Southern Africa
Allied Technologies Limited (Altech) continued to show impressive growth when the group released its interim results for the half-year period ended August 2003. Commenting on the results, the Altech CEO, Craig Venter, said he was pleased with the group's on-going and consistent performance which had come during one of the most prolonged difficult global and local business environments experienced in years. Revenue and operating profit for the continuing operations increased by 8,5% and 6,5% to R1,961 bn and R160m respectively. Concerning the group's operations, Venter said the Telecommunications Division had once again performed extremely well. Netstar had maintained its market share at above 47% for the reporting period. Within Altech's Multi-Media and Electronics Division, UEC Technologies had posted an acceptable financial performance given the tough economic conditions. Regarding Arrow Altech Distribution, Venter said the company had exceeded expectations and had achieved a good overall financial performance in a globally depressed electronics industry. In Altech's IT Division, Isis Information Systems had delivered good results for the six months, while Altech Card Solutions met expectations and had posted a satisfactory performance for the period.
British Telecommunications (BT) and Spescom have concluded an agreement that allows BT to reduce its contractual volume commitment for NTelite, Spescom's intelligent electronic network terminator, whilst reinforcing the relationship between the two companies under an international marketing agreement. Spescom said the move will release operational funds that Spescom Limited (UK) will direct in its efforts to internationally market this product range and to sustain a development activity for new generation devices to allow Spescom to realise the full potential of the technology. The Ntelite will form a major part of Spescom's exhibit at the ITU Telecom World 2003 show being hosted in Geneva this month.
Leaf Wireless, a local convergence technology company, has announced a major strategic offshore partnership with Virgin Mobile Australia. This is a significant step in a major push by the company to market and sell its offerings around the globe. Leaf Wireless will develop an SMS, WAP and MMS portal for Virgin Mobile Australia.
The deal makes it one of the few local mobile technology companies to take its offerings offshore, and perhaps more impressively, cracking a very difficult Australian market. According to Leaf Wireless the company is set to leverage South African skills on an international stage, bringing cost effective elements such as total remote management to the equation. Leaf Wireless CEO, Brandon Leigh: "To have won this contract in the face of such strong global competition is true validation of the depth of technological skills in the South African market."
RF Design has been appointed as the distributor for Radiometrix in South Africa.
Multisource Telecoms has been appointed as a distributor for Alvarion broadband wireless access products. Alvarion is a leader in all five areas that define broadband wireless access (BWA) technology, namely radio microwave technology, high-speed modems, PMP air protocols, VLSI design and overall system integration.
Bekithemba Electronic and Mechanical Distributor has acquired the business of Parsec Components (see ' Bekithemba acquires the business of Parsec Components').
EBV-Electrolink has appointed Spectron Electronics as a sub-distributor (see 'EBV-Electrolink enters into sub-agency agreement with Spectron Electronics').
Overseas
Business
Cirrus Logic has upgraded its guidance for the second quarter of its fiscal year, and expects revenue to be $50m whereas previously it had said revenue would be in the range $45m to $50m. Cirrus Logic reported first quarter revenue of $41m.
Companies
Silvaco International has purchased the assets of Verilog simulation provider Simucad. Silvaco will combine Simucad's digital simulation technology with its SmartSpice analog offering.
Motorola has licensed its magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM) non-volatile chip technology to Honeywell. Honeywell plans to incorporate MRAM memory elements with its radiation-hardened, silicon-on-insulator technology for military and aerospace applications. Honeywell and Motorola collaborated with DARPA in the initial research and development of MRAM.
Leading German car makers and electronics suppliers have launched an open systems initiative in an effort to combat growing complexity in automotive electronics. Members of the Autosar (Automotive Open Systems Architecture) initiative include car manufacturers BMW, DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen as well as electronics component vendors Bosch, Continental Automotive Systems and Siemens VDO. The group will seek more interoperability in automotive electronics, application software as well as in car components. It also wants to establish a level of interoperability between the automotive design from different OEMs.
National Semiconductor and ARM are jointly promoting PowerWise Interface (PWI) technology as an open standard interface for system power management. PowerWise uses multiple-voltage islands and dynamic voltage scaling to reduce power consumption in advanced system-level ICs. With both active power and leakage power becoming serious design problems, chip architects are increasingly dividing their system-level chips into regions and providing separate operating voltages for each, using only the minimum voltage required to meet the block's performance requirements.
Cambridge Silicon Radio and wireless communications specialist TTPCom have agreed to cooperate in the creation of fully integrated GPRS mobile and Bluetooth terminals. The agreement between the two Cambridge-based companies gives TTPCom direct access to CSR's BlueCore Host Software and BlueCore range of devices. According to the two companies their combined expertise would result in a complete mobile handset design with Bluetooth connectivity being available quickly and at low cost to designers and manufacturers.
Industry
The world market for automotive electronics (non-entertainment), excluding sensors and commercial vehicles, was estimated at $26,9 bn in 2002 and is forecast to reach $35,4 bn by 2007, according to a recent report published by Reed Electronics Research. The strongest demand will come from the emerging markets in Asia and East and Central Europe. Legislation, customer demand, and benefits to the car manufacturer will continue to boost the market despite a slowdown in passenger car production, it says. The period up to 2007 will also see new products and applications emerging, such as advanced lighting and night vision, in the upper market segments although the delay in the introduction of 42 V technology will push back the introduction of a number of systems. This will include by-wire, the technology seen by many as a key factor in enabling automakers to meet more stringent fuel economy/emission standards, according to the report.
With units available for less than $100, global positioning system (GPS) receivers are now affordable to the masses, enabling applications unthinkable just 18 months ago. These emerging applications, plus renewed growth in existing markets, will help propel the global GPS market north of $22 billion by 2008, according to technology market research firm ABI.
FPGA vendor Xilinx has announced a major research project called 'Pippin' (Programmable IC Platforms for Programmable IP Networks) to be conducted in collaboration with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Queens University Belfast. Xilinx plans to support the creation of a Programmable Systems Laboratory at the school, where collaborative research, experimentation and development will be undertaken.
Infineon Technologies has added 145 software developer engineers from Siemens Information and Communication Mobile (Siemens mobile) to boost its expertise in the mobile communications sector. The engineers will mainly contribute know-how in hardware-level software for mobile phone platforms and mobile phone operating systems. The engineers will join Comneon, an Infineon-owned software development firm that is already developing products for Siemens and other mobile phone manufacturers.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has upgraded its IEEE 488.1 standard so IEEE 488 buses (GPIB) can transfer data at speeds as high as 8 MBps, up from 1 MBps. The increased throughput rests on the use of two-wire handshaking and packed data streaming. The prior version only allowed three-wire handshaking and handshaking after each byte.
Motorola is planning to spin off its semiconductor products group into a separate, publicly traded company. The company said it remained committed to its remaining business units, including mobile phones and communications networks. The plan involves an initial public offering of a portion of the semiconductor business followed by a distribution of remaining shares to shareholders.
The IEEE has formed an interest group to explore the use of the 60 GHz band for wireless personal area networks (WPANs), which generally have a range of 10 m. This 7 GHz-wide portion of the radio spectrum avoids interference with nearly all electronic devices, given the high attenuation of these wavelengths by walls and floors, and promises to allow more WPANs to occupy the same building. Designated the IEEE 802.15.3 Millimeter Wave Interest Group (mmWIG), the body is part of an effort to develop a millimetre wave-based alternative physical layer for the IEEE high-rate WPAN standard.
The Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard for compressing digital audio and video, in an attempt to assert its technological independence from the rest of the world. The aim is to enable domestic companies to avoid using the dominant MPEG standards, which require royalty payments. The competing Chinese standard, known as AVS, will apparently be proposed as a national standard in 2004 according to the Audio Video Coding Standard Workgroup of China.
ATI Technologies has agreed to pay $9m to Cirrus Logic and the two companies have entered into a cross-license agreement and settled all outstanding litigation between them. Cirrus Logic brought a lawsuit against ATI alleging infringement of a Cirrus Logic patent relating to graphics processor technology.
International Rectifier has filed a lawsuit in Tokyo, Japan against Renesas Technology and its parent companies, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric, alleging that procedures used to form Renesas violated Japanese commercial law. IR is seeking to nullify the joint venture, formed in April, and wants Hitachi to pay a licensing fee for using its patented technology.
Cirrus Logic has filed a patent infringement suit against mixed-signal device maker Wolfson Microelectronics based in Edinburgh, for technology used in digital-to-analog converters. The suit claims that several Wolfson products infringe upon two Cirrus Logic patents.
Technology
Toshiba has developed a palm-sized portable fuel cell that it claims is capable of charging a cellphone battery about six times. Although not designed to replace batteries in mobile devices, it is intended instead to provide an alternative power source to charge batteries, providing greater freedom for mobile users. The portable cell, which generates an average output of 1 W for 20 hours, weighs 130 grams and measures 10 by 6 by 3 cm, according to Toshiba.
STMicroelectronics is working on research to reduce the cost of generating electricity from solar power. The research teams, based in Italy, are applying nanotechnology to develop solar cell technologies that they hope will eventually be able to compete commercially with conventional electricity generation methods. ST's alternative approach is to produce solar cells that may have lower efficiencies than conventional cells (eg, 10% instead of 15-20%) but are much cheaper to manufacture. There are two methods: one uses organic dye (photosensitiser) in a similar principle to photosynthesis; the other is a full organic approach, in which a mixture of electron-acceptor and electron-donor organic materials is sandwiched between two electrodes at distances below 10 nanometers.
Sharp has developed TFT liquid crystal displays that offer increased 160° viewing angle vertically and horizontally, a contrast ratio of 300:1 and a response time of 25 ms. The new displays are produced using Sharp's amorphous silicon manufacturing process and the CG-silicon process.
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