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MacRobert Award
2005 Winner
CSR plc
 CSR
plc, the Cambridge-based wireless silicon company,
has won this year's Royal Academy of Engineering
MacRobert Award for its single chip BlueCore™
family, the revolutionary devices which have fuelled
the inexorable rise of Bluetooth wireless products,
from mobile phones to medical devices.
The five-strong team of
engineers, CEO John Hodgson, Commercial Director Dr
Phil O'Donovan, Technical Director James Collier,
Sales Director Glenn Collinson and VP of Operations
Chris Ladas, receive a tax-free prize of £50,000
between them plus a gold medal for the company from
HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at Buckingham
Palace on Monday 6 June 2005. Prince Philip is the
Academy's Senior Fellow and has presented the
MacRobert Award every year since its inception in
1969.
"From a standing start in
1999, CSR has established a leading position among
the world's largest semiconductor companies," says
Dr Robin Paul FREng, Chairman of the MacRobert Award
judging panel. "They have achieved a remarkable
breakthrough to meet the Bluetooth wireless standard
proposed in 1998 on a single chip and have moved
astutely to become the global market leader, with
over 900 Bluetooth consumer products using their
chips."
"I'm delighted to see CSR
winning this year's MacRobert Award," says Academy
President Lord Broers. "They had a brilliant idea,
gathered the best engineers to develop it -
including nearly 300 people at their research
headquarters in Cambridge - and have become a global
success story by exploiting a totally new market
opportunity. This is what the MacRobert Award is all
about - seeking, seizing and securing commercial
opportunities through outstanding engineering
innovation".
CSR's key technology
breakthrough in the late 1990s was to pioneer a
silicon chip with an integral radio transmitter. "It
sounds easy but in fact the 'noise' of the
electrical signals on a tiny electronic chip would
normally swamp a radio receiver working with
micro-volt signals, and at the time it was thought
to be impossible," says Dr Phil O'Donovan, CSR's
Commercial Director and Co-founder. But James
Collier, CSR's Technical Director and Co-founder
discovered that judicious frequency planning could
enable the radio component to communicate through
the din of the silicon chip's digital traffic. This
is like the 'cocktail party' effect, where you can
hear certain voices over the crowd.
Critically, CSR's outstanding
innovation performance has been matched by
commercial success. They floated on the London Stock
Exchange in March 2004 and entered the FTSE 250 just
four months later. Since 1999 they have designed
over 30 different BlueCore™ chips, which are
manufactured in Taiwan, and the company is now
ranked number one in every Bluetooth market segment.
CSR has shipped more than 100 million chips since
its foundation, covering 60 per cent of all
qualified Bluetooth enabled products, to customers
which include industry leaders such as Nokia, Dell,
Panasonic, Sharp, Motorola, IBM, Apple, NEC,
Toshiba, RIM and Sony using BlueCore™ chips in their
range of Bluetooth products.
"Bluetooth is also being used
to create whole classes of products that were not
previously possible," says Glenn Collinson, CSR's
Sales Director and Co-founder, "such as wireless
medical devices that benefit patients and remove the
load from healthcare professionals. The LifeSync
wireless sensor and ECG monitor from GMP Wireless
Medicine Inc gives patients freedom from wires and
gives 12-lead ECG continuous monitoring and
reporting. The Digital Pulse Oximeter from Nonin
Medical Inc wirelessly measures and reports the
saturation of oxygen in arterial blood. Both of
these products use our chips."
Phil O'Donovan said, "CSR is
honoured to win the MacRobert Gold Medal. This award
is recognition of CSR's highly innovative and
commercially successful semiconductor products.
Also, it strengthens our ability to further
encourage and motivate young people coming through
the UK educational system to choose engineering as a
career".
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