Overseas
Business
For the first quarter of its 2015 fiscal year, Analog Devices reported revenue totalling $772 million, down 5% sequentially but up 23% year-over-year. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) were $0,57 based on net income of $178,8 million, an improvement over the preceding quarter’s EPS of $0,37 based on net income of $108,7 million as well as the prior year’s first quarter EPS of $0,34 based on net income of $152,6 million.
Net sales for Microchip’s third quarter of 2015 were $528,7 million, down 3,2% sequentially and up 9,6% year-on-year. Net income for the third quarter of fiscal 2015 was $86,1 million, or 39 cents per diluted share, down 8,1% compared to the immediately preceding quarter and down 18,4% compared to the prior year’s third fiscal quarter.
Sierra Wireless recorded strong annual revenue growth for 2014, with a 24,1% increase to $548,5 million. Organic revenue growth, which excludes contributions from the acquired In Motion Technology and AnyData businesses, was 18,3% compared to 2013. Net loss was $16,9 million, or $0,53 per diluted share, in 2014, compared to a net loss of $15,6 million, or $0,50 per diluted share, in 2013.
Lattice Semiconductor announced that shipments of its iCE FPGAs have reached the 250 million mark since its launch approximately three years ago. The iCE series has proved popular in the growing mobile device markets, particularly for consumer applications.
Companies
Freescale Semiconductor, having struggled ever since being bought in 2006 by Blackstone, a private equity fund which loaded $10 billion of debt onto the company, will be bought by NXP Semiconductors for $11,8 billion. The combined enterprise will be valued at just over $40 billion, with annual revenue in excess of $10 billion, and will become the market leader in automotive semiconductor solutions and in general-purpose microcontroller (MCU) products.
Molex announced that it and certain of its affiliates have acquired SDP Telecom, a Canadian manufacturer of RF/microwave solutions for the wireless communications industry. SDP will be managed by the RF/Microwave Business Unit that is part of Molex’s Global Integrated Products division.
RS Components and Allied Electronics have signed a global distribution agreement with Rosenberger, a leading manufacturer of connectivity products in the high-frequency and fibre-optic technology sectors. The Rosenberger products now stocked by RS and Allied include RF coaxial connectors, RF test and measurement products, RF connectors for automotive electronics, medical and industrial electronics, and fibre-optic products. The distributor will continue to expand the range, and will support the launch of new products with immediate availability.
Industry
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has formed a working group tasked with building the architecture for standardised mesh networking capability. Over eighty member companies have volunteered to serve on the Bluetooth Smart Mesh Working Group, among the highest of any SIG working group and demonstrating the strong industry backing for this initiative. The group is assessing many user scenarios that would benefit from mesh, including lighting, HVAC control, asset tracking and security.
While the market for mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) modules has been growing solidly for a number of years, it is poised to enter an era of unprecedented growth, according to Infonetics Research. The market is expected to account for $1,6 billion in sales for 2014, driven by M2M services reported by customers of tier 1 mobile operators. This is forecast to accelerate more noticeably in 2015, and ultimately to nearly triple to $4,5 billion by 2018.
Technology
Scientists at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have prototyped a tree that harvests solar energy from its surroundings, stores it and turns it into electricity to power small devices such as mobile phones, humidifiers, thermometers and LED light bulbs. The tree trunk is made using 3D printing technology and wood-based biomaterials, while the leaves are flexible, patterned solar panels made using another printing process. The technology can also be used to harvest kinetic energy from the environment.
An innovative FPGA (field programmable gate array) core that allows chip makers and equipment manufacturers to update normally fixed functions in silicon, has been announced by Flex Logix Technologies. EFLX cores can be integrated into communications chips, MCUs and other devices, and can be leveraged by manufacturers or end users to upgrade new products or individual systems already installed in the field. The company has begun to offer its first core, a 2500-LUT core design in TSMC’s mainstream 28 nm HPM process, to manufacturers through licensing contracts.
EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, has released the successor to CoreMark. While CoreMark stresses the CPU pipeline, CoreMark-Pro tests the entire processor, adding comprehensive support for multi-core technology, a combination of integer and floating-point workloads, and data sets for utilising larger memory subsystems. The tool is freely available, performs self-verification to ensure accurate results, and supports a process whereby users can submit their scores to the EEMBC website for users to make comparisons between processors.
Semiconductor foundry GlobalFoundries is partnering with Belgium’s Imec nanoelectronics research centre for joint research on future radio architectures and designs for highly integrated mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The pair will investigate solutions targeting improvements in area, performance and power consumption, with the ultimate aim of building a technology and design infrastructure that will enable future RF architectures while minimising critical interface requirements for radio power consumption and performance.
Microsoft researchers in Beijing have developed the world’s most advanced computerised image recognition engine. Their latest effort, based on deep convolutional neural networks, surpassed all previous levels of accuracy in testing against the ImageNet challenge data set, which is accepted as the industry yardstick. More significantly, this is the first time such a system has ever managed to eclipse the image recognition capabilities of human beings. The work is already being applied to Microsoft services like Bing image search and OneDrive. Just days after Microsoft made this announcement, Google one-upped it with accuracy levels better by 0,04%.
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