Finalists build underpass flood alarm, data centre safety controller
Five university students who designed the “brain” of a barrier-free toll lane have won a contest at Selangor AI & Semiconductor Summit (AiSEM@Selangor 2026).
Team No Jam took first place at ChampionChip eXperience – Malaysia Edition, a Malaysia-Brazil integrated circuit (IC) design talent programme.
The team’s winning project was 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 cannot be forged.
The design passed every organiser test on an AWS FPGA (Amazon Web Services Field Programmable Gate Array, a reconfigurable integrated circuit) on its first attempt.
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 proceeds to switch 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 shutdown 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.
Team No Jam’s members were Liaw Chee Jian and Ong Ting Haw from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Nicholas Choong Chen Juin (Monash University Malaysia), Rachel Low Sin Yan (Taylor’s University) and Fong Chee Keat, a graduate from Tunku Abdul Rahman University of Management and Technology (TAR UMT).
Launched at Semicon South-East Asia summit in May, ChampionChip set out to train 300 Malaysian science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) university students.
It drew 943 signups and 654 participants from 90 local and international institutions.
UTM sent the most participants with 190, followed by Universiti Malaya (88), Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (29) and Asia-Pacific University (27).
The programme also attracted participants from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University 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 in Kuala Lumpur.
The programme targeted 300 students but more than 650 participants joined.
“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 Advanced Semiconductor Academy of Malaysia (Asem) general manager Angel Low.
“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 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,” said Angel.
This was the kind of creativity and problem-solving mindset the academy hoped to nurture in Malaysia’s next generation of IC designers, she said.
ChampionChip is led by Asem, with support from Selangor Information Technology and Digital Economy Corporation (Sidec) and 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 were the main sponsors, with AWS as technical and support partner.
“Brazil and Malaysia are both countries with talent, creativity and technological aspirations,” said Brazil ambassador to Malaysia Daniella Ortega de Paiva Menezes.
“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,” she said.
The ChampionChip programme is designed as an early entry point to the field of IC design, with participants able to continue into Asem’s training programmes, internships and roles in Malaysia Semiconductor IC Design Park companies.
