We are pleased to announce that Oliver Leisten, Chief Technology Officer at Helix Geospace has been listed within the united Kingdom’s 36 top CTO’s in the manufacturing space, as part of Boardroom Media’s CTO Showcase.
Featuring at number 28, Boardroom Media track over 1,000,000 startups and over 5,000,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. Individuals are assessed on their contribution four categories: Innovation, Growth, Management and Societal impact.
Plessey Avionics and Communications sponsored Oliver’s studies in electronic and electrical engineering at Loughborough University, and Philips Research Labs funded his pursuit of a PhD in solid state microwave electronics at the University of Kent.
Since 1990 he has worked on satellite receiver and antenna design: amassing over 40 patents and an impressive list of frequently cited publications. Starting his career with integrated circuit receiver design he then focused on designing miniature dielectric-loaded antennas. Now utilising his accumulated knowledge, he leads an innovation team at Helix to develop arrays of small antennas tasked to the positioning of autonomous vehicles to a 10 cm accuracy in urban environments.
Helix Geospace is taking the intellectual property to a higher level: augmenting the conventional GNSS measurement of time of arrival of the GNSS signal with the direction of arrival to build measurement checking as a basis for resilient GNSS.
You can view the full list here
Helix focuses on high performance antenna technology for satellite communications and resilient PNT (Position, Navigation and Timing). With variants for GPS, Galileo GNSS constellations and the Iridium LEO satcomms constellation, Helix antennas are multifrequency resonant devices with tightly targeted frequency discrimination. They utilise multiple helical conductor filaments on a high dielectric constant ceramic core. The selective nature of the design assures integrity of data delivered to the receiver enabling positional accuracy to 10cm to be computed, and high levels of resilience against environmental and deliberate disruption. The helical antenna resonance means that troublesome reflected signals, typical of modern cities’ ‘urban canyons’ are ignored, while the on-frequency accuracy makes the system resilient to ‘noisy neighbour’ spectrum interference and deliberate jamming. All this comes in a compact and robust form factor light enough for drones and small enough for vehicle aesthetics. Using this best-in-class antenna technology enables the CRPx anti-jamming/spoofing systems deliver the optimum defence against malicious attempts to undermine satellite navigation and communications with the best SWaP-C.
