Startup of 2003 to start 2004 with two wins

RF Engines - the signal processing specialist awarded the "Startup company of the year" in this year's prestigious European Electronics Industry Awards, saw a record year in 2003.

RF Engines - the signal processing specialist awarded the "Startup company of the year" in this year's prestigious European Electronics Industry Awards, saw a record year in 2003.

Twelve new contracts were signed with major companies for their advanced designs, worth over $1.5 million.

The company specialises in advanced signal processing system designs and IP core designs for FPGAs, for supply to companies in the defence, test instrumentation and communications market areas.

2004 will get off to a flying start with the announcement of two more contracts.

The first is with one of the leading defence companies in Turkey.

For commercial reasons, details of the customer and the specific application are not available for publication.

However, what can be revealed is that RFEL is supplying a design from its Vectis "Quadspeed" range of high performance Radix 2 pipelined FFT signal processing designs, this particular design having a 400Msample/s rate complex input, and is to be used for a surveillance application.

The RFEL Vectis pipelined FFT design range are relevant where high sample rate real-time processing is demanded, and are particularly relevant for design into electronic warfare, radar, sonar, surveillance and communication systems.

John Summers, RFEL's VP of Sales and Business Development, comments: "We are pleased to be working with such an important customer in support of its advanced electronic systems and communications design work.

They have a very strong and growing reputation in this area and we are pleased to be associated with its highly respected development programme".

A spokesperson for the customer comments: "We intend to maintain our position at the forefront of defence and communication technology development.

The RFEL design integrates well with our current project work, and is proven technology in this highly specialist area of signal processing, and most importantly is available now in a tested and proven form".

The second contract is for an advanced signal processing measurement design, from one of the world's leading test equipment manufacturers.

The major contract provides access to the latest high-speed FPGA signal processing techniques from RFEL's patented range of designs.

The first instrument to include the technology is scheduled for launch in early 2004 and will provide a high-speed, specialised spectrum analysis capability.

The precise applications are being kept under wraps at the moment, however the new digital IF designs replace the analogue IF strip as used in most existing instruments.

This approach achieves the benefits of real time spectral measurements, lower material costs, and reduced production setup costs, but without losing the feel and functions of traditionally designed instruments.

John Lillington, CTO of RFEL, adds: "This is a significant break through in the test instrumentation market.

The evolution from traditional analogue or simple DSP processing over to high-speed FPGA based designs is a significant step forward.

Our customer has shown that it has both the vision and the capability to adopt this innovative technology and incorporate it in its radical new designs.

This will certainly maintain their position as one of the leaders in this industry and also help broaden the scope of the application of our technologies into new and important market sectors".

A spokesperson for the instrumentation customer adds: "Speed, accuracy, and cost are important issues in this competitive market.

The work with RFEL will enable us to leverage maximum performance out of the silicon and supply our customers with instruments of superior performance at the right price.

We are very excited at the prospects for our new products in this area".

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