Student Design Competitions- Call for Proposals

IMS2025 Student Design Competition - Call for Proposals 

Dear MTT-S Technical Committee Chairs, dear Colleagues,

We are delighted to invite you to organize a Student Design Competition (SDC) at International Microwave Symposium (IMS) 2025 San Francisco, USA,  the largest annual event in the microwave world. Student design competitions are a great opportunity for students to show their finest design and innovation skills.

All the competitions must aim at solving a technical microwave problem, thus, each SDC proposal must either come from one of the MTT-S Technical Committees (TCs) or obtain endorsement from one. The TCs create their own rules for the contest and are responsible for all aspects of the contest, including any equipment required to run the contest. Each MTT-S Technical Committee that organizes a contest is given funds for prize money, and monetary contribution neither is required from nor allowed from you as an organizer. The IMS Technical Program Committee will provide an evaluation space and publicity for your contest.

Important dates:

  • Submission deadline for SDC proposals: 8 September 2024

  • Results announcement for SDC proposals: 22 September 2024

  • Student registration: individual for each SDC, usually March/April

  • International Microwave Symposium 2025: 15-20 June 2025

Prizes: We would like to make all the competitions equally attractive to the students. The monetary prize levels will be made even for all the SDCs and will be provided to the organizing TC. The number of awarded places will depend on the participation rate with a maximum of three prizes. Additional non-monetary prizes provided by you are very welcome if they are specific to a given contest, e.g., winners of filter design competition can be offered internship or EM solver licenses. 

Equipment: While each TC is responsible for obtaining their own equipment for the SDCs, we are willing to assist the TCs in contacting the right people, e.g., at Keysight, Anritsu, Rohde and Schwarz, Tektronix, NI, etc.

Judging: The proposal should clearly outline the judgment criteria, likely in the form of a particular figure of merit for the design. It is the SDC proposer’s responsibility to evaluate the submissions in their competition. 

In addition to TCs, we are welcoming industrial and 3rd sector communities to be co-organizers of SDCs. We believe that higher variety is beneficial to all the participants and organizers of the competitions. We have also adopted the rule of equal playing field for all the SDCs, which means equal monetary prize levels.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at ims2025.sdc@gmail.com. You can also see examples from the 2024 SDC at: https://ims-ieee.org/2024SDC. We are looking forward to your proposals. 

Kindest regards, 

Hazal Yuksel and Benson Chan

IMS2025 Student Design Competition Chairs