/> A total of over $10,000 in cash and prizes will be awarded throughout the contest, including the $2,500 Grand Prize. More information, including how to enter the contest and how to become a judge, as well as lively interaction from participants and the engineering community is available at www.cypress.com/go/challenge.

Judging of the contest entries will be done in three stages:

* Stage 1 – November 10, 2010 to January 31, 2011 - Designers will submit schematic block diagrams and abstracts of their ideas. From these entries, the top 100 will be selected, each of which will be awarded a free PSoC 5 Development Kit.
* Stage 2 – January 31, 2011 to April 4, 2011 - The first round winners will then submit a video of their completed designs, along with a project file created in Cypress’s PSoC Creator IDE. From this group, four winners from the following categories will be selected and awarded: $1,000: Best Analog Design, Best Digital Design, Best PSoC Creator Component Design, and the Community Choice Design as selected by popular vote of the over 20,000 members of the Cypress Design Community.
* Stage 3 – April 4, 2011 to May 3, 2011 - The Grand Prize will be selected from the four winning designs by an all-star panel of judges, including Cypress President and CEO, T.J. Rodgers; ARM Director of Enterprise and Embedded Solutions, Ian Ferguson; and Brian Fuller, Chief Product Strategist for EE Times.

“We’re pleased to see so much interest generated by this exciting contest,” said Matt Branda, Director of PSoC Platform Marketing. “We’re hopeful that even more engineers will be able to participate and truly make this contest competitive.”