Announcing the 2025 LEAP Awards in industrial automation

Now in its eighth year, Design World’s annual Awards in Leadership in Engineering Achievement Program highlights innovation and engineering achievements from around the globe. This year, the expert independent judging panel reviewed dozens of submissions to award gold, silver, and bronze winners across multiple categories.

The following products were recognized in the 2025 LEAP Awards in Industrial Automation for their innovative value.

Industrial automation: Bronze

TE Connectivity  — Solderless Terminal solution for fan-motor applications

A new miniaturized solution offers engineers the same wire range of existing MAG-MATE terminals but with much smaller body size to eliminate the need for soldering and improve fan-motor applications. Magnet wire in the coil and external lead wire are both connected via a solderless solution.

The bottom magnet wire adopts IDC structure that makes airtight connection with the magnet wire without requiring someone to prestrip the insulation skin. The wire can puncture and peel off the insulation skin without damaging the internal conductor.

The top is connected to a Pin-Lok terminal using a tab to replace preexisting solder-based connection, and the connection between the Pin-Lok terminal and the tab can help prevent reverse insertion and interlocking.

The total solution can be applied in compact motor applications to deliver design flexibility. With that, terminal material usage reduced 37.7%, cavity HSG space reduced 33.5%, assemble pitch reduced 9% that help design engineers trim costs and improve production efficiency. This solution can enable design engineers to reach automation, improve the throughput of the production line, and reduce the overall production cost of the product. Plus, soldering-free connections avoid environmental pollution and product functional instability caused by soldering quality. This product is suitable for HVAC systems, ceiling fans, and other industrial applications.

Industrial automation: Silver

Beckhoff Automation  — LLC MX-System

The cabinet-free MX-System enables new automation-design approaches to transform how machines are designed across industries. As a modular control cabinet replacement that can also be decentralized on the machine or line, the IP67-rated MX-System dramatically trims engineering, assembly, installation, and maintenance work for numerous applications.

At its core, the MX-System is a modular IP67-rated control hardware platform. Via machine-mounted baseplates and pluggable function modules, the MX-System combines power distribution, PC-based automation, drive technology, I/O, safety, and more into a unified platform that installs directly on the machine — no cabinet required. With the MX-System, machine builders, system integrators, and end users can choose between the new cabinet-free alternative to automation, traditional in-cabinet control, or a hybrid.

The hardware integrates seamlessly with Beckhoff’s existing range of hardware and software technologies via EtherCAT industrial Ethernet and standard TwinCAT automation software.

There’s almost no programming and networking learning curve for engineers already familiar with the Beckhoff ecosystem.

A complete MX-System can be setup in just one hour, including final testing. A comparable control cabinet might need 24 or more hours of total setup time. In this way, the MX-System directly counters skilled-worker shortages, as tasks are greatly simplified and take far less time to complete. Plus, wiring errors are completely eliminated.

Industrial automation: Gold

AutomationDirect — C-more CM5 Headless HMI

A new headless HMI from Automation has all the functionality of the C-more CM5 touchpanel HMIs sans display-size restrictions. This HDMI-enabled device works with televisions, monitors, projectors, and most any other HDMI display device to display realtime operational data or messages. Or, engineers can eschew a local display and use the remote-access feature to feed machine data to any Windows PC web browser or Apple iOS and Android devices with the C-more Remote HMI mobile app.

The CM5-RHMI:

• Supports numerous screen resolutions including VGA 640×480, SD 720×480, XGA 1024×768, HD 1280×720, and FHD 1920×1080.
• Provides an SD card slot for log files, project memory, or graphic media.
• Offers 90 MB of user memory.
• Is $599 and comes with a two-year warranty.

Four integrated USB ports allow connections to industrial touchscreen monitors that support the USB interface … or they can be used for USB mouse operations. The two serial ports and two 10/100 Base-T Ethernet ports connect all major protocols and enable easy simultaneous connections to multiple devices.

All CM5 HMIs use free configuration software with C-more’s legendary ease of use. The software has a time-saving project simulator, Event Manager, flexible recipes, screen objects, trend graphs, PID faceplates, true historical data logging, and EA9-to-CM5 conversion.