Ericsson's telecommunications medal and prize awarded to Ciaran Craughan
2o December 2002

This year's Ericsson medal and prize for the most outstanding project in telecommunications engineering at DCU has been awarded to Ciaran Craughan, a graduate of the School of Electronic Engineering. Ciaran who was awarded a first class honours B.Eng. degree in November 2002 also receives a prize of €1,000 for his project, "Design and development of a generic protocol/test coverage tool suite".

The award ceremony was held in DCU's Research and Engineering Building on Thursday December 19 2002 and was attended by Liam Hickey, Ultan O'Gorman and Joe Doyle of Ericsson. Ciaran, who is currently employed as an Information Systems Engineer with EIRE Systems, an IT consultancy company based in Tokyo Japan, was unable to attend. He was, however, represented by his father Mr Eamon Craughan of Athboy, Co Meath.

Jim Dowling, head of the school of electronic engineering expressed his appreciation to Ericsson's for their continued involvement with the school and with RINCE, the national centre for research excellence in information and communications technology based in the school.

Liam Hickey said that the relationship between Ericsson and DCU gives the company a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The university produced excellence graduates who have the ability and expertise to work on world-class projects. "The graduates of DCU are not only of an exceptionally high standard, but they are forward-thinking", he said.

Ciaran spent six months of his third year working at PMC-Sierra as part of DCU's INTRA programme. PMC-Sierra develop chips to be used in the routers and switches that regulate the flow of information through the Internet. The research for his fourth-year project, for which he was awarded this year's Ericsson Medal and Prize, began during his time at PMC-Sierra.

As a result of his research, Ciaran developed a software tool that works with existing chip design tools to verify the correctness of a new design. He concentrated on chips that implement industry standard communication 'protocols' such as EtherNet and PoS. The graphical user interface (GUI) he designed has resulted in the chip design tool being much easier to use.