Queen Elizabeth Prize awarded to creators of digital imaging sensors

Eric Fossum, George Smith, Nobukazu Teranishi and Michael Tompsett were announced as the winners by Lord Browne of Madingley in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London today.

Lord Brown, chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation said: “The winners [were] selected primarily on two criteria; one is global excellence, it has to be something that is extraordinary and changes the way in which people behave, people live or people survive, or people prosper. Secondly, it’s designed to inspire people to do the same thing, young people to saying ‘yes, we’d like to be engineers and we’d like to achieve something very important for humanity’."

The four engineers were acknowledged for developing technologies that have attained a certain ubiquity in the modern world, starting in 1970 with the development of the ‘charge coupling principle’ (William Boyle (deceased) and Smith)), an idea that was taken forward by Tompsett and his team with the first imaging circuits using a charge-coupled device.