Smiths Group businesses win two prestigious Queens Awards Aerospace

Smiths Aerospace, part of the global engineering business Smiths Group, is today honoured with a 2006 Queens Award for Innovation.

It has won the Queens Award for Enterprise 2006 in Innovation for the Remote Interface Unit (RIU) product family. The RIU family of units brings a simple, modular design approach to typically complex aircraft electronics. 

Dr John Ferrie, President, Smiths Aerospace, commented: "We are delighted and proud to receive the Queens Award. Our world leading Remote Interface Unit is the result of focused investment in technology and the dedicated efforts of our most talented people.

The Remote Interface Unit (RIU) product family is a range of units that offer incredible flexibility with the ability to digitise real world signals like voltage, current, frequency and temperature, and effectively communicate this to a large number of aircraft systems over the central nervous system of a modern aircraft - its communication network.

Benefits of the RIU product family include the way in which one design can be reused on many different aircraft and in different ways without having to start from scratch each time saving both time and money, and minimising development risk.  This provides aircraft manufacturers with simplified aircraft electronics, lower development and unit costs, shortened development lead-times, reduced development risk, and weight (fuel) savings.

The RIU family supports the aerospace industrys transition to Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architectures providing a standardised unit that can interface to multiple types of aircraft sensors, and communicate with centralised computing resources.

ENDS

Queens Awards

The Queens Awards for Enterprise are the UKs most prestigious awards for business performance. They recognise and reward outstanding achievement by UK companies.