2006 Vic Award
The 2006 Victorian Pearcey Award was presented to Dr Anthony Overmars.
Dr Anthony Overmars
Dr Overmars has a background in electrical engineering, robotics and control systems.
He has Masters in Engineering and a PhD from Swinburne University of Technology and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Melbourne.
In 1986 he founded Softronics Pty Ltd.
Softronics initially developed and manufactured emulators which enabled their customers to develop and debug processing systems for a wide range of ICT products.
Although manufacturers of particular processing chips provide debugging and development tools for their own products, many products now integrate multiple processors from different manufacturers.
For instance a typical mobile phone may have within it three separate processing chips (or computers), each of which must be programmed and organized to interact with the others. Softronics has developed tools (hardware and software) which allow developers to test, monitor and debug systems which, although they operate concurrently, are collections of different hardware platforms.
Today Softronics products are used by almost all major chip and product developers worldwide, including Nokia/Siemens, Texas Instruments and Motorola. 90% of Softronics business is export, with twenty distributors worldwide.
Anthony is presently developing a universal or generic emulator/debugger which, uses open systems and standard hardware and can be applied to a broad range of chips. His plan is to provide a "one solution fits all" embedded software debugging platform which will be the system of choice for manufacturers and designers.
He also plays an active role in research and post-graduate programs at Swinburne University and at The University of Melbourne
