Natick, MA July 15

Donald K Mitchell was announced as the winner of the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. The award acknowledges his technological innovations and entrepreneurial success in growing MicroE Systems to $30 million in annual sales.

Established in 1994, sales and market share rapidly grew with the introduction of the PA 2000 micropositioning system. The system was based on innovative encoder technology developed by Mitchell. Today, nearly 70% of all disk drives worldwide are manufactured using the company’s micropositioning products. In addition, Mr. Mitchell’s designs have enabled the disk drive industry to increase drive capacity from 200MB in 1995 to 100GB today.

Mr. Mitchell and his product development team have added to these achievements with the introduction of a revolutionary encoder technology dubbed the Mercury Series. The Mercury Series is the first programmable encoder family, and it is the smallest high performance encoder family in the industry.

As testament to Mitchell’s success, MicroE Systems is now a worldwide company with offices across the United States, Europe and Asia and it possesses some of the world’s leading OEMs as loyal customers.