cities across India. This year, the fellowship program focused on sectors such as energy, healthcare, agriculture, environment and resource management with the technology focus on sensors, power, IoT, cloud, algorithms, etc. In this interview Mr. Sai Krishna Mopuri, Managing Director, Analog Devices India Pvt. Ltd. shares more about this program.

• How the Anveshan program works and how it is different from the other innovation competition?

Anveshan fellowship provides a platform for the Indian Engineering Students Community to pitch, develop and productize their innovative engineering ideas.  This is an outreach program open to the students of all engineering colleges across India.  With technical and financial support from Analog Devices, students stand to gain from their interactions with the industry experts while still in their academic institutes.  They gain access to Analog Devices’ products and tools which gives them ammunition to solve real-world problems using readily available technology from the global leader in analog, mixed signal and DSP integrated circuits.  If you are a student of any engineering college in India, you can participate in the Anveshan fellowship program by first identifying a problem in the areas suggested in Anveshan website, form a team with your fellow students, write and submit your project proposal on the Anveshan website.  Once your proposal is selected for funding, you will be assigned a mentor or two to guide you as you develop your solution.  The details of the fellowship program, submission procedures, guidelines and timelines are provided in the Anveshan website.

Anveshan is not just another design contest or hackathon.  It is a program designed to bring out and support innovative engineering and business ideas that solve real world problems by enabling academic and industry partnership.  In this program students are paired with technical experts from Analog Devices to help review, refine and realize their ideas.  Students are provided necessary technical tools and financial assistance during the fellowship.  The students and the mentors work together collaboratively as a team.  Students are encouraged to think ‘innovation with impact’ as opposed to ‘innovation in isolation’.

• How Anveshan Design Fellowship can play thought leadership initiative to encourage young minds?

Anveshan encourages students to think of problems / ideas that have social impact, to study existing solutions, and challenges them to prove uniqueness of their solution.  The screening process evaluates business potential, value capture, and strategic thinking in the submitted proposals.  Experienced mentors guide the young innovators to identify techniques and tools to achieve an efficient and cost-effective solution, to identify and build a team that has right skillsets, to know their customer, to analyse business and go to market strategies, and so on.  During the fellowship period, a young innovator is guided to think of his/her solution holistically from all aspects of engineering, business and social impact.

• How many states / cities have participated in Anveshan 2019?

Students from 12 States 35 cities participated in Anveshan 2019.

• The involvement of engineering students in Anveshan

In the first edition of Anveshan in 2012, we had participation from a few premier Engineering institutes. Over the last few years we have seen the participation surge and it is exciting to see entries from many parts of India, even from colleges in tier2 cities and towns. The complexity of the problems that students choose to address has also seen a big leap.  Students who have got the Anveshan exposure share their experience with their juniors leading to repeat entries from many colleges over the years.

• What are the different criteria’s under which the teams will be judged?

We look at multiple dimensions in evaluating the teams and their ideas.  The criteria includes the problem statement chosen by the team, exploration of existing solutions, innovation and uniqueness of the proposed solution, impact of the idea on society and business, use of Analog Devices products and technology, effectiveness of the solution, completeness of the solution, minimum viable product or working prototype, how the team presented and demonstrated, and so on.

• Tell us something about your presence in the Indian market.

ADI has been in India since 1995.  ADI’s engineering teams in India develop diverse technologies and products that provide signal processing solutions in multiple end markets including industrial, automotive, communications, consumer and healthcare.  We design Digital, Analog and RF integrated circuits, develop software and systems to solve toughest engineering challenges for our customers.  Our engineering teams have full product ownership and comprehensive capability to develop products from ideation to production.  India has great engineering talent and ADI has successfully tapped into that talent over the years.  ADI India is a key and strategic offshore facility for Analog Devices.

Anveshion 2019 Winners

Jewel Beetle from College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar is the winner while team CocoKnock from Canara Engineering College, Mysore and SpineCare from Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology, Burla secured second and third spot, respectively. The top winner took home prize money of INR 2.5 lakhs while the runners-up received INR 1.5 lakhs and INR 1 lakh, respectively. The jury also recognized another finalist Urban Farming (Villam) from RV College of Engineering with a special award for Best Business Idea presented who took home prize money of INR 50 thousand.

Jewel Beetle developed an Energy Harvesting for Forest Fire Detection System. It is a reliable system aimed at efficient monitoring and detection of forest firethat uses plant based Microbial Fuel Cells(MFCs).

About Mr. Sai

Mr. Mopuri is the managing director of Analog Devices India (ADI Bangalore).  As the site head, he drives strategy and growth, manages operations and drives engineering enablement and execution by collaborating with business units across ADI and partnering with customers, industry ecosystem partners and academic institutions.  In his earlier roles at ADI, he built product and test engineering capability for multiple technology groups and established a state of the art IC test development facility in ADI Bangalore.  Prior to joining ADIin 2003, Mr.Mopuri hadworked in large and start-up semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley, CA, USA.

Mr. Mopuri holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Osmania University and a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering (VLSI) from Clemson University, SC, USA.