Electronics enterprise is big hit in Queen's Awards14 electronics firms feature in the export and innovation categories of Queen's Awards for Enterpise. Richard BallThe government has published winners of this year's Queen's Awards for Enterprise with 14 going to UK electronics firms.
This year's awards follow a new format, with 77 awards being made for international trade, 32 for innovation, and seven awards for environmental achievement.
Electronics companies feature in the first two categories, mainly receiving honours for trade performance.
Receiving the international trade gongs are Alcatel Submarine Networks, Applied Satellite Technology, Epichem, Flomerics, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, Oxford Magnet Technology, Pascall Electronics, Psion Dacom, Semefab and Tesla Engineering.
Innovation awards go to Alcatel Submarine Networks, Imagination Technologies and Nortel Networks (Northern Ireland).
The PowerVR division of Imagination Technologies has won awards both for trade and innovation. The division designs and licenses high end 3D graphics processors.
"Winning awards for both innovation and international trade clearly recognises the company's capability and accomplishment in both creation of leading edge technologies and their successful marketing," said Hossein Yassaie, chief executive of Imagination Technologies.
PowerVR is licensed by NEC and STMicroelectronics and is used in the Sega Dreamcast games console and the Naomi arcade game system.
Also honoured in both categories is Alcatel Submarine Networks. Its innovation award is for the development of high capacity intercontinental optical transmission systems. The use of wavelength division multiplexing has allowed for large capacity increases at relatively little extra cost.
Flomerics has succeeded in the competitive design automation market with its thermal analysis products. Exports account for almost 90 per cent of the Surrey company's £8.7m turnover.
Its main software product, Flotherm, uses computational fluid dynamics to predict airflow and hot spots in electronics equipment such as desktop PCs.
Psion Dacom is winning a Queen's Award for the first time. It markets a number of mobile communications and connectivity products such as the Gold Card and Gold Port USB range.
The firm sells its products in 46 different countries, nine of them added in the last three years.
Pascall Electronics, based on the Isle of Wight, has quadrupled its exports over the past three years.
Working in the avionics and satellite communications markets, the firm has seen greatest success with power supplies for in-flight entertainment systems and carrier monitoring equipment used in over 450 satellite earth stations.
Scottish semiconductor manufacturer Semefab has won its second award for trade, the last coming in 1994. Exports of its Asic and micromechanical devices have gone up over 120 per cent in the past three years. It has achieved considerable success in the automnotive sector.
Tesla Engineering, formed in 1993, sell electromagnets to manufacturers of magnetic resonance imaging systems and to high energy physics labs.
In a similar vein, Oxford Magnet Technology also supplies magnets, mainly for medical imaging. Jointly owned by Siemens and Oxford Instruments, the firm is a regular at the Queen's Awards, winning export awards in 1985 and 1992, and a technology award in 1996.
Winning an award for innovation is Nortel Networks (Northern Ireland). The County Antrim division gained recognition for its synchronous digital hierarchy and fibre optic multiplexer products operating at 600Mbit/s and 2.4Gbit/s. Three main innovations in the development were high levels of integration, an architecture optimised for reuse and scalability, and comprehensive hardware simulation.