Southern Africa
Following Wavecom's recent acquisition of Sony Ericsson's M2M Business Unit, the new Wavecom's distribution network in South Africa has strengthened. Both Trinity Telecomms and newly-appointed distributor Arrow Altech Distribution will be providing the local market with technical support and logistics services. During the transition period whilst the two former businesses integrate, Trinity Telecomms will continue to distribute only Wavecom products and Arrow Altech Distribution will resell and support only former Sony Ericsson products. As soon as both distributors have been fully trained in the combined product portfolio, all products from the new Wavecom portfolio will be available from both distributors. Any enquiries may be directed to Mallorie Claudel ([email protected]) or Gopinath Krishnamurthy ([email protected]).
Eagle Technology has been appointed as the exclusive distributor for Congatec ETX/XTX and Com Express embedded module products in South Africa. The Congatec product portfolio is comprised of embedded computer boards and modules with BIOS features for industrial use, professional board-support-packages and extensive design-in support.
Overseas
Business
Royal Philips Electronics has reiterated its intention to float or sell off its chip business by late 2006, keeping a minority stake in the business, which it hopes will merge with another chipmaker later.
Programmable logic supplier Altera has announced that it expects to restate its financial earnings for fiscal years 1996 through 2005. In an official press release it said it would do this to 'correct errors related to accounting for stock-based compensation expense.' The company does not currently anticipate that the restatement will result in a material charge to the 2005 fiscal year.
Tektronix posted a $31,9m net income on sales of $289,3m for its fiscal fourth quarter. Compared with the same period of 2005, Tektronix' net income grew 48% while revenue increased by 11%. For the fiscal year, Tektronix posted a net income of $91m, up 15% from the prior fiscal year, on sales of just over $1 bn.
Texas Instruments has increased its second quarter revenue and earnings estimates, saying the company now expects to post revenue of $3,63 bn to $3,78 bn. TI expects to post semiconductor revenue of between $3,45 bn and $3,59 bn, up from the prior range of $3,29 bn to $3,56 bn.
Companies
Royal Philips Electronics has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Intermagnetics General, a supplier of superconductive magnets for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, for $1,3 bn in cash.
Analog Devices has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Integrant Technologies of South Korea for approximately $127m. Integrant is an innovator in the field of high performance analog circuits designed for reconfigurable RF signal processing.
Nokia and Siemens have announced that they will merge the Networks Business Group of Nokia and the carrier-related operations of Siemens into a new company, to be called Nokia Siemens Networks. The 50-50 joint venture will create a global leader with strong positions in the important growth segments of fixed and mobile network infrastructure and services.
Flomerics has reached an agreement to acquire NIKA, an engineering fluid dynamics software company based in Frankfurt. With the acquisition Flomerics, a leader in core markets such as electronic thermal analysis, hopes to open up new market opportunities in complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology.
Cabot Microelectronics has agreed to purchase all of the assets of QED Technologies, a supplier of polishing and metrology systems for high precision optics.
NeoPhotonics, a planar lightwave circuit specialist, has acquired both LightConnect and OpTun as well as 25 MEMS patents from Memx.
IP licensor ARM Holdings has acquired Falanx Microsystems, a Norwegian developer of graphics processor cores. Falanx has developed graphics accelerator IP and software for semiconductor system-on-chip (SoC) vendors.
LED manufacturer, Cree, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Intrinsic Semiconductor for $46m. Intrinsic develops materials and device technologies based on SiC and GaN wafers.
Wireless communications solutions provider, Wavecom, has announced its acquisition of NexGen Software, a France-based software company specialising in TCP/IP Internet software. NexGen Software will operate as a wholly-owned Wavecom entity and will continue to develop and market its current portfolio of software products.
Rosenberger of North America has signed an agreement to purchase assets and to license technology used by Agilent Technologies at its cable assembly shop in California. The Agilent facility produces complex, high frequency semi-rigid cable assemblies that are used by Agilent.
Fabless chip company Impinj has licensed flash data storage card supplier SanDisk to use its AEON memory technology. AEON cores offer multiple-times programmability and can store encryption keys, unique chip identification numbers, chip or system configuration data and trim bits for on-chip analog components.
Industry
Databeans estimates that worldwide revenue generated by thermal management ICs reached $674m in 2005. Growing at an aggressive average growth rate of 20% each year, this market could reach just under $2 bn in five years, it reckons.
DSPs will top the Indian semiconductor market by revenue in 2006, contributing $863m to the country's total market size of $3,62 bn, according to a Frost & Sullivan study for the India Semiconductor Association. Microprocessors with a market of $583m will be the second biggest category, followed by microcontrollers ($469m), memory products ($444m) and sensors ($51m).
Shipments of mobile phone displays rose 43% in the first quarter of 2006 to 274,6 million main displays and 58,6 million sub displays, according to market research firm DisplaySearch.
The total number of homes worldwide that will be reached by next-generation fibre-optic networks will soar from about 11 million this year to about 86 million in 2011, according to a study by Heavy Reading. Fibre-to-the-home expansion will be the most aggressive in Asia over the next five years, it notes. Although DSL (copper) offers a temporary fix to the ever-growing consumer demand for bandwidth, the report says it will run out of options in the next three to five years, meaning that telcos must begin the transition to fibre soon.
In 2011, mobile TV services will have some 514 million subscribers worldwide, up from only 6,4 million at the end of 2005, according to a prediction in a new ABI Research report. The fledgling market for mobile television is beginning to build significant momentum, it notes. South Korea and Japan are the early adopters, but European and North American markets are not far behind, with three contenders planning to introduce mobile video broadcast services in the US over the next 12 to 18 months, it says.
While most analysts are raising their semiconductor forecasts for 2006, Wedbush Morgan Securities has announced that it has lowered its 2006 semiconductor growth forecast from 11% to 10%. For 2007, Wedbush projects that the IC market will slow and grow by only 6% over 2006.
According to market research firm Gartner, strong growth in the market for Apple's iPod and other portable media players is expected to be a significant driver for sales of NAND flash memory in the second half of this year. Gartner forecasts that the market for all portable media players will reach 187,7 million units, up from 134,5 million in 2005.
According to the US Economic Policy Institute (EPI) think tank, the average chief executive in the United States earned 262 times the pay of the average worker in 2005. Thus a CEO earned more in one workday (260 per year) than an average worker earned in 52 weeks. In 1965, CEOs in the US earned 24 times more than an average worker.
Advanced Micro Devices has announced plans to build a new 300 mm wafer-fab in upstate New York that will cost $3,5 bn.
Intel has opened its next 65 nm wafer fab in Leixlip, Ireland. Fab 24-2 cost $2 bn to build.
The China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA) has officially joined the World Semiconductor Council (WSC).
The 1394 Trade Association has announced that it will develop a new, streamlined enhancement to the IEEE 1394 standard called VersaPHY. The enhancements will take advantage of 1394's high speed and its robust capability to extend the technology's long distance reach to more than 75 metres and higher. VersaPHY will retain full compatibility with all existing 1394 products. 1394 technology is also known as FireWire.
The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board has ratified the IEEE P802.3an 10GBASE-T standard, which specifies 10 Gbps data transmission over four-pair copper cabling.
The IEC 61000-4-3 is the long-accepted basic standard for testing radiated RF field immunity to satisfy many EU requirements for the CE mark. Recent changes in Edition 3.0 include a new harmonic distortion requirement, new linearity check, an extended frequency range, and new test table material requirements. According to AR Worldwide RF/Microwave Instrumentation these changes have brought some common test problems to light. It has thus written an application note explaining the changes - and the implications for test equipment: www.arww-rfmicro.com/pdfs/appNotes/AN%2041-%20IEC61000-4-3%20Ed3%20update.pdf.
Six companies have announced their intent to jointly establish the world's first global, open Linux-based software platform for mobile devices. The six: Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone; will also form an independent foundation. Focusing primarily on the joint development and marketing of an API specification, architecture, supporting source code-based reference implementation components and tools, the foundation intends to leverage the benefits of community-based and proprietary development.
Technology
Intel and Analog Devices have announced a new bus technology called the simple serial transport (SST) that improves and communicates heat dissipation and voltage management information in computer systems. The technology is said to enable faster and more precise communication of system efficiency, one of the determining factors in temperature and voltage within a variety of computing systems. SST works in conjunction with a computer's core-logic chipset, and improves upon the existing 100 Kbps SMBus (system management bus) by offering increased bandwidth and higher noise sensitivity, they claim.
Cree has announced a white LED with an efficiency of 131 lumens per watt, confirmed by the NIST. This is claimed to be the highest level of efficacy achieved for a white LED. Tests were performed using prototype white LEDs with Cree EZBright LED chips operating at 20 mA and a correlated colour temperature of 6027 K. As a reference, conventional incandescent light bulbs are typically in the 10 to 20 lumens per watt range, while compact fluorescent lamps range from 50 to 60 lumens per watt.
Synplicity has developed a free, non-proprietary intellectual property (IP) encryption flow that permits industry-wide interoperability and is offering this methodology to EDA, IP and end-user communities. According to Synplicity the methodology is being offered as a means to address the challenges designers face when using protected IP in design flows, which are often composed of tools from several different EDA vendors. This proposed IP encryption methodology (applicable to both FPGA and ASIC design flows) should significantly simplify the integration of IP for designers, said the company.
The world's largest online family history source, Ancestry.com, has announced it has completed digitising and indexing the entire US Federal Census from 1790 to 1930. It is now claimed to be the most comprehensive genealogical database ever compiled online with more than five billion searchable names. Over the course of the project, Ancestry.com's team spent 6,6 million hours of labour deciphering handwriting from 13 million original census documents and 21,9 billion keystrokes manually entering information into the database.
Spansion has introduced new security technology to bring new levels of security to mobile phones by integrating a range of encryption, authentication, random number generation and other security features into a mobile security chip. Spansion's secure flash memory technology will be offered to customers as a discrete security controller in a multichip package (MCP).
Kontron America has announced the highest class certified computing display. The Triton D1 is claimed to be the industry's first explosion-proof computing display that carries the Certified Class l Zone l/ATEX Zone l and electrical protection class EMC/EN61326 for maximum protection in hazardous-classified areas. Intended for industries such as oil and gas, the computer display carries both the Class I, Zone I, Ex d IIB T4 and Class I, Zone l, AEx d IIB T4 certifications for the USA and Canada and the ATEX II 2 G, EEx d IIB T4 certificate for Europe.
Royal Philips Electronics has introduced a new RFID chip that offers enhanced, password-protected security and privacy features. According to Philips its ICODE-SLI S device addresses many of the challenges facing library management, including reader logistics, material identification and inventory and information storage. ICODE SLI-S also offers increased read performance and is specifically suited for automated management of media in libraries.
Samsung SDI of South Korea has developed what it claims is the industry's slimmest CRT for 21" (53 cm) TVs. Trademarked Ultra Vixlim, the 29,9 cm thick CRT is 5,3 cm slimmer than Samsung's existing Vixlim CRT models. The company expects to adapt Ultra Vixlim for 28", 29" and 32" CRTs by next year.
Lund University spin-off, Nanofreeze Technologies in Sweden, has developed cooling chips that it claims are powerful enough to work as a heat exchanger, 'effectively replacing' the compressors used in refrigerators. The startup was recently awarded a 300 000 Swedish krone innovation prize from the Swedish government. The technology consists of different semiconductor materials built using nanotechnology. The cool chip technology is initially being aimed at compact and portable applications such as computers, cellphones and lasers.
Texas Instruments has released a new digital video software development kit based on its DaVinci technology. The kit comprises the eXpressDSP Configuration Kit, and SoC analyser based on the eXpress data visualisation technology and MontaVista's Linux operating system. The combination is said to reduce the DaVinci development cycle from months to weeks for designers of IP set top boxes, video phones and video security systems.
Perpetuum has launched a vibration energy harvester to power wireless and battery-free devices that send large amounts of data from many types of industrial equipment. The PMG7 high-performance microgenerator allows users to power sensors, microprocessors and transmitters which monitor equipment and machinery without the need for batteries, cabling or maintenance. The microgenerator converts kinetic energy from the equipment's vibration (25 mg min) running at mains frequency, into electrical energy. It can generate up to 5 mW which it says is enough to power a wireless transmitter sending up to 6 KB of critical data every few minutes.
Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken), SGI Japan and Intel have announced the development of a supercomputer with a theoretical peak performance of 1 petaflops (one million billion floating point operations per second). The MDGRAPE-3 system is designed to perform molecular dynamics simulations of such phenomena as non-bonding interactions between atoms. The system consists of 201 units equipped with 24 of Riken's MDGRAPE-3 LSI chips (total of 4808 chips), which are connected to 64 parallel servers equipped with 256 Intel Xeon 5000-series cores and 37 parallel servers equipped with 74 Xeon 3,2 GHz cores. The MDGRAPE-3 chip (pictured), has 20 pipelines for force calculations which operate at 300 MHz at the typical case. The chip performs 660 equivalent-operations per cycle and has the peak performance of 198 Gflops. The power dissipation is 19 W at 350 MHz (fastest) or 16 W at 250 MHz (typical).
Toshiba America Electronic Components has introduced a multichip package that, in addition to standard MCP memory devices, integrates a gigabyte-class NAND flash memory with an SD card interface controller.
Powerline communications IC firm SiConnect claims to have overcome the reliability issues of using existing domestic electrical wiring for networking audio, video, voice and data in the home. According to the company, the 'best effort' approach of Ethernet-like technologies, that rely on an asynchronous carrier sense multiple access/collision detection (CSMA/CD) protocol, cannot provide the consistent quality of service that is needed. SiConnect's POEM technology therefore uses a synchronous multiple access/contention resolution (SMA/CR) protocol and an inbuilt QoS management structure that it says delivers 16 different service levels for prioritising traffic, including audio, video, VoIP and IP data streams.
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