Southern Africa
The KwaZulu-Natal Innovation Support Centre (ISC) is appealing to inventors, individuals or companies to bring their innovative ideas to the centre in a bid to further develop their potential and to create sound business ventures. This non-profit organisation says it is able to assist inventors and innovators in getting a good idea to market. See article page 4.
Trolley Scan has announced that it has developed and put into production the most sensitive passive single chip UHF RFID system ever developed. With this system, it is possible to read the company's credit-card-sized Ecochiptag tag at an 11 m range even when the transponders are attached to metal objects. Says Mike Marsh, MD of Trolley Scan: "The holy grail of RFID is to produce simple, small, efficient transponders that are easy to mass produce and offer good operating range. The most frequent question asked is how well RFID systems work in the presence of metal. Well the current answer now is 11 m." To help reach this new milestone Trolley Scan developed a new generation of reader that differs significantly from the standard backscatter receiver used for passive RFID in the past.
Power Technologies, an Altron subsidiary, has sold 25,1% of the equity in its subsidiary Battery Technologies to Kagiso Trust Investments. Powertech will retain its majority stake of 74,9% in Battech. Said Norbert Claussen, CEO of Powertech: "Powertech welcomes the joint venture with Kagiso, a company with impeccable credentials and an extensive business network based on established relationships with some of Battech's major customers." Battery Technologies is one of South Africa's leading suppliers in the highly specialised field of stationary and back-up power systems into the ICT sector.
Bar code and mobile solutions specialist, Harmonic Group, has been appointed the exclusive distributor in South Africa for Accu-Sort Systems, a leader in automatic identification technology.
National Instruments South Africa is moving to bigger premises. The company, which recently celebrated its 3rd anniversary, says it has experienced a staff growth rate of 125% per annum. The decision to move was also borne out of the need to expand for local training, as well as for NI's internship program. NI South Africa branch manager, Michael Hutton, says that the premises will allow it to better serve its continually growing customer base by offering additional training facilities and spacious meeting rooms for customer demonstrations and interactions. New address is: G3 - Ground Floor, East Midview Building, Thandanani Office Park, Invicta Road, Halfway Gardens Ext 25, Midrand. Tel (toll-free) 0800 203 199, [email protected].
Overseas
Business
Agilent Technologies announced $1,64 bn in revenues for its first fiscal quarter, up 16% from last year. Net earnings for Q1 were $71m, compared to a loss of $369m, in last year's first quarter. For the quarter, semiconductor orders were up 53% from last year to the highest levels since the year 2000, said Agilent. Automated test segment orders, while down from the seasonally strong fourth quarter, were up 74% from last year. Revenues of $219m were 61% above last year and down 16% from a strong Q4. First quarter profits of $20m were up $68m from one year ago on an $83m increase in revenues.
Companies
Cingular Wireless is acquiring AT&T Wireless for $41 bn, making Cingular the largest wireless operator in the US. Its total GSM subscriber base will be 46 million with revenues of $31 bn. Cingular is owned by SBC Communications and BellSouth.
Infineon Technologies has signed an agreement to acquire ADMtek, a fabless, integrated circuit design company based in Hsinchu, Taiwan, for around Euro 80m in cash, which includes an earn out portion of about Euro 20m if certain performance and development milestones are achieved within two years after completion.
Synopsys has acquired Monolithic System Technology (MoSys) for approximately $432m. In addition, Synopsys also announced that it has acquired Accelerant Networks, a developer of high-speed serial interfaces.
Credence Systems plans to acquire NPTest Holding for $660m.
Motorola has chosen the new name for its semiconductor products sector - Freescale Semiconductor. The name was announced after "interviews and research conducted among the company's employees, customers and industry analysts worldwide," said Motorola. The spin out of Freescale from Motorola is expected soon.
To reflect its global position, Amplifier Research (AR) has changed its name to AR Worldwide. The 35-year-old company's products include amplifiers, antennas, transient generators and complete test systems.
Casio and Hitachi have announced details of their new joint venture to be formed on 1 April, 2004. Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications' main operations will be development and sales of cellular phones.
Wind River Systems has announced a partnership to jointly develop Red Hat Linux for the embedded devices market. Wind River, which previously announced that it is going the open source route, said that it was important for it to enter into a relationship with Red Hat because of its global dominance in the Linux market. Under the terms, the new Linux distribution will be jointly developed by a team of engineers from both companies. Wind River will be the premier channel for Red Hat Embedded Linux which will initially be targeted at the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) segment of the device software market, for carrier grade network equipment such as high-end routers and switches.
The International Telecommunication Union and Waseda University of Tokyo, Japan have established a research centre at the ITU-Waseda ICT Centre to support work in the area of radiocommunications, particularly in the fields of radio-frequency spectrum, digital broadcasting, mobile services and regulatory issues.
Keithley Instruments is working with the Albany NanoTech Center at the State University of New York, to share research information and work together to further the understanding of nanotechnology and optoelectronics technologies. Keithley will provide the Albany NanoTech Center with a state-of-the-art semiconductor device characterisation system.
Andrew Corporation and IPWireless have jointly developed a duplexer product that allows wireless operators to deploy both UMTS frequency division duplex (FDD) and UMTS time division duplex (TDD) systems using a single antenna, taking efficient advantage of their 3G spectrum to deploy new broadband services and offload traffic from their circuit switched networks. Now offered commercially, the companies claim the UMTS FDD/TDD duplexer has already been proven in a number of trials across Europe.
At the 3GSM World Congress Key wireless industry leaders Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, Sony Ericsson and Sun Microsystems announced the launch of the 'Java Verified' program to provide a unified process for the testing and certification of Java applications for mobile handsets. The program is intended to help the wireless industry satisfy growing demand for mobile data services by reducing development cost and speeding time-to-market. To join the program, developers simply register at www.javaverified.com, where applications submitted for testing will be administered by selected test houses worldwide.
The new Global UMTS TDD Alliance was launched at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes to accelerate the growing success of UMTS TDD as the leading standard for delivering wide-area wireless broadband and other high-speed packet-based services. Sanctioned by the GSM Alliance, UMTS TDD is the time-division duplexing variant of the 3G UMTS standard, and is also known as TD-CDMA. Founding members include: Airdata (Germany), AtlasOne (Malaysia), IPMobile (Japan), IQ Networks (Australia), Kite Networks (USA), Mobicom (Mongolia), Net2Cell (Ireland), Nextwave Telecom (USA), Sentech (South Africa), Softbank BB (Japan), SonaeCom (Portugal), Aksoran (Kazakhstan), and Woosh Wireless (New Zealand).
Atmel and u-blox have announced that Wavecom has chosen their ANTARIS GPS solution for Wavecom's WISMO Quik Q2501 hardware platform for wireless automotive applications, to provide accurate global positioning information. The Q2501 is believed to be the world's first hardware platform that combines a dualband GSM/GPRS class 10 with a GPS 16 channels receiver in a single fully integrated module (58 x 32 x 6 mm).
The US' Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and others, have announced that they have invested $7m in Dust Inc, a developer of devices for wireless mesh sensor networks. The company's technology is based on more than 10 years of R&D at the University of California at Berkeley. The company has been working to develop a complete autonomous sensing and communication package in a cubic millimetre-sized device with a sensor, coined 'Smart Dust'.
Intel and others have formed what the 'Wireless USB Promoter Group' in a move to enable a high-speed personal wireless interconnect. The group has started work on defining the wireless USB specification, with a targeted bandwidth of 480 Mbps that maintains the same usage and architecture as wired USB. Other members include Agere, HP, Microsoft, NEC, Philips Semiconductors and Samsung Electronics.
Industry
The SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group (SMG) has reported that worldwide silicon wafer area shipments increased by 10% in 2003 over 2002, with double-digit growth projected for 2004. "Capacity utilisation is tightening, as demand heats up for silicon wafers," said John Kaufmann, chairman of SEMI SMG. "Another year of double-digit growth for silicon is forecasted in 2004, fuelled by 300-mm production ramps in the fabs, greater end-market demand for consumer electronics, and strengthening in the US economy."
The worldwide market for semiconductor chips is projected to reach $217 bn in 2004, a 22,6% increase from 2003, according to preliminary quarterly estimates from Gartner. "A tighter supply environment in 2004 will bring increased revenue and profitability to the industry, and as semiconductor vendor financials improve, capital spending should increase," said Richard Gordon, research vice president for Gartner. "Overall fab utilisation is currently running in excess of 95%, which is about 10 points higher than the traditional trigger point for additional capital spending in the industry," he added.
The market for enterprise Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in Europe will grow from $133m in 2003 to $7,1 bn in 2008, according to a report from the Probe Group. It said that Europe makes up one-quarter of the worldwide market, with the large number of small and medium-sized businesses there making it an attractive market for VoIP.
China's automotive-related semiconductor consumption is projected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28% to reach $1,45 bn in 2007, up from $416m in 2002, according to iSuppli. China's automotive chip market is expected to account for 10% of global consumption.
Advanced Forecasting optimistically projects that the semiconductor equipment business will grow 55% in 2004 over 2003. It states that currently, the IC cycle is in a boom period, and overcapacity has been eliminated, causing a considerable ramp for equipment makers.
DVD recorders are expected to slowly take over for DVD players, in standalone products as well as in combination products such as DVD+VCR, DVD+HTiB, and TV+DVD, reports In-Stat/MDR. In 2004, the first DVD recorder combination products entered the market. In 2003 alone, DVD recorder unit shipments increased over 200%. As more products come on to market over 50 million DVD recorders are expected to ship worldwide in 2007. According to In-Stat, blue laser player/recorders will become mainstream, but not before 2008. The two competing blue laser formats will finalise their read-only formats in 2004, so In-Stat/MDR expects more product introductions in 2005.
NEC Electronics has announced the acquisition of a non-exclusive licence of the FlexRay Communication Controller IP from Robert Bosch, a FlexRay Consortium core member. NEC will use this IP to develop FlexRay silicon based on its automotive-proven CMOS technology. FlexRay is a next-generation high-speed serial communication system for in-vehicle network, which offers high bandwidth (10 Mbps) and flexible configuration options.
Driven by strong consumer demand, shipments of colour LCD screens for mobile phones will outstrip those of monochrome LCD screens for the first time ever in 2004, according to iSuppli/Stanford Resources. In 2004, colour LCDs will account for 60% of mobile-phone display shipments. By 2007, colour will dominate with 89% of shipments.
Qualcomm was the largest fabless chip maker in 2003, according to the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA), with sales of $2,5 bn. Broadcom was second with $1,8 bn, while Nvidia was third with $1,6 bn.
The Asia-Pacific region experienced the most dramatic spread of wireless local-area networking hotspots of anywhere in the world in 2003, seeing a more than tenfold increase over 2002, according to UK research group, BWCS. In total, hotspots in Asia grew from 1953 in 2002 to 21 308 in 2003.
STMicroelectronics has opened its third design and development facility in India in Noida, near New Delhi.
Digital television is one of those terms that excites and confuses people at the same time. While a great number of consumers today are familiar with high definition TV sets, many get confused when it comes to explaining what exactly they are paying for when they subscribe to a digital TV service. In-Stat is offering a free downloadable white paper ( www.instat.com/CorpReg/WP_digitaltv.asp) that offers an overview of the most prominent digital TV services and their availability around the world.
Technology
Intel released some details at the 3GSM World Congress of its next-generation communications processor, code-named Hermon, which is targeted at single- and dual-mode wideband CDMA phones. The single-chip device incorporates an XScale MSA architecture processor, on-chip StrataFlash memory, and W-CDMA and GPRS baseband logic on a single 0,13 µm integrated circuit.
Hewlett-Packard has developed what it claims is the world's smallest non-volatile memory device, which was made by nanoimprint lithography technology. At the SPIE Microlithography conference, HP said it made a re-writable, non-volatile memory device with a density of 6,4-Gbits/cm2 with nanoimprint technology. The device is said to be 40 nm in width and 130 nm in pitch.
Renesas, Hitachi and SuperH have developed a new power-consumption reduction technique for use in central processing units (CPUs). According to the trio, the technology enables quick recovery from the standby state to the active state. Trial production using the techniques confirmed the achievement of a CPU core performance per unit power of 4500 MIPS/W, and recovery to the active state in 3 ms (max.) while holding standby current down to 100 µA or less. The results were announced at the 2004 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
Infineon Technologies scientists have demonstrated the first carbon nanotube switch that can control light emitting diodes or electric motors. This is considered a breakthrough for nanotechnology, since scientists previously assumed that these miniature atomic-sized components were not suitable for the high voltages and currents used in power applications. Nanotubes are microscopic 'pipes' that are made out of carbon atoms and have a diameter of one millionth of a millimetre. Since a single CNT (1 nanometre diameter) can only deliver about 24 µA, the trick is to arrange hundreds or thousands of the tiny tubes in parallel to achieve the desired current-carrying capacity. The first prototype developed by Infineon consists of approximately 300 parallel tubes, and it supplies 2 mA at 2,5 V.
Intel claims two new voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) are the world's fastest CMOS devices. Based on the company's 90 nm CMOS process technology, the 65 and 100 GHz quadrature VCOs are used in advanced radios to reduce data errors. The 100 GHz VCO has been devised in separate 1- and 4-transistor designs, said Intel.
SanDisk has rolled out what the company claims is the world's smallest removable flash memory storage format technology. Based on its NAND technology, SanDisk's so-called T-Flash technology is a fingernail-sized module for use in mobile phones. T-Flash uses advanced packaging technology and SanDisk's latest NAND multi-level cell flash memory and controller technologies. Motorola is the first major announced customer for T-Flash, which it will use in its mobile phones.
A pen-style digital still camera, dubbed 'Pico PenShot' has been unveiled by Green House of Japan. A USB flash memory-based pen-shaped camera supporting 300 000 effective pixels, it has a built-in 8 MB flash memory that can store up to 500 images. The 16 x 20 x 142 mm device also serves as a web camera when used with USB and its pen stand.
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