South Africa
• Denel announced that matriculants who participated in its maths and science enrichment programmes in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the North West received a 100% pass rate in the 2015 year-end exams. The 230 Grade 12 learners raked in 117 distinctions and more than 60% of the class received exemptions for university studies. Denel employees contribute to the enrichment programme by teaching classes in collaboration with local schools over weekends and during holidays.
• Test equipment supplier and the developer of SeeBox, K Measure, has relocated to premises more conveniently located around the corner from the Gautrain station in Hatfield. Its new address is Block B, 1166 Schoeman / Francis Baard Street. Other contact details (landline: +27 (0)87 230 0134, email: [email protected], [email protected]) remain unchanged.
• RS Components announced the signing of a global marketing partner agreement with Infineon Technologies to distribute the company’s extensive portfolio of semiconductors and other electronic components. RS stocks many hundreds of electronic components developed by Infineon and International Rectifier including discrete semiconductor devices, high-power thyristors and diodes, power management devices plus a range of other components including microcontrollers and MCU development kits, sensors, RF and wireless control ICs and LED driver ICs, among many more.
• Electrocomp has sealed a reseller partnership to distribute Souriau’s industrial connector range. Souriau’s products are renowned for withstanding the harshest environments including extreme temperatures, severe vibrations and highly corrosive fluids.
• To complement its portfolio of IoT and M2M solutions, iCORP Group has signed a distribution agreement with Antenova M2M, to distribute its range of standard antennas and RF antenna modules for wireless connectivity across GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G, LTE, GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and ISM technologies.
Overseas
Business
• Silicon Labs reported financial results for its fourth quarter ended 2 January 2016. Revenue for the quarter was at the high end of guidance at $160,1 million, up from $156,2 million in the third quarter. The company reported that its IoT revenue exceeded expectations, increasing to $67,2 million, or 2,8% sequentially, while broadcast revenue increased to $39,7 million, or 8,7% sequentially. Infrastructure and access revenues both declined, by 1,5% (to $30,6 million) and 3,0% (to $22,6 million) respectively.
• ams reported record revenue figures for its 2015 fiscal year, achieving 34% growth to reach 623,1 million Euros. The result from operations (earnings before interest and tax – EBIT) for 2015 was 162,2 million Euros or 26% of revenues (excluding acquisition-related amortisation), increasing by 40% from 116,1 million Euros or 25% of revenues in 2014.
• Sierra Wireless reported results for its full year, ending 31 December 2015. Revenue for 2015 was $607,8 million, an increase of 10,8% compared to 2014. Revenue from OEM solutions was $523,4 million (up 9,8%), enterprise solutions revenue was $63,0 million (down 12,2%) and revenue from cloud and connectivity services (a new division) was $21,4 million. Net loss was $2,7 million, or $0,08 per diluted share, in 2015, compared to a net loss of $16,9 million, or $0,53 per diluted share, in 2014.
• Qorvo announced financial results for the fiscal 2016 third quarter, ended 2 January 2016. On a GAAP basis, quarterly revenue was $620,7 million and net loss was $11,1 million ($0,08 per share). Comparatively, revenue for the previous quarter was $708,3 million, resulting in net income of $4,4 million ($0,03 per share).
• NXP Semiconductors delivered revenue of $6,1 billion for 2015, up 8% from 2014 (including the benefit of approximately one month of revenue contribution from the acquisition of Freescale Semiconductor). Revenue from the company’s strategic HPMS (high performance mixed signal) segment was $4,72 billion, up 12% year-on-year, with nearly all of the operating segments delivering positive growth for the year. Standard product segment revenue was $1,24 billion, down 3% versus the prior year.
• Net sales for the third quarter of Microchip Technology’s fiscal 2016 were $540,3 million, up 2,2% from the prior year’s third fiscal quarter. Net income for the third quarter of fiscal 2016 was $61,2 million, or 28 cents per diluted share, down 28,9% from net income of $86,1 million, or 39 cents per diluted share, in the prior year’s third fiscal quarter.
• At 1,56 billion Euros for the first quarter of its 2016 fiscal year, Infineon Technologies’ revenue grew from 1,13 billion Euros in the like quarter of the previous year. Sequentially, the company’s industrial power control, power management and multimarket and chip card and security segments all reported decreases, whereas the automotive segment recorded revenue essentially flat compared to the previous quarter.
• STMicroelectronics reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended 31 December 2015. Fourth quarter net revenues totalled $1,67 billion, gross margin was 33,5%, and net income was $2 million. For the full year 2015, net revenues totalled $6,90 billion, gross margin was 33,8%, and net income was $104 million. The company also announced plans to discontinue its set-top box business, which will result in 1400 job losses and 600 employees being redeployed to the digital automotive and microcontroller divisions.
Companies
• Microchip Technology has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Atmel for $8,15 per share in a combination of cash and Microchip common stock.
• The acquisition price represents a total equity value of about $3,56 billion, and a total enterprise value of about $3,40 billion. Following the closing, the transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to Microchip’s non-GAAP earnings per share and is anticipated to achieve an estimated $170 million in synergies from cost savings and incremental revenue growth in fiscal year 2019.
• Silica has expanded its franchise portfolio to include Alliance Memory, whose products will now be available throughout the EMEA region from Avnet Memec – Silica, and locally from Avnet South Africa. Alliance Memory manufactures a complete line of DRAMs and SRAMs.
Industry
• IC Insights expects annual global IC market growth rates to closely track the performance of worldwide GDP growth. The analyst firm forecasts 2,7% global GDP growth for 2016, only marginally ahead of what is considered to be the recession threshold of 2,5% growth. The accompanying figure puts the worldwide electronics and semiconductor industries into perspective. Geographically, the most significant global economies affecting the slowdown are China, whose GDP is forecast to increase only 6,3% in 2016, and the USA, which accounted for 22% of worldwide GDP in 2015 and is forecast to grow 2,5% in 2016.
• The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that the global semiconductor industry posted sales totalling $335,2 billion in 2015, a slight decrease of 0,2% compared to the 2014 total, which was the industry’s highest ever. Logic was the largest semiconductor category by sales with $90,8 billion in 2015, or 27% of the total semiconductor market. Memory ($77,2 billion) and micro-ICs ($61,3 billion) – a category that includes microprocessors – rounded out the top three segments in terms of total sales. Optoelectronics was the fastest growing segment, increasing 11,3% in 2015. Other product segments that posted increased sales in 2015 include sensors and actuators, which reached $8,8 billion in sales for a 3,7% annual increase, NAND Flash memory ($28,8 billion/2,2% increase) and analog ($45,2 billion/1,9% increase).
Technology
• ETH Zurich researchers have created the world’s smallest integrated optical switch, which uses just a single silver atom or, at most, a few silver atoms to control the flow of light. The switch is based on the voltage-induced displacement of one or more silver atoms in the narrow gap between a silver and a platinum plate. Although it has the advantage of operating at room temperature, unlike other devices that work using quantum effects at this order of magnitude, it still remains very slow for a modulator: so far, it only works for switching frequencies in the megahertz range or below. The ETH researchers want to fine-tune it for frequencies in the gigahertz to terahertz range.
• Tokyo Institute of Technology and Fujitsu Laboratories have achieved the fastest ever wireless transmission speeds of 56 Gbps. In order to manage this feat, they developed a CMOS wireless transceiver chip that can process signals at high speeds with little loss across a broad range of frequencies (from
72 to 100 GHz). The research is being conducted in aid of finding solutions to ever increasing data traffic, using the millimetre-waveband where there are few competing wireless applications and which are capable of large-capacity communications.
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