RF Engines wins Queen’s Award for Innovation

The Queen’s Award for Enterprise is the UK’s most prestigious Award for business performance and recognises and rewards outstanding achievement by UK companies. The Innovation category is for continuous innovation and development, sustained over not less than five years to levels that are outstanding for the size of a company’s operations.

John Summers, RFEL’s CEO, said, “It is a very great honour to win this Award. The Queen’s Awards are internationally recognised markers of excellence. To win in the Innovation category against the stiff competition for these Awards is a tremendous testament to our team of outstanding engineers who have created world-class solutions that bring in business from multinational companies and defence organisations around the world.”

RFEL is a privately held company based on the Isle of Wight that was formed in 2000 and now employs over 20 highly qualified designers. It has been profitable for several years and has been steadily growing year on year both in revenue terms and head count. RFEL's customers are mainly 'Tier 1' companies in each of its main markets, including Thales, Qinetiq, UK Ministry of Defence, Rheinmetall (Germany), CEA (France), Agilent (Switzerland) and LIG Nex1(Korea), as well as many other major international clients.

The company develops (and patents as appropriate) products based on high performance, state-of-the-art, digital signal processing techniques that are then implemented on the very latest FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), which possess enormous computing power. These are incorporated into an increasing number of RFEL’s own products as well as their customers’ products, all of which are benefiting from quick and accurate signal detection, low power usage and compactness.

RFEL’s solutions have a variety of applications, and are embedded in the design of efficient wireless communication (satellite and terrestrial) networks, test and measurement instrumentation, homeland security surveillance systems, specialised wideband receivers/transceivers and in systems to detect signals from fast moving missiles or other military threats.