Southern Africa
With the celebration of its 60 years of existence in 2005, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is refocusing its core activities to adhere to its founding purpose that is grounded in science and technology. The reconfiguration will increase its overall research content and strengthen the research base, it says. According to Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, CSIR president and CEO, the aim is a large-scale renewal to ensure that the CSIR remains relevant in the ongoing development of the country's economy and society. The CSIR's staff complement in March 2005 was 2379, with researchers making up 60,3%. Women researchers make up 32%. Of the CSIR's total staff, 45,8% are black people. The CSIR says it aims to increase the proportion of staff with post-graduate qualifications from the present level of 22,5% to more than 28% over the following three years. The new CSIR executive management board comprises: Dr Sibusiso Sibisi, president and CEO; Albert Jordaan, group executive - Finance and Services; Dr Phil Mjwara, group executive - Research and Development and Strategic Human Capital Development; Vishnu Pillay, group executive - Institutional Planning and Operations.
MB Silicon Systems has been appointed as the sole South African distributor for Power Integrations' range of products. Power Integrations is a supplier of high-voltage analog ICs for power conversion. The product line includes: the LinkSwitch, DPA-Switch, TinySwitch and TOPSwitch IC families, supported by free design software. See 'MB Silicon Systems appointed Power Integrations distributor'.
Webb Industries has concluded a deal with European Antennas for the distribution rights of its products in South Africa. According to Webb's Paul Richards, this will significantly bolster the company's offering in the wireless data product arena. European Antennas is part of the Chelton Group of companies. See 'Webb strengthens wireless data antenna offering'.
EBV Elektronik, an Avnet company, has announced that is has signed franchise agreements with Samsung Semiconductor Europe, and with Royal Philips Electronics for semiconductor products. The contracts for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) region are effective as of 5 September, 2005, giving local distributor EBV Electrolink the rights to distribute these companies' products. Samsung Semiconductor Europe is headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, of Seoul, Korea. Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales in 2004 of 30,3 bn Euros.
A new company, Harmonic RFID, has been formed to meet anticipated growth in the radio frequency identification (RFID) market. Along with Harmonic Group, the holding company, it will be supported by DarkStar SA, Evolving Management Solutions (EMS), and Alliance SA. They will supply product, skills and support while continuing to operate as separate entities.
Overseas
Business
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Motorola has enlisted J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. to pursue the sale of its automotive products unit. The unit makes telematics products, sensors and other items.
Companies
TES Electronic Solutions, an independent French electronic design and manufacturing company, has acquired Purple Vision, a Bangalore-based company that specialises in still- and moving-image processing algorithms, speech codecs and biometrics verification systems.
Schott, of Mainz, Germany has announced that it will acquire the 50% share that RWE Solutions holds in RWE Schott Solar of Alzenau, Germany, a supplier of solar components. Schott will thus become the sole shareholder and the company will conduct business under its new name, Schott Solar.
Epcos has signed an agreement with the Chinese conglomerate, Xiamen Xindeco (Xindeco) to set up the joint venture EPCOS (Xiamen), to manufacture aluminium electrolytic capacitors.
Magnetic components supplier, Pulse, has completed the acquisition of Finland-based LK Products, a supplier of cellular and non-cellular antennas and integrated modules for mobile handsets.
IMEC, the Belgian R&D institute, and TNO, the Dutch research institute, have joined together to create the Holst Center, a research centre run along similar lines to those of IMEC. To be located at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, the Holst Center will start with two strategic program initiatives; wireless autonomous transducer solutions and systems-in-foil.
Smart antenna start-up Video54 has changed its name to Ruckus Wireless.
To address the needs of customers in the $65 bn optoelectronics market, Dow Corning has announced that its 'photonics solutions' business development program will become part of its mainstream 'electronics' business. The company said it will thus increase its sales, marketing and product development activities to support creation of light management applications for a vast range of markets. The new Light Management group will focus on helping customers develop and commercialise applications that rely on the emission, transmission, amplification, detection, modulation and switching of light.
picoChip of Bath, UK, has signed a development partnership agreement with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea in the area of software defined radio for WCDMA/HSDPA and WiMAX. The arrangement takes the form of engineering co-operation, including joint development and research into future wireless technologies.
IBM Microelectronics, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Electronics have announced a collaborative design-for-manufacturing (DFM) initiative that will offer a series of rules, models and utility kits for increasing manufacturing predictability, control and yield.
Royal Philips Electronics' subsidiary, Handshake Solutions, is working with an R&D unit of aerospace company Boeing Phantom Works, to develop asynchronous (clockless) circuits. Handshake Solutions is providing access to design tools for use in the DARPA's clockless logic, analysis, synthesis and system (CLASS) project. The project is currently focusing on developing demonstrator and prototype ICs to show the feasibility of clockless technology in challenging environments.
Hewlett-Packard and Royal Philips Electronics have announced they will partner to accelerate the adoption of the next-generation global RFID standard. This new global EPC Class 1 (Gen2) standard allows a single tag to travel globally and still be read by most readers, said Philips. Most first-generation Class 1 RFID tags used in the US cannot be read in Europe due to bandwidth limitations.
American Technical Ceramics (ATC), a manufacturer of high performance components for a broad range of commercial and military applications, has entered into an agreement to purchase from CTS, certain equipment and inventory used by CTS in the manufacture of low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) products.
The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) has announced the formation of the Open Modeling Coalition (OMC) to address critical issues in the characterisation and modelling of libraries and intellectual property.
Two UK companies, Celoxica, an electronic system level (ESL) design and synthesis vendor, and Sundance, a provider of DSP and reconfigurable FPGA systems, have announced their intention to jointly offer out-of-the-box system design solutions backed up by partnerships with Texas Instruments and Xilinx. The joint offering uses C-based ESL tools to enable system optimisations employing an array of off-the-shelf modules and systems to address the critical issues of hardware/software co-design, DSP/FPGA integration, power utilisation and cost reductions from design conception through to deployment.
Industry
According to the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA), optoelectronics-enabled systems represented a $223 bn market in 2004; of that, optoelectronic components accounted for $65 bn, while optoelectronic materials represented a $14 bn market.
Shipments of organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays rose 82% year-over-year to 14,2 million units, for the second quarter of 2005, says market research firm, DisplaySearch. According to the firm, passive-matrix OLED displays accounted for much of the growth in sales, with active-matrix OLED shipments still extremely small - at under 50 000. The key OLED applications were main displays for mobile phones and displays for MP3 players.
Semico Research has raised its semiconductor forecast for the next two years. The research firm now projects that the semiconductor industry will grow by 4% to $221,6 bn in 2005 over 2004, up from its previous forecast of 2% for the year. In 2006, it projects the semiconductor industry will grow a significant 18,2% to $262,1 bn - double its previous forecast of 8,1%.
According to the latest forecast from IDC total PC shipments in the second half of 2005 are now expected to reach nearly 110 million, with growth of 12,9%. IDC's previous forecast in May predicted 107,2 million units and growth of 10,4%.
The number of residential Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) users is expected to increase over the next few years, causing market revenue for wireline VoIP equipment to more than triple from 2004 to reach $24,5 bn in annual revenue in 2010, according to iSuppli. In 2005, at the start of a period of explosive growth, worldwide VoIP equipment revenue is set to rise by 60% compared with the preceding year to $12,9 bn, it said. Residential VoIP subscribers worldwide is predicted to rise to 197,2 million in 2010, up 40-fold from 4,8 million in 2004. The VoIP equipment market consists of products targeting the residential, enterprise and other segments.
Siemens announced plans to cut more than 2400 jobs in Germany over the next two years, in its IT services unit, SBS. The job reductions are an integral part of a total 1,5 bn Euro in cost-cutting measures to be implemented between now and 2007. The loss-making logistics and assembly systems division, is being dismantled, with the various activities spun off or transferred to other parts of the Siemens group. Telecommunications unit Com will be restructured to make its sales and services more customer-oriented.
Sony has announced a workforce reduction of up to 10 000 jobs worldwide by March 2008 and will close several factories as part of a major restructuring program. New chief executive Sir Howard Stringer said in a mid-term strategy review, that Sony would downsize or dispose of 15, unspecified, business lines, reduce the number of models in certain categories, and close 11 factories, leaving 54 plants.
The European Commission (EC) has launched a public consultation in the form of a web-based questionnaire, on whether, and how, to create a European Institute of Technology (EIT).
The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has formed a 'competitiveness committee' intended to boost funding for basic semiconductor and related research in that country. The so-called 'Committee of American Competitiveness' intends to launch a public relations campaign and raise awareness on the need to boost overall competitiveness in the US as well as raise research funding.
The Semiconductor Test Consortium has announced that it now has over 40 members. The STC was founded in 2003 to develop a common test architecture that is completely open, documented and supported via solutions available from all ATE vendors.
Sony Computer Entertainment America has recalled about 843 000 AC adapters sold with the company's PlayStation 2 game machine. These AC adapters can overheat and melt, posing the risk of fire, burn and shock injuries to consumers, said Sony.
Microchip Technology has announced that it has shipped its four billionth PIC microcontroller, a PIC16F877 Flash microcontroller, to Insta Elektro of Lüdenscheid, Germany. Microchip said this event comes barely 19 months after delivering its three-billionth microcontroller in 2004.
For the 10th consecutive year, Samtec was ranked No. 1 in the Bishop and Associates 'Customer Survey of the Electronics Connector Industry'. The survey ranked and compared 36 connector manufacturers based on customer feedback.
Technology
Startup company Achronix Semiconductor has announced that is has produced prototype FPGAs that can operate at clock frequencies in excess of 650 MHz and at lower power than other commercial state-of-the-art FPGA products. The company's Ultra line of FPGAs is expected to demonstrate the highest performance ever offered by a CMOS FPGA at clock frequencies in the 700 MHz to 1,2 GHz range based on a synchronous interface, an asynchronous core and a set of software tools to convert synchronous design flows to asynchronous logic, according to the company.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) has introduced FPGA technology that the company claims is capable of substantially increasing computing application performance. The FPGA-based hardware is based on SGI's reconfigurable application-specific computing (RASC) technology. According to the company, it offers unmatched performance, scalability and bandwidth for data-intensive applications. SGI says the RASC technology is specifically designed to overcome challenges associated with a lack of high-level programming expertise that has prevented FPGA-based acceleration from broadly penetrating the high-performance computing market.
Sharp has developed a 0,5 mm ball pitch technology for 3D systems-in-package (3D-SiP). The company said it is able to stack a DSP, flash memory, and synchronous DRAM chips in a stack with a 14 x 14 mm footprint and 1,7 mm in height. Initial applications are intended for digital cameras.
Fractal antenna technology pioneer Fractus of Barcleona, Spain, has launched an ultrawideband antenna for the short-range wireless market. Measuring 10 x 10 x 0,8 mm, the UWB antenna combines an omni-directional radiation pattern and high efficiency level to deliver the largest bandwidth possible, it says. Dubbed the UWB Media+ Chip Antenna, the device meets the requirements of reference designers, OEMs and ODMs that use the 3,1-5 GHz spectrum as specified by the WiMedia Alliance. Fractus holds the first patent for fractal design applied to mobile telecom antennas. The company now holds 36 patents for fractal technology, which relies on a geometric pattern repeated at ever-smaller scales so that each is a smaller copy of the whole.
Fujitsu Frontech has begun limited sales in Japan of its new service robot called 'enon'. The advanced practical-use service robot can assist in such tasks as providing guidance, escorting guests, transporting objects, and security patrolling, says the manufacturer. The wireless LAN equipped enon stands 1,3 m high, can lift up to 0,5 kg in each of two arms and has an internal storage space of 27 x 32 x 28 cm to hold a payload of up to 10 kg. It can provide image information on a 10,5" touch panel LCD, and LEDs on the eye and mouth area of its face enable enon to display facial expressions. Fujitsu says enon can work at events such as exhibitions, where it can sidle up to visitors and provide product details, or for use in corporate environments where it will escort guests to different locations.
Pace Micro Technology has launched what it calls the world's first DVB-H H.264 mobile personal video recorder (PVR). The PDH400 integrates the new DVB-H standard into its existing PVR2GO mobile PVR device, enabling live digital content to be enjoyed by the subscriber 'on the move'. It uses advanced H.264 video compression technology, enabling live mobile TV content on a 11 cm colour widescreen display, also works as a personal video recorder and comes with a maximum hard drive capacity of 40 GB, which can store over 200 hours of programming.
To support its CCL-Softcar anti-collision radar for vehicles, that operates at a low 5,8 GHz, Cambridge Consultants has developed software for pedestrian-sensing. The technology allows radar and video sensors to work in tandem to sense pedestrians (or cyclists), enabling the introduction of advanced active safety concepts such as tilting the bonnet to mitigate impact or deploying external air bags. The software performs object classification: it uses radar scatter information, object movement information, shape and colour matching and other techniques to distinguish humans from other moving objects. The 'sensor fusion' technology uses the forward-looking radar to cue the video, greatly reducing the amount of realtime processing required, which allowing the system to be run on a low-cost digital signal processor.
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