A winning legacy
06 November 2009
The e-Legacy awards are over for another year following a most enjoyable celebration of the winners in central London last Wednesday (4 November 2009).
The important business of the day was who won the six awards, and that distinguished list this year is made up of the following companies:
Contribution to Sustainability Award, sponsored by Ansmann
WINNER - Silicon Laboratories for the C8051f9 series – the first MCUs operating down to 0.9V
Environmental Design Award, sponsored by National Instruments
WINNER - Lattice Semiconductor’s LatticeECP3 FPGA family that only uses half the power of competitive FPGAs
Medical Advances Award, sponsored by International Rectifier
WINNER - JAOtech whose Smart Terminals have been rolled out across Sheffield Children’s Hospital to improve efficiency and accuracy of patient care.
Investment in the Environment Award, sponsored by Intersil UK
WINNER - Freescale who launched its Freescale Technology Forum Green Design Challenge.
Investment in Education Award, sponsored by Farnell
WINNER - Premier EDA for organising the Design Innovation Conference and for student sponsorships.
Contribution to Security Award, sponsored by Amplicon
WINNER - Sony whose MCB 1172-P is the smallest HD security video camera
Congratulations to them all - and all thoroughly deserved.
The event itself was hugely enjoyable - a networking event for people from all sides of the industry and proof that business and pleasure can co-exist happily. Unfortunately I punctuated the good humour with an introductory address, which I have decided to bring to you now (in abbreviated form) not because it was a sparkling bit of public speaking (it wasn’t) but because it does explain why I think the e-Legacy awards are so important. For those of you who were there, and can’t stand the thought of going through it again, look away now….
“Many of you were at this event last year. Slightly earlier in the year, in September, and all the talk around this time concerned the sub-prime-lead credit crunch. Lehman Brothers was collapsing and the amounts of money disappearing from our economies was beyond comprehension. We didn’t know how bad it was going to get, almost at that stage it was like the bad dream we hoped would go away – but of course it didn’t. It has been a shocking year for many in the electronics industry and yet, here we all are today.
We probably have seen the worst of it, although, unfortunately, we have not quite seen the end of it, but and those of us remaining, which is most of us, still face huge challenges. But before we tackle those challenges maybe we deserve to take a step back, take stock, and give ourselves a massive pat on the back for just for making it through this far. Whether you are an electronics designer, manufacturer, supplier to the industry or even part of the whole marketing and media function we have had to adapt and innovate to survive. And by having to innovate to survive, many electronics companies are excelling themselves by coming up with some remarkable products, some of which are starting to see the light of day now and are included in our medical, security, sustainability and environmental design e-Legacy categories. More will come to fruition in time for next years e-Legacy Awards.
But I do think this recession has had a more fundamental effect on society as a whole. The unshakeable belief that money makes money has been ripped apart. The notion of a virtual economy where young people could go with no qualifications and make a fortune by the time they are thirty has been hugely discredited - and the UK is near the top of the list of countries guilty of propagating that myth in the first place.
But now the bubble has burst, the reality of needing another way to generate revenue has come home to roost. In past decades maybe Britain and other countries have been a bit hasty in surrendering their manufacturing industries. But it is not too late. The skills base in science, technology and engineering is still very much alive in Western Europe, and I believe there is now at least some recognition that the technology sector needs to be encouraged and supported at a political level.
The building block for doing this has got to be education and for all that it will take political will to provide the education system with a more technological direction, it is incumbent on industry to promote ourselves and inspire the next generation of budding engineers. Companies who do this obviously put themselves at the front of the list of employment prospects for the most talented graduates, but they are also doing the industry as a whole a great service. We recognise some of these companies in the education category of e-Legacy
It may sound that I am manufacturing arguments to justify the virtues of the e-Legacy Awards, but I assure you that this is not the case. I genuinely believe that these Awards are more relevant now than they have ever been. All the great challenges facing the human race are going to be solved by engineers and scientists, not political leaders. These challenges are all around us, and include climate change, energy provision, feeding the growing population and taking care of their medical needs. Huge challenges indeed.
I think the global scale of this recession and the need, purely on economic grounds, to preserve resources has forced companies to take their environment and their environmental responsibilities more seriously. And in doing so are demonstrating that technology, despite what some of our environmentalists might believe, is not the cause of our problems, but the solution.
For all these reasons, I believe that the importance of the e-Legacy awards will only increase as years go by. It is no surprise therefore that we had more entries and votes for the finalists this year than we have ever had before. The scope and imagination of entries in all categories was, quite simply, outstanding.
Any company who finds themselves here as a finalist should therefore take huge pride in this achievement alone and it was a tough job for the judges to try and make sure that we selected the cream of the crop. However, the judges did not choose the winners. That was down to the readers of EPD who voted in their thousands – and these votes have now been counted. So now, to put the finalists are to their misery, we come to the important business of the day…”
And then we moved on to the awards themselves.
We will be making announcements soon about e-Legacy 2010 and we hope the success of this year’s event will encourage even more people to enter, to vote and to join us at out e-Legacy event next year.
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