Garden lights shine on their creator

Integrated Electronic Solutions (IES) was presented the EIA Gold Cup for Excellence in Engineering and Commercialisation, during the Electronics Industry Association (EIA) annual dinner, by EIA president Peter Charlesworth.

IES is a South Australian-based company that specialises in the design and manufacture of microelectronic components for consumer products such as kettles and hair straighteners. The company's products include integrated circuits (silicon chips), thick film hybrids (ceramic substrate) and surface-mounted printed circuit board assemblies and modules.

IES was awarded the Gold Cup for the design and commercialisation of an integrated circuit used in a range of lighting products (including garden solar lamps) in North America. First production orders were placed in 2004 for three million circuits, increasing to a total of 20 million to date.

Anthony Kittel, managing director of Redarc Electronics, won the Legrand Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award for his research, design and manufacture of a range of electronic voltage converters, inverters, power supplies, battery chargers, electrics brake products and associated automotive products for the transportation industry.

A new award introduced last year was created to recognise the Electronic Graduate of the Year. Judges were so impressed with two of the nominations that the award was split between the top two finalists this year. Jason Turner from Redarc and David Blockow from Tenix Defence were awarded joint Advertiser Electronics Graduates of the Year.

Turner's most valuable contribution to Redarc has been some project work that has never been attempted in Australia before. This has involved the design, development and implementation of an interface device that allows an automated manual truck transmission to communicate and function in a vehicle fitted with a manual transmission. Jason presented a working prototype and then supplied the customer with some custom-made tools to fine-tune the prototype.

Blockow has shone in the area of tracking systems in his role as graduate engineer at Tenix Defence. Blockow joined Tenix after completing a Bachelor of Maths and Computer Science degree at Adelaide University almost three years ago. Since then he has been the engineer primarily responsible for the design and development of tacking systems and multiple projects including target tracking using an electro-optic camera stabilised on an unmanned aerial vehicle networking of ship-borne radar systems and sensor networking of heterogeneous sensors for surveillance work.