Research & development

Our aim is to make ourselves indispensable to our customers through delivering technology based solutions, by maintaining our technology leadership.

We focus our technology development on the following key areas:

• radiated and conducted EMI suppression technology, enabling proper system function in today's electrically noisy environments
• thermoelectric device and subsystem technology, enabling us to build industry leading thermal management modules and assemblies
• thermally conductive materials technology, performance critical components and solutions that allow our customers' devices to function effectively
• satellite data reception and processing technology, enabling satellite radio, GPS and multi-band signal reception and processing
• active wireless systems, firmware and hardware development, for radio modules and assemblies
• antennae design, simulation and optimisation capability; this is at the heart of our competitive advantage in the communications marketplace

Laird Technologies' Artificial Intelligence Optimiser provides the highest performance antenna design studio at significantly reduced time and development cost.

• investment in research and development in 2010 was £42.2 million before capitalised development, 7.4% of revenues
• our spend focuses on new development programmes, including redesigns for product extensions, targeted at near term customer development platforms and applications
• we also focus on product innovation for future platforms which result in completely new product families; the remaining spend is on advanced technical research, offering the greatest future potential
• we employ over 600 qualified engineers and technologists, one quarter of whom have masters' degrees or doctorates
• we possess over 700 active patents with a further 700 pending

In April 2008 we opened our new Corporate Research Laboratory in Bangalore, India providing an advanced technology research capability as well as "horizon scanning" for potential new technology opportunities and threats.

Laird Technologies' Corporate Research Laboratory in Bangalore, India will focus on fundamental material science that will provide breakthrough, new products.

We are uniquely positioned to exploit our broad range of products and technologies to deliver multifunctional value to our customers, in a number of different ways:

• technology convergence: bringing together products where the technical design characteristics are interdependent
• physical convergence: combining two or more individual products into a single component
• modules: bringing together components from a variety of sources, internal and external, to form a new multifunctional high value product
• sub-assemblies: fitting modules and other components together onto a single "deck"
• bundling: supplying a range of our individual products into a customer’s device