AVALON 2019 Defence SME Innovation Grant:
The judges have recommended this go to CryoClock Pty Limited of Adelaide, SA, for developing the “Sapphire Clock” product range.
This award-winning technology provides signals that are up to 1,000 times more precise than any other commercial system: it is so precise, it gains or loses only one second over 40 million years. The Sapphire Clock has been incorporated into the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN), whose upgrade aims to improve its ability to detect slow moving objects among significant background clutter, enabling JORN to see smaller objects, travelling slower, at much greater range. The impact of the Sapphire Clock in improving end-to-end radar sensitivity and resolution is such that it has been likened by Defence to “jumping the project forward by 20 years in just one day”.