About us

The Team

Andy Rawling, a pioneer in electronic design consultancy, began his journey at university in the 1970s. Since then, he has established and led several successful consultancies across Europe, the USA, and Malaysia. The name FIGFI, which has been synonymous with electronic design excellence since the early '80s, officially became FIGFI Limited in 2015.

Many of the consultants at FIGFI are people Andy has met or worked with over the past 40 years. FIGFI is a gathering of like-minded, experienced engineers who still enjoy designing professional products and overcoming the challenges that accompany them.

Our Expertise

In the 1970s, we started designing wireless products the hard way. Nothing digital, no processors, and often no chips at all. The designs were frequently born out of frustration at the poor quality of existing VHF and UHF transceivers and telemetry products. Diversifying into telecoms design in the '80s led onto Internet related products by the end of the millennium.

The first dedicated electronic mail terminal in the world

In 1983, we designed for British Telecom what the Science Museum in London called the first dedicated electronic mail terminal in the world.

Aimed at replacing Telex, it was called Mantis Microtex. It had word processing, a dial-up modem, error correction, encryption, and full battery backup. With software written in Forth, it unbelievably fitted in 8kB of EEprom and had 1kB of RAM!

The original BBC Microcomputer

We designed parts of the original BBC microcomputer, the modem in Apple’s first laptop, emergency communications for over 100,000 Otis elevators, telephones in the Channel Tunnel (only in the UK half), and more than 120 dial-up modems.

Powering 12 million fax machines

Our designs can be found in more than 12 million fax machines from all the major Japanese, Korean, and North American companies.

With an office in the ‘90s in Menlo Park in the centre of Silicon Valley, we participated in the birth of the Internet and worked with Intel, Sun Microsystems (Oracle), United Technologies, Xerox, Dell, IBM, Texas Instruments, AT&T, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard and Apple.

Returning to Wireless

But in the last 25 years, we have returned to our roots, focusing on designing many wireless products, including:

Over 5 million linked smoke and CO detectors split between 21 models
A million connected streetlights
Flashing wristbands
Real-time racehorse monitoring
Public utility data logging
Energy monitoring and control
Asset tracking
Marine beacons
Smart meters

and others too confidential to mention. Most are connected wirelessly, and many are approved worldwide.

We also design many specialist products, including hydrogen detectors, sewer monitors, marine and railway appliances, HazMat simulators, and drone controls.

Designing backwards compatible products to replace obsolete technology has become a speciality.