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XCAM Ltd snaps up NTI grant.
22/02/2010
When your business involves using technology that is so cutting-edge that it needs constantly reinventing, it is vital that you have the resources to keep up with your competitors.
XCAM Ltd in Moulton, Northampton, make custom digital cameras for medical and science experiments. Their cameras are so specialised they often use technology developed for space science and frequently have to design one-off items for highly specialised ‘world-first ‘projects.
When their vacuum test facility began to show signs of wear and tear, the need for a replacement was urgent. Moisture and any form of contamination can potentially damage the expensive sensors when they are under test in the system at very cold temperatures, and the nine year old chamber was not designed to provide the levels of cleanliness which are required for today’s top end science products.
XCAM have also developed a technology transfer relationship with scientists at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, who have developed digital cameras that take spectacular images of the universe from some of the world’s largest ground-based telescopes; these images can have a higher resolution than the Hubble space telescope. XCAM engineers are designing science cameras around this leading-edge electronics in a way that will permit them to offer new types of cameras for scientific and medical research experiments. This work too, required new expensive instruments which was prohibitively expensive.
New up-to-date equipment to assist them to address these equipment issues would cost over £20,000, so XCAM turned to the East Midlands New Technology Initiative for help.
Karen Holland, XCAM Ltd CEO said: “We were beginning to have some problems using our existing testing facilities and needed to build new equipment which was guaranteed to eliminate the danger of contamination. We also needed much faster instruments than we currently have in order to deal with the new technology transfer electronics we are using.
“We are a small company, but we need to be able to have access to the same standard of equipment that larger organisations have in order to be able to compete effectively and grow. Suitable equipment is absolutely crucial.
“The NTI grant really helped us to buy what we needed and couldn’t otherwise afford. The new vacuum test facility and high speed instrumentation is incredibly important to us and means that we can compete internationally for larger contracts, and continue to develop even more advanced cutting-edge camera systems.”
As part of their NTI grant application businesses must send one or more employees on an NTI approved course. Karen added: “My heart sank when I heard that the grant required an employee to do a level 3 or 4 equivalent course; in a business working at this level, most of our staff already have very high level qualifications or equivalent experience. But when we explored the opportunities further we found excellent European Space Agency-approved courses on space quality soldering techniques and making cables for space applications.
“The NTI had the flexibility to let us take courses which were industry appropriate. It has been particularly useful to have Laura Wood from the NTI Health and Bioscience Network so close at Northampton University. She gave us a lot of good information and advice relating to the application, and when we were busy, she offered to visit us in order to help move the application forward which was enormously helpful.”
Laura added: “This is what the network is all about: being able to assist companies in development not only in gaining capital equipment but also up skilling their staff. As the project manager it’s great to see a company really benefit from the grant and see how this can help businesses achieve what they necessarily would not have been able to do, and in XCAM’s case this has been a great story.”