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must have. Our last developments have been made with these requirements in mind, and with the Ekinox series we start to address the low cost underwater navigation market. There is still a long way to go before offering low power, small sized and cost effective INS with gyro compassing that is a mandatory feature to completely cover subsea market needs. Subsea Science, Defense and Offshore Energy are the big drivers in the subsea sector. Please discuss the importance of each to your business? For SBG Systems, the offshore market is clearly driving our subsea business. This market is constantly looking at new solutions with increased accuracy or better prices. For this market, the main concern is always the system reliability and availability. In addition, offshore / energy customers want a straightfor- ward integration with a very responsive support. At SBG Sys- tems, we do our best to provide a very high quality support with free of charge support, updates and improvements. Subsea science is our second most important market as new technologies enable new research projects. The ratio between the cost, the accuracy, the size and the power consumption is a very important factor for this market. Finally, the marine defense industry is a promising market for SBG System as the need to offer smaller and lower cost so- lutions such as divers navigation is more and more important. In your opinion, what are the top two or three technical drivers that have had the most dra- matic impact on your products, your business in the past fi ve years, and why? Clearly to provide an accurate subsea Inertial Navi- gation System, you need good gyroscopes and accelerome- ters. In the last past fi ve years, MEMS technology has dramat- ically improved and can now easily compete with FOG based gyroscopes on some parameters such as the angular random walk (noise at 1 second) and the bias instability. Low noise www.seadiscovery.com Marine Technology Reporter 27 MTR #5 (18-33).indd 27 6/9/2014 12:21:57 PM
