South Africa
• Newly signed Comtest agency, Pico Technologies, a leading UK-based manufacturer of affordable PC oscilloscopes and data loggers, recently sent two company representatives – Paul Allen (distribution sales manager) and Stuart Murlis (product specialist) to meet South African dealers and other stakeholders, at Comtest’s Linbro Park offices. Paul Allen commented that “Pico is currently the global market leader in PC-based oscilloscopes, and we would like to become market leader here in southern Africa, too.”
• The University of Cape Town has dropped in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) rankings of the world’s best universities, but remains the highest ranked African institution. Despite a worrying trend that has seen it drop 50 ranking spots in the last two years, UCT management maintains this is not an indication that the quality of research or teaching have declined. Rather, it attributes it to changes in the QS rankings methodology for citations.
Overseas
Business
• u-blox announced its financial results for the first half of this year. Consolidated revenues for the first half of 2016 stood at CHF 179,7 million, representing an increase of 11,0% over the comparable period in 2015, when the company enjoyed exceptionally strong growth. Both segments in which the company operates – positioning and wireless products, and wireless services – continued their double-digit growth path in the first half of 2016.
Companies
• ON Semiconductor has successfully completed its previously announced $2,4 billion cash acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor, furthering its ambition of becoming the premier supplier of power management and analog semiconductor solutions for a wide range of applications and end-markets. In order to secure the necessary regulatory approvals for the acquisition, ON Semiconductor was compelled to sell its Ignition IGBT business, which Littelfuse picked up, together with ON’s transient voltage suppression (TVS) diode and switching thyristor product lines, for a combined $104 million in cash.
• Texas Instruments recently entered into an agreement with Silicon Catalyst, a Silicon Valley-based incubator, that will expand TI’s access to new technology innovations and potentially lead to engagements with semiconductor startups focused on creating chips and system solutions in analog and embedded processing. In the past 15 months, Silicon Catalyst has screened nearly 100 startups from the US, Europe and Asia. The 10 startups admitted to the incubator are developing innovations in LED, energy, silicon photonics, memory technology, wireless communications and biomedical devices.
Industry
• The Semiconductor Industry Association announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $27,1 billion for the month of July 2016, an increase of 2,6% compared to the previous month’s total. July marked the global market’s largest month-to-month sales increase since September 2013, though sales were down 2,8% compared to the July 2015 total. Underscoring the welcome uptick, month-to-month sales increased in all regional markets for the first time since October 2015.
• According to the latest analysis by Semicast Research, revenues for industrial semiconductors are forecast to grow to $61,5 billion in 2021, from $40,7 billion in 2015, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7%. Compared with a total semiconductor market of around $340 billion, the industrial sector is estimated to have accounted for about 12% of the overall semiconductor market in 2015, a larger proportion than the automotive sector. Texas Instruments was the leading vendor of semiconductors to the industrial sector in 2015, ahead of Infineon Technologies. Intel passed STMicroelectronics to become the third largest vendor following the acquisition of Altera, with Renesas Electronics completing the top five.
• According to IC Insights, the IC industry’s original system-on-chip (SoC) product category – microcontrollers – is expected to steadily reach record-high annual revenues through the second half of this decade, despite an overall slowdown in unit growth during the next five years. Microcontroller sales barely increased in 2015, rising less than a half percent, to set a new record high of slightly more than $15,9 billion, thanks to a 15% increase in MCU shipments that lifted worldwide unit volumes to an all-time peak of 22,1 billion last year. IC Insights forecasts MCU sales will rise in 2016 to nearly $16,6 billion, which is a 4% increase over 2015. MCU unit volumes are expected to grow by 2% in 2016 to 22,4 billion, and the average selling price is forecast to rise 2% to $0,74.
• A host of next-generation Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon and ultra-wideband (UWB) technologies threaten to dramatically disrupt the real-time location system (RTLS) and asset tracking markets. ABI Research forecasts that new solutions, along with the arrival of industrial IoT, will result in a combined RTLS and asset tracking market that more than triples from its current size to reach $15 billion in 2021. Traditional technologies like active RFiD, Wi-Fi and legacy UWB will still have a place, but will be increasingly marginalised, particularly as smartphones and wearables become more predominant in industrial spaces. ABI Research forecasts a 5:1 ratio on new RTLS technology tags versus traditional RTLS technologies by 2021, with significant growth into new greenfield applications like pallet tracking, condition monitoring and inventory management.
Technology
• Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have employed a new modulation technique to achieve an unprecedented 1 Tbps data transmission rate over a deployed optical fibre network. This is close to the theoretical maximum information transfer rate of that channel and thus approaching the Shannon Limit of the fibre link. The trial of the novel modulation approach, known as probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS), uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats to achieve higher transmission capacity and significantly improve the spectral efficiency of optical communications.
• University of Wisconsin–Madison materials engineers have, for the first time, created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors, achieving current that’s 1,9 times higher than their silicon counterparts. This advance could pave the way for carbon nanotube transistors to replace silicon transistors and continue delivering the performance gains the electronics industry relies on and that consumers demand. The new transistors are particularly promising for wireless communications technologies that require a lot of current flowing across a relatively small area.
• UK company Peratech was honoured in the Corporate Vision 2016 Technology Innovator Awards for its force sensing technology. The company’s technology is based on quantum tunnelling composite (QTC) materials, which change their electrical resistance based on how much force or pressure is applied to it—from light touch to hard press. Its current ink formulations can be applied to any surface (even laminated wood) and use semiconductive nanoparticles that are carefully blended with other particles in a polymer binder that makes the resulting force sensors durable and reliable at high and low temperatures, and in high-humidity conditions.
• ARM has launched a new real-time processor with advanced safety features for autonomous vehicles and medical and industrial robots. The Cortex-R52 was designed to address functional safety in systems that must comply with ISO 26262 ASIL D and IEC 61508 SIL 3, the most stringent safety standards in the automotive and industrial markets. STMicroelectronics is the first ARM partner to announce it has licensed the processor for highly integrated SoCs for the automotive market.
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