KUALA LUMPUR, 18th October 2026 – Five university students who designed the “brain” of a toll lane that charges drivers without stopping them at a barrier have won the ChampionCHIP eXperience –Malaysia Edition, a Malaysia–Brazil IC design talent programme that ended with its Demo Day on 17th October at AiSEM@Selangor 2026 (AI & Semiconductor Summit) in Kuala Lumpur.
Team No Jam took first place with LaneX, an edge controller for multi-lane free-flow tolling. Running on RVBL-2, a processor the team designed from scratch, the controller decides for every passing vehicle whether to charge it, photograph it or raise an alarm, and digitally signs each decision so it can’t be forged. The design passed every organiser test on an AWS FPGA on its first attempt. The team also built a working model toll lane, complete with a 3D-printed gantry, to show it in action.
Team Maroon 5 placed second with Underpass Sentinel, a flood early-warning system for urban underpasses. It reads water-level sensors in real time, checks the data with a hardware error-detection engine, projects how fast the water is rising, and switches on a pump, warning beacon and barrier gate before conditions turn dangerous.
Team Corex came third with RackSentinel, a safety controller that protects data centre racks from overheating, electrical overloads and water leaks. When it detects a critical fault, it triggers an emergency power-off and keeps it locked until the rack is safe to reset, while logging what went wrong for engineers to investigate.
All three winning designs run on processors the teams built themselves and were tested on AWS FPGA F2 hardware. As champions, No Jam receives a ChipInventor FPGA development board and a one-year EDA software licence.
From 300 places to 654 participants
Launched at SEMICON Southeast Asia on 7th May 2026, ChampionCHIP set out to train 300 Malaysian STEM university students. It drew 943 sign-ups and 654 participants from 90 local and international institutions. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) sent the most participants with 190, followed by Universiti Malaya (UM) with 88, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) with 29 and Asia Pacific University (APU) with 27. The programme also attracted participants from NTU Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.
Over five months, participants worked through self-paced study in digital fundamentals and RTL design, a five-week IC design challenge, and a month of hands-on prototyping on AWS FPGA F2, using ChipInventor’s cloud-based EDA platform. The field was narrowed to 100 semi-finalists and then 10 finalist teams of five, who presented at the Demo Day.
“We initially targeted 300 students, but the overwhelming response exceeded our expectations, with more than 650 participants joining the programme. This was also our first attempt at running a predominantly online IC design challenge, so it was encouraging to see 40 teams taking part,” said Angel Low, General Manager of the Advanced Semiconductor Academy of Malaysia (ASEM).
“What impressed me most was how the students went beyond designing chips to thinking about their real-world applications. In the industry, chip designers often work based on specifications provided by customers, with limited exposure to the end applications. Through ChampionCHIP, we wanted students to think differently — to identify real problems, develop their own solutions and understand how chip design can create value. This is the kind of creativity and problem-solving mindset we hope to nurture in Malaysia’s next generation of IC designers.”
Building Malaysia’s IC design talent pipeline
ChampionCHIP is led by the Advanced Semiconductor Academy of Malaysia (ASEM), with support from Sidec and the Malaysia Semiconductor IC Design Park. Its Brazilian partners are Von Braun Labs and the Embassy of Brazil in Malaysia, under the Brazil Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Innovation Diplomacy Programme. Cyberview and VSTECS are the main sponsors, with AWS as technical and support partner.
“Brazil and Malaysia are both countries with talent, creativity and technological aspirations. We should not see ourselves simply as consumers of technologies developed elsewhere. We can develop knowledge. We can train people. We can innovate. And, most importantly, we can do it together,” said Her Excellency Daniella Ortega de Paiva Menezes, Ambassador of Brazil to Malaysia.
ChampionCHIP supports the talent agenda of the National Semiconductor Strategy (NSS), which aims to move Malaysia beyond manufacturing into higher-value IC design. The programme is designed as an early entry point to the field, with participants able to continue into ASEM’s training programmes, internships and roles at Malaysia Semiconductor IC Design Park companies.
