£400,000 award to three Irish firms helps create 90 jobs

THREE Irish companies have won £400,000 in financial assistance to support joint ventures with US companies, creating up to 90 new jobs.

The three Radius 1996 award winners were announced last night at the conference.

The companies are involved in a spread of technologies from medical diagnostics and software development to computer chip design. The winning joint ventures are Biosyn in Belfast, Facility Management Workshop in Dundalk and Integrated Silicon Systems from Belfast.

The awards were made under the International Fund for Ireland's science and technology programme, which is administered by Forbairt.

Announcing the awards Mr James Lyons, US observer to the fund, said the range of partnerships bore testament to the innovative and far reaching nature of the programme.

Facility Management will be working with Inform Worldwide in Denver to develop a GIS based application product for cable TV and telecommunications. The internationally traded software services company hopes to expand from employing 11 people to 98 within two years.

Biosyn, a spin off company from Queen's University in Belfast, will be linking with ICN Pharmaceuticals in California to develop and market a range of non radioactive diagnostic test kits. The grant means the company will be taking on three new people immediately and four more when the project moves into the production phase.

Integrated Silicon Systems is linking with Xilinx of San Jose, California, to develop and market a new chip for use in producing high performance digital signal processing systems. The project will result in two extra jobs at the company immediately,

The radius programme, Research And Development between Ireland and the US, was launched in January 1996 with a budget of $750,000 (£468,000). Given the success of the fund its budget will be increased next year, a spokesman for the fund said.