Southern Africa
The Meraka Institute, the CSIR's national research centre dedicated to information and communications technology (ICT), was part of the Department of Communication's delegation on the ICT4All exhibition - the major parallel, multistakeholder event of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that was held in Tunisia this month. The ICT4All exhibition aims to contribute to the more effective use of ICT worldwide. The Meraka Institute promoted a selection of innovative ICT-based products and services, which have been developed through some of its current initiatives. These comprise:
* The Digital Doorway which promotes widespread computer literacy through minimally invasive education.
* The National Accessibility Portal which aims to enhance the development and independent living of persons with disabilities.
* Wireless Africa which researches ways and means to develop sustainable ICT infrastructure in developing countries.
* Open Source Centre which amplifies the benefits of Free/Libre and Open Source Software - locally and abroad.
* Human Language Technologies which creates, applies and adapts speech and language technologies for the benefits of the people of southern Africa.
Actum Electronics has announced that it has purchased the complete business of Altico Static Control Products (Altico) as a going concern, effective 1 November 2005. Altico, a well-established distributor of static control products including anti-static clothing and equipment, anti-static consumables and packaging, and anti-static flooring, will be incorporated as a division of Actum Electronics.
Measuring Instruments Technology (MIT) has been appointed as the exclusive South African distributor of products from Andor Technology, a maker of instruments for spectroscopy and scientific imaging. The product range includes a range of multichannel and gated detectors. Andor was a spin-off company from the Queens University in Northern Ireland.
In a move to speed up cycle times and to become more competitive on the global market in executing its pipeline of programs, Denel Aerospace Systems (DAS) has decided to deploy PTC's Windchill Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions in a contract worth R7 million. The contract is with productONE, the sub-Saharan Africa distributor for PTC, the developers of Windchill and Pro/Engineer.
As of January 2006, Grafoplast Wiremarkers' head office will be accommodated in new wholly-owned premises. The new address is 361 Olympic Duel Ave, Northlands Business Park, Northriding, Randburg. Telephone and fax numbers remain unchanged.
Overseas
Business
Agilent Technologies has announced revenues during the quarter of $1,41 bn, up 5% from the same period last year. Fourth quarter GAAP net earnings were $26m, compared with $74m in last year's fourth quarter. Included in Agilent's fourth quarter GAAP net earnings, is a $48m tax charge associated with repatriating $970m of off-shore earnings under the Homeland Investment Act, and $119m, form costs due to its restructuring process.
Analog Devices reported that its fiscal fourth quarter net income was down 48% on a year-over-year basis, despite nearly flat revenue, citing charges associated with previously-announced restructuring plans. ADI reported net income of $68,3m on net sales of $622m for the quarter. For the year, the company reported net income of $414,8m on revenue of $2,4 bn. Q4 revenue was an increase of 7% on a quarter-over-quarter basis, but a decrease of 2% when compared with the same period of 2004.
Renesas Technology reported that sales for the first half of its 2005 fiscal year fell 10% to 439,3 bn yen, with a net loss of 2 bn yen.
Companies
FCI, one of the largest manufacturers of connectors and interconnect systems in the world, has been acquired from French energy group Areva by Bain Capital, a global private investment firm. Completion of the acquisition follows a competitive bidding process designed to identify the best possible partner for FCI in terms of financial strength, international presence and commitment to business development.
Pulse has expanded its wireless communications product offering through the acquisition of LK Products, a producer of cellular and non-cellular antennas and integrated modules for mobile handsets.
Sokymat, a supplier of RFID transponders, has acquired Imasys, a German supplier of RFID inlay manufacturing equipment.
Data storage device supplier M-Systems has acquired Microelectronica Espanola, a European smartcard and smartcard operating systems company, for $40m in cash.
Communications semiconductor supplier Emcore has acquired the assets of Phasebridge, a privately-held supplier of multichip, system-in-package optical modules and subsystems.
Infineon Technologies has announced a 'strategic alignment,' having the objective to create two focused and independent companies, one for logic and one for memory products. The company intends to spin out its memory business by July 2006 and will then look to an initial public offering of stock. It will then focus on its logic division, continuing to target the automotive, industrial electronics and communications sectors. Infineon, as the parent company, will then focus on the logic business, comprised of the business groups Automotive, Industrial Electronics and Multimarket (AIM) and Communications (COM). Infineon said the split would strengthen its core technological competencies in analog-mixed signal, power, RF and embedded controls. The unit will target automotive, power management, chip cards and security along with mobile and broadband communications.
Saab and TietoEnator are forming a joint venture company called TietoSaab Systems, with the intention of becoming a major supplier in defence and civil security solutions in Finland. TietoEnator will own 60% and Saab 40% of the company's share capital and votes, and the joint venture also includes the Saab-owned company, Elesco.
Epcos has established a joint venture with Chinese group Beijing Jones to manufacture EMC filters, hoping to increase its share of the Asian market. Epcos will have a 55% stake in Epcos-Jones.
Royal Philips Electronics has agreed to merge its Philips' Mobile Display Systems (MDS) business unit with Toppoly Optoelectronics of Taiwan. The company, to be called TPO, is intended to be a leading provider of displays for mobile applications.
Taiwan-based display supplier AU Optronics has restructured its business groups along two industry sectors, Information Technology Displays and Consumer Electronic Displays, effective 1 December.
Chipidea, a provider of analog and mixed-signal semiconductor intellectual property, has acquired a portfolio of USB controller IP from the wholly-owned TransDimension NH, a subsidiary of Oxford Semiconductor.
Sundance Multiprocessor Technology and Celoxica have agreed to combine their expertise to offer out-of-the-box digital signal processing (DSP) and FPGA system design solutions. The companies will initially focus their efforts on software-defined radio (SDR) and complex image processing, and will begin rolling out solutions during the fourth quarter of 2005.
Music instrument specialist Gibson Guitar, and semiconductor manufacturer, Cirrus Logic, have announced an agreement to develop a new generation of digital audio networking products beginning in 2006. The companies will develop next-generation gigabit Ethernet-based products designed to provide high-bandwidth for audio and video transport applications. They also intend to develop specifications for a new software protocol that will form the basis for the new products.
Ruckus Wireless has signed a joint development and marketing pact with Tropos Networks, to extend its WiFi residential gateways with Tropos' metropolitan mesh network architecture.
Advanced Micro Devices and Cray have announced an extension of their supercomputer development collaboration through the end of this decade. As part of the deal, the companies hope to develop a system that operates at a petaflop or more in performance.
IBM and Sony have released new software components and documentation for the Cell processor, including extensions to Linux.
Spansion, the flash memory venture between AMD and Fujitsu, will collaborate with M-Systems to integrate logic blocks into its MirrorBit technology that would form the basis of a new line of products dubbed 'Logic on Flash'. According to Spansion the Logic on Flash range will offer clear low power advantages and be an important addition to its multichip package (MCP) memory devices and package-on-chip technology.
Solidica and Freescale Semiconductor are jointly developing embedded sensors for use in advanced military vehicle diagnostics. The prototype sensors can be directly embedded into any metal component to measure a wide range of critical system information and wirelessly transmit the data in realtime, using Freescale's 2,4 GHz digital radio and microcontroller technology.
Seeking to solve the growing 'energy gap' in portable systems, Motorola has made a strategic investment in Canada's Tekion, a startup developer of a hybrid fuel cell and battery technology for mobile products.
Kopin has received a $0,75m contract from the US Department of Defense to develop an advanced display driver chip for its full-colour CyberDisplay SXGA active-matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD).
Agilent Technologies has announced it has been awarded a $19,7m contract by the US Air Force to provide Agilent microwave measuring receivers to the Air Force Metrology and Calibration Lab (AFMETCAL). Agilent also has received a $2,3m contract to deliver low-noise signal generators to the lab.
Industry
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has slightly raised its semiconductor forecast for 2005, but lowered its outlook for 2006 and 2007. The new forecast calls for 2005 sales to increase by 6,8% to $227,6 bn, followed by increases of 7,9% to $245,5 bn in 2006, 10,5% to $271,3 bn in 2007, and 13,9% to $309,2 bn in 2008. The trade group now projects a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10% over the 2005 through 2008 period, reaching $309 bn in 2008 - an increase of 45% from the $213 bn record level of 2004. For 2006, the SIA expects that the fastest-growing major end-markets will be: personal computers with a unit growth forecast of 10%; cellular telephones at 13%; digital cameras at 9%; digital televisions at 52%; and MP3 players at 52%. The microprocessor market will grow slightly faster than the PC market in 2006, while DSPs will be the fastest-growing major segment of the semiconductor market with 17,2% growth in 2006. Flash memory will grow 15,9%, while DRAM sales will decline by 10,1% it says.
Computer equipment will remain the largest semiconductor market for 2005, but communications is growing the fastest, according to IC Insights. Overall, IC revenues are forecast to grow about 8% to $192,4 bn in 2005, compared to $178,8 bn in 2004, according to the research firm. Computer equipment will account for about half of the ICs sold in 2005, or about $96,5 bn, according to the research group. The computer IC market is expected to grow 7,3% in 2005, surpassing the record for revenues set in 2000.
According to research firm IDTechEx, postal and courier mail services are expected to become the second-largest market for RFID (radio-frequency identification) item-level tagging following the retail sector. China, Korea, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Germany and the US are moving forward with deploying RFID to track packages, it says. By 2016, the US will contribute 25% to the total market, Europe 25% and China 50% to the $3 bn RFID market geared toward postal and courier services, according to IDTechEx.
Recovering from the dismal growth of 2002 and 2003, the European wireless communication test equipment market improved considerably in 2004, to record revenues of approximately $572,8m, and it is likely to grow at a CAGR of 9,2% to reach around 1057,7m in 2011, according to Frost & Sullivan.
Digital signal processors (DSPs), with worldwide unit shipments estimated at 1,5 billion units in 2004, are set to grow to approximately 2,8 billion units in 2009, reveals In-Stat in a new report. Over the same period it expects floating-point DSPs to lead revenue increases over the next five years, growing from $1,0 bn in 2004 to approximately $2,2 bn by 2009.
The markets for nano materials, tools and equipment for nanoelectronics totalled $1,8 bn in 2005 and is forecast to reach $4,2 bn by 2010, according to a new market research report from SEMI.
Intel has announced the setting up of a $50m venture capital fund to invest in companies in the Middle East and Turkey who are developing technology-focused hardware, software and services.
Israel's government has reportedly approved a grant of $525m to Intel to help the world's largest chip maker build a wafer fab in the southern town of Kiryat Gat.
UK communications watchdog Ofcom has ruled to deregulate RFID equipment using the 865 to 868 MHz range. The regulator concluded that, with the existing RFID rules covering power levels, frequency bands and antenna characteristics, interference from RFID devices in this frequency range was unlikely.
Sun Microsystems has announced that Virtual Compute Corporation has agreed to use more than 1 million hours of central processing units on its Grid Compute Utility, the company's largest grid compute utility deal yet. Sun Grid provides an open computing infrastructure on a utility basis, charging $1 per CPU per hour pay-per-use. VCC said it is using the grid to serve customers in the oil and gas industry.
Qualcomm has announced that it has shipped two billion chips since 1996 when it delivered the first commercial CDMA solutions to wireless handset and infrastructure customers. Qualcomm's chipsets have been instrumental in the robust growth of CDMA technology.
Qualcomm has filed patent infringement allegations against Nokia Corporation and Nokia Inc. in a federal court in San Diego claiming the phone maker has infringed 11 of its patents and one owned by its fully-owned SnapTrack subsidiary.
Phil Moorby, the inventor of the Verilog language and Verilog-XL simulator, has been awarded the Phil Kaufman award by the EDA Consortium.
IBM's Microelectronics Division and Motorola have been awarded the 2004 National Medal of Technology, announced the US Commerce Department. The National Medal of Technology is awarded annually by the US president to America's leading innovators.
Technology
Researchers at IBM have demonstrated what they claim is the world's first optical chip to electrically control the speed of light. The optical silicon chip can electrically alter the effective index of refraction of an integrated photonic-crystal waveguide. According to the researchers, the optical chip, which is constructed using normal silicon-on-insulator CMOS methods, can variably slow light by a factor of 300 times, under active control by a low-power (under 2 mW), fast-changing (<100 ns) electrical signal. The intention eventually, is to replace computer system backplanes, wires between chips and even on-chip communications, with electrically controlled all-optical components.
Texas Memory Systems has announced it has developed solid-state storage technology that utilises an InfiniBand interface, an open I/O architecture, that provides scaleable performance of 2,5 Gbps to 120 Gbps. The company demonstrated its 4x InfiniBand interface at the recent Super Computing conference in Seattle.
Research organisation SRI International is developing a direct carbon fuel cell (DCFC) technology that it claims to be a more efficient way to convert coal into electricity. DCFCs convert the chemical energy in coal directly into electricity without the need for gasification. SRI says DCFC has several potential benefits. It produces electricity at a competitive cost from a variety of fuels including coal, coke, tar, biomass and organic waste, and also, it is two times more fuel-efficient than today's coal-fired power plants, resulting in reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
Analog Devices' UK design centre has developed a single-chip radio transceiver for the EDGE (enhanced data rates for GSM evolution) cellular standard that combines all the radio and power management functions required.
Tektronix, Altera and First Silicon Solutions (FS2) have introduced FPGAView, a software package from FS2 for Tektronix TLA logic analysers that the companies claim enables realtime debugging of Altera's field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The companies said that FPGAView enables design engineers to quickly and easily measure signals inside their Altera FPGA design and select which group of internal signals to probe without having to recompile the design.
ACG Identification Technologies has launched an LF MultiTag Reader platform featuring support for both 125 kHz and 134,2 kHz transponders. This multifrequency capability enables the use of a single reader for multiple applications based on both of the two main low frequency technologies that have established themselves on the market. The LF MultiTag Reader platform also enables end-users to source low frequency ICs and transponders from a broader range of providers, said the company.
Scientists have announced that they have been able to improve the efficiency of organic or flexible solar cells. Researchers at Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, claim to have achieved an efficiency rate for organic solar cells of almost 6%, whereas the best that scientists have been able to do so far, is about 3%. Traditional silicon solar panels convert about 20% of light into useful electricity.
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