Southern Africa
The Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) has launched the Energy Efficiency Campaign for 2006 and Beyond (EEM2006+), themed 'It is in your power'. Launched in partnership with the National Energy Regulator and Eskom, the campaign aims to create awareness of the inherent benefits to all levels of South African society when energy users change their attitudes and behaviour to use energy more wisely. The DME says the campaign is in line with the Kyoto Protocol.
OEN Enterprises has acquired the sole Photonis-Dep agency for the sub-Saharan region. Photonis-Dep is a global source for photon sensor technology dedicated to image intensifier solutions. Photonis in Brive, France, and Delft Electronic Products in Roden, The Netherlands, merged in February 2005. The company supplies image intensifiers, photomultipliers and micro-channel plates.
The Southern Africa Amateur Radio Satellite Association (SA AMSAT) will be holding it annual conference at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on 25 March 2006. The programme features a number of presentations of general interest to anyone who is fascinated by science, engineering and technology, says SA AMSAT president, Hans van de Groenendaal. This year's programme was devised to appeal to a much wider audience although it also has enough content to interest persons who are directly involved in satellite and amateur satellite communication, he says. The conference is supported by the Department of Science and Technology. It is essential to pre-book: see www.amsatsa.org.za.
InterCal, an independent calibration company based in Midrand, has a new e-mail address and phone numbers: tel: +27 (0)11 315 4321; fax: +27 (0)11 312 1322, [email protected].
Phoenix Contact has new telephone numbers: tel: +27 (0)11 801 8200, fax: +27 (0)11 793 4403.
Philips SA recently announced that EBV Electrolink has joined its South African distribution network. Commenting on the appointment at the launch event in Cape Town, Vic Ritson, general manager of Philips Semiconductors South Africa (pictured) noted, "Philips is continuously evaluating the best way to serve its distribution customers as well as meet its growth objectives. We are very pleased to extend our relationship to EBV Elektrolink to drive Philips' breakthrough products across its customer base."
Overseas
Companies
US telecommunications giant AT&T has acquired rival BellSouth for $67bn. The merged company will have 70 million local-line phone customers and nearly 10 million broadband subscribers.
Bookham has agreed to acquire Avalon Photonics, a Switzerland-based supplier of single-mode and multimode vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) chips, arrays and subassemblies for sensing and datacom applications, for approximately $5,5m.
In a bid to enter the flash-memory card market, Micron Technology has acquired Lexar Media. Lexar supplies NAND flash memory products including memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers and ATA controller technology.
Transitive, a provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, is to work with Intel to allow software code originally written for RISC processors to operate on the Intel Itanium 2 and Intel Xeon processor families. The companies will focus on developing QuickTransit Hardware Virtualisation Technology Products for market release this year.
The HomePlug Powerline Alliance has announced that the baseline technology for its HomePlug Command and Control specification was awarded to Israeli company Yitran Communications. Yitran will work closely with Ariane Controls of Quebec City, Canada, and GE Security - two other companies involved in the Command and Control specification - to refine the standard. Nine companies responded to the Alliance's open call for the baseline technology platform, and Yitran's semiconductor technology emerged as the clear choice, according to the organisation.
Semiconductor suppliers SigmaTel and Infineon Technologies have entered an agreement to offer Bluetooth solutions for portable digital multimedia devices. Under the agreement, both companies will jointly develop a Bluetooth chip optimised for use in digital multimedia devices based on SigmaTel's portable multimedia SoC solutions. The chip will use SigmaTel's optimised radio architecture and Infineon's expertise in Bluetooth technology and chip design. The companies believe this solution will enable widespread adoption of Bluetooth technology in even the most cost-sensitive, power and space constrained applications, such as MP3 players or stereo headsets.
Symbol Technologies has entered into a licensing agreement with Terabeam, the parent company of Proxim Wireless, settling long-standing patent litigation related to wireless patents.
Industry
Worldwide sales of semiconductors of $19,66bn in January were 7% higher than January of 2005, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has reported. January sales reflected a 1,5% sequential decline from the $19,95 bn reported in December. The SIA noted that global semiconductor sales in January historically show an average sequential decline of 2,2% following the seasonally strong fourth quarter. "Retail sales, including consumer electronics products, were relatively strong in January and helped dampen the expected seasonal decline in sales," said SIA president George Scalise. "The industry entered the new year in a healthy condition. There are no excess inventories, end market demand remains strong, and capacity utilisation rates are very high. There are signs of recovery in the market for networking equipment, and reports from manufacturers of personal computers and cellphones reflect continued optimism."
The digital satellite set top box market, by far the largest of the digital TV set top box markets, reached 65 million units in 2005 and will grow to 79 million units by 2009, reports In-Stat. Digital satellite set top boxes include pay-TV boxes whose features are often specified by satellite pay-TV providers, and free-to-air (FTA) boxes that are used to receive unencrypted TV signals, according to the market research firm.
Global shipments of large-area (25,4 cm and over) thin-film-transistor LCD modules increased 10% quarter-to-quarter and 69% year-over-year to 65,5 million units, according to market research firm, DisplaySearch.
To secure employment in Europe and reinforce the European industry's leading position in embedded systems technology, Artemis (Advanced Research and Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems), a research program partially funded by the European Union, intends to invest 2,7 billion Euro into embedded systems R&D in Europe between 2007 and 2010.
Deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology continues to be hampered by a shortage of individuals skilled in the technology, according to a new survey by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). 75% of the technology companies surveyed said they do not believe there is a sufficient 'pool of talent' in RFID technology to hire from. Among companies that believe there is a talent shortage, 80% said the lack of individuals skilled in RFID will impact adoption of the technology.
The European Commission launched a wide-ranging public debate on the opportunities and challenges posed by radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for government, industry and society at large, at a high-level panel discussion at CeBIT 2006. Current trends and forecasts indicate that the RFID market will grow fast in the next 10 years. While cumulative sales of RFID tags have totalled 2,4 billion over the past 60 years, with 600 million tags being sold in 2005 alone, the value of the market, including hardware, systems and services, is expected to be multiplied by 10 between 2006 and 2016. The more intensive and extensive use of RFID also raises questions in the areas of privacy, security, technological reliability and international compatibility. According to the EC, the number of tags delivered in 10 years will be over 450 times the number to be delivered this year.
Sales of mobile phones worldwide totalled 816,6 million units in 2005, a 21% increase from 2004, as the leading six vendors increased their share of the market at the detriment of smaller vendors, according to market research company Gartner. Nokia remained the top vendor in 2005 with 32,5% of all mobile phone sales, followed by Motorola on 17,7%, Samsung on 12,7%, LG on 6,7%, Sony Ericsson on 6,3% and Siemens on 3,5%.
LSI Logic has announced that it will cease development of its RapidChip ASIC platform technology and would sell its digital signal processor (DSP) unit. It said it is taking specific actions to significantly enhance its ability to target growing opportunities in the storage and consumer markets.
The world market for organic light-emitting diodes is set to grow 64% by volume and 45% by value in 2006, to reach 100 million units and $900m, according to DisplayBank, a South Korean display market researcher. The largest supplier, Samsung SDI, shipped a total of 16,58 million OLED units in 2005, which accounted for 27% of the world's market volume.
Cadence Design Systems and the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET) have completed a three-year curriculum development project to provide engineering students with the skills and knowledge to work for international technology companies in Russia. As a result, says Cadence, the two-year graduate programme is self-sustaining and will continue to help train some of Russia's best and brightest minds, supporting the strong emerging Russian marketplace. The programme offers a master's degree in analog/mixed-signal engineering and includes 24 courses, accompanying lab projects and practical training. The curriculum of the courses is available for educational use at no charge from the online repository at http://crete.cadence.com.
According to a report from Clean Edge, markets for biofuels, photovoltaics, wind energy and fuel cells in total are poised to expand fourfold in the next decade, growing from $40 bn in global revenues in 2005 to $167 bn by 2015. The burgeoning biofuels market, which includes ethanol and biodiesel, hit $15,7 bn globally in 2005 and is projected to grow to $52,5 bn by 2015. Clean Edge projects that markets for photovoltaics (modules, system components, and installations) will grow from $11,2 bn in 2005 to $51,1 bn by 2015. Wind power installations will expand from $11,8 bn last year to $48,5 bn in 2015. Fuel cells and distributed hydrogen will grow from $1,2 bn in 2005 to $15,1 bn by 2015, it says.
Search engine giant Google is reported to be switching its internal servers from microprocessors made by Intel to chips from Advanced Micro Devices. According to reports Google has more than 200 000 internal servers worldwide.
Unit shipments of wireless LAN (WLAN) chipsets are projected to grow from 140 million in 2005 to 430 million in 2009, according to market research firm In-Stat. The research firm says that the market will be increasingly buoyed by new categories of devices such as handheld games, gaming consoles, cellphones and printers.
National Semiconductor has opened a new power application design centre in Europe to strengthen application and system-support services for engineers designing power supplies and power-management systems. Located within the company's European headquarters in Fuerstenfeldbruck near Munich, Germany, the centre gives power designers a full spectrum of engineering services, including reference designs, product selection, circuit design, board layout and problem analysis.
Technology
Carnegie Mellon researchers claim to have determined that cellphones pose a greater risk to aeroplane navigation than previously believed. Researchers in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) reported that cellphones and other portable electronic devices, like laptops and game-playing devices, can pose dangers to the normal operation of critical electronics on aeroplanes. Bill Strauss, an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility at the Naval Air Warfare Center said, "These devices can disrupt normal operation of key cockpit instruments, especially global positioning system (GPS) receivers, which are increasingly vital for safe landings."
Menta, a French company, is offering a reconfigurable FPGA fabric for licence and inclusion in customers' system-chips. Menta has developed a customisable, domain-specific reconfigurable core (eFPGA) for ASIC or system-on-chip (SoC). The eFPGA (embedded FPGA) core can be integrated into any design in three different ways: inside a general purpose processor (ICS: integrated core solution); connected as a coprocessor to any processor (CCS: coprocessor core solution); or as a peripheral through a system bus (PCS: peripheral core solution). Programming is facilitated with a C/C++ based IDE. Said Laurent Rougé, Menta CEO, 'FPGA vendors provide devices made of microprocessors embedded into reconfigurable logic - Menta goes the other way around: we embed eFPGAs into microprocessors: resulting chips are less expensive, and programming is much easier.'
Intel has outlined, at the Intel Developers' Forum, its mobile future, announcing significant innovations in mobile devices and broadband wireless. Its next generation of Intel Centrino mobile technology, codenamed Santa Rosa, is expected to include a more powerful mobile microprocessor, an improved graphics chipset (codenamed Crestline), an IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter (codenamed Kedron), as well as Intel-optimised advanced management and security solutions. It will also include a flash-based platform accelerator, which enables much more rapid boot-up time and power savings. Intel's family of next-generation application processors for handheld devices (codenamed Monahans), is based on Intel XScale technology. The platform will offer a wide range of performance, power and integration levels designed to meet the needs of handsets, handhelds and consumer electronic devices. Intel also introduced a new category of small form-factor mobile devices: ultra mobile PCs (UMPC). These highlight the growing ecosystem that Intel is working with to deliver targeted applications and services. Also showcased was the first single-chip multiband Wi-Fi/WiMAX radio (codenamed Ofer), which will enable people using laptops to connect to Wi-Fi or WiMAX networks worldwide.
Akustica, a pioneer in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, claims the first single-chip microphones on the market. The microphone chips are small, thin and light devices designed to replace the electret condenser microphone (ECM), a 50-year-old technology. The AKU2000 is a digital-output silicon membrane microphone suitable for use in microphone array applications requiring a high degree of noise immunity. The CMOS chip integrates the acoustic transducer together with an output amplifier and a fourth-order sigma-delta modulator on a single chip.
Samsung Electronics has unveiled at CeBIT, what it claims is the first smart phone equipped with an 8 GB hard disk drive. The SGH-i310 combines a phone, a digital camera and an MP3 player that can store about 2000 songs. It also offers USB 2.0 and can be used as a removable hard drive. It includes a 2 megapixel camera with flash, microSD slot, document viewer and TV output.
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