2003 Product of the Year Awards

The Signature Room at the John Hancock Center in Chicago was again the setting for the presentation of the annual NASA Tech Briefs Readers' Choice Product of the Year Awards. Held in conjunction with National Manufacturing Week, the ninth annual event featured the presentation of the Gold, Silver, and Bronze award winners. Nine finalists also were recognized at the awards reception.

The top three winners were chosen by the more than 195,000 readers of NASA Tech Briefs from a field of 12 nominees - each of which had been highlighted throughout 2003 as a Product of the Month. Each month, the editors of NASA Tech Briefs choose one new product with exceptional technical merit and practical value to the readers of NTB, designating it as Product of the Month.

The 12 finalists are placed on an on-line ballot, and the readers are asked to select the one product among those 12 that they feel was the most important new introduction to the engineering community in 2003. The product receiving the most votes is named Gold Winner and Product of the Year; the Silver and Bronze winners receive the second- and third-highest number of votes, respectively.

The 2003 Gold Award and Product of the Year was presented to Raytek Corp. of Santa Cruz, CA, for the ThermoView Ti30(TM) portable thermal imager. The award was accepted by Jason Wilbur, Raytek's Thermography Market Manager.

"I would like to thank NASA Tech Briefs, and most importantly your readers, for awarding Raytek Product of the Year honors for our ThermoView Ti30 thermal imager," said Wilbur. "I am extremely fortunate to be accepting this award, considering I have only been the Ti30 product manager for two weeks.

"I am really accepting this award on behalf of the entire Raytek team in Santa Cruz, CA. It is their creativity and hard work that is being honored here tonight," he added. "They set out to create a thermal imager that truly met the needs of a wide range of customers, including plant maintenance professionals, engineers, and building inspectors, while keeping the technology affordable. Our hope is that with the ThermoView Ti30, many more customers will benefit from the powerful technology that is thermal imaging."

Named Product of the Month last June, Raytek's ThermoView Ti30 lets users with minimal training conduct inspection and equipment troubleshooting. The handheld unit weighs only 2.2 pounds, and provides image scanning and radiometric measurements on a large LCD screen. Images are saved for downloading into Inside IR(TM) thermal analysis and reporting software, which comes with the imager. The device uses a type L2 single-dot laser target sight and can store up to 100 temperature-calibrated images and data.

(www.raytek.com)

Texas Instruments (TI), Dallas, TX, took home the Silver Award for the MSC1200 data acquisition system on a chip from the company's Burr-Brown product line. Carl Wolfe, analog field specialist with the High Performance Analog Semiconductor Group of BurrBrown, accepted the award for the system, which was the December 2003 Product of the Month.

The system integrates a 24-bit delta-sigma, analog-to-digital converter with an 8051 processor core, flash memory, internal oscillator, and peripherals. The system enables high-resolution measurement in industrial process control, portable instrumentation, smart transmitters, and chromatography.

(www.ti.com)

The Bronze Award was presented to National Instruments of Austin, TX for LabVIEW 7 Express graphical programming software, which was chosen Product of the Month last July. Nicole McGarry, LabVIEW team leader and product manager, accepted the award for the latest release of LabVIEW.

This release extended the software to a range of platforms, including embedded FPGAs, Palm OS, and Microsoft Pocket PC PDAs. It features more than 40 Express VIs that encapsulate measurement functionality in interactive virtual instruments (VIs) for common measurement applications such as data acquisition, signal analysis, and file I/O. The software also includes modules for real-time embedded control, and datalogging and supervisory control.

(www.ni.com/labview)