Overseas
Companies
• The US International Trade Commission has ruled in favour of Silicon Labs in the complaint filed against the company and several of its customers by Cresta Technology regarding patents on silicon TV tuner products. The ITC found that there was no violation committed by Silicon Labs or its customers and that all patent claims asserted by Cresta were either invalid, not infringed or both. In addition, it found that Cresta failed to satisfy the ITC’s domestic industry requirement for each patent, resulting in a separate and independent basis for the finding of no violation.
• Atmel has lost interest from Cypress Semiconductor, as the latter allowed its acquisition offer to expire. However, Atmel has a new suitor in the form of Dialog Semiconductor, which has signed an agreement to acquire it in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $4,6 billion. If approved by shareholders, the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016.
Industry
• Member countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) will soon meet to discuss implementation timeframes for a proposed expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA). The agreement was put in place as far back as 1996, and provides for participants to completely eliminate duties on certain IT products. Negotiations, which currently include 81 participants representing about 97% of world trade in IT products, have been ongoing since 2012 to update the ITA with new products not already covered. South Africa is one of just a handful of advanced economies not to be participating in the agreement.
Technology
• Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have successfully grown atomically thin 2D sheets of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites from solution. By contrast with other two-dimensional semiconductors (covalent semiconductors such as graphene, boron nitride and molybdenum disulphide) vying to become the successor to silicon, these 2D hybrid perovskites are ionic materials, which gives them special properties of their own. They exhibited efficient photoluminescence, colour-tunability, and a unique structural relaxation not found in covalent semiconductor sheets. The well defined geometry of these square-shaped 2D crystals is the mark of high-quality crystallinity, and their large size should facilitate their integration into future devices.
• STMicroelectronics has licensed new 32-bit ARMv8-R processor technology, which it will deploy in 32-bit microcontrollers targeting real-time safety-related ‘smart driving’ and industrial applications. First implementations will be used in advanced multi-core, high-performance processors for safety-related automotive devices targeting powertrain, safety and gateway applications. This processor architecture will give the company’s chips the ability to offer virtualisation and separation to improve software reliability, reduce development costs, and enable consolidation of multiple applications onto a single processing platform.
• The world’s first entirely light-based memory chip to store data permanently has been developed by material scientists at Oxford University and University of Münster in collaboration with scientists at Karlsruhe and Exeter. The device, which uses the phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) – the same as that used in rewritable CDs and DVDs – to store data, has the potential to dramatically improve the speed of modern computing. It uses a small section of GST on top of a silicon nitride ridge, known as a waveguide, to carry light. The team has shown that intense pulses of light sent through the waveguide can carefully change the state of the GST. An intense pulse causes it to momentarily melt and quickly cool, causing it to assume an amorphous structure; a slightly less intense pulse can put it into a crystalline state. By sending different wavelengths of light through the waveguide at the same time – a technique referred to as wavelength multiplexing – the team also showed that they could use a single pulse to write and read to the memory at the same time.
• Using nanometre-scale components, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the USA have demonstrated the first optical rectenna, a device that combines the functions of an antenna and a rectifier diode to convert light directly into DC current. Based on multiwall carbon nanotubes and tiny rectifiers fabricated onto them, the optical rectennas could provide a new technology for photodetectors that would operate without the need for cooling; energy harvesters that would convert waste heat to electricity, and ultimately for a new way to efficiently capture solar energy.
• LTE in unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U), a technology developed and touted by Qualcomm that would allow cellphone carriers to boost coverage in their cellular networks using the unlicensed 5 GHz band, was recently tested by independent research firm Signals Research Group (SRG) to assess its co-existence with Wi-Fi devices operating on the same frequency band. SRG’s comprehensive technical report concluded, in essence, that the two technologies lived in relative harmony for the most part. LTE-U is intended to let cell networks boost data speeds over short distances, without requiring the user to login to a separate Wi-Fi network as they normally would. It is the subject of controversy in the telecommunications industry, with a number of virulent opponents (such as Google) having expressed concerns over its co-existence with Wi-Fi.
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