Southern Africa
Sentech has already started digital terrestrial television (DTT) test transmissions and has announced that it is set to spend close to R1 bn over the next five years on upgrading its infrastructure for the digital age. Sentech will also be playing a major role in the 2010 FIFA World Cup as a digital ready terrestrial system is necessary in order to meet requirements. Frans Lindeque, Sentech's acting COO, says that digital TV sets will increasingly become integrated with fixed and mobile broadband networks, allowing viewers to switch easily between watching television, surfing the Internet, or even doing online shopping. The first requirement is to upgrade its network and duplicate the current analog network channels on a digital system. Sentech anticipates the first phase of network upgrades will take two years, with digital migration commencing in 2008. Lindeque says that most of the 220 sites needed to broadcast DTT to 92% of South Africa's population are already in place and only need upgrades to become fully digital. Once that process is complete, DTT and analog systems will be run side-by-side (a dual illumination process) until South Africa is ready to switch off the analog transmission.
Overseas
Companies
Storage vendor EMC has announced a definitive agreement to acquire RSA Security for around $2,1 bn.
EADS Test & Services has acquired Get Electronique based in Castres near Toulouse, France, which specialises in services in industrial electronics.
Fabless Chinese ASIC design company VeriSilicon Holdings has acquired the ZSP digital signal processor unit of LSI Logic. Under the terms VeriSilicon will obtain certain assets related to ZSP licensable cores, development tools, standard products and software and associated issued and pending patents.
Chip-packaging specialist Tessera Technologies has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Digital Optics for $59,5m.
Siemens, a leader in the manufacture of process analytics devices, has announced a deal to acquire Eastime Automation, a leading company in China for engineering and project management in process analytics. The company is to change its name to Siemens Process Analytics.
STMicroelectronics and Schneider Electric have joined the ZigBee Alliance's board of directors. Huawei, the Chinese communications equipment group, has been upgraded to 'Promoter Level' at the alliance. Other director companies of the ZigBee Alliance include: Texas Instruments, Philips, Ember Corporation, Motorola, Siemens, Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung, Honeywell and Mitsubishi Electric.
Pelikon, a UK designer and manufacturer of printed segmented electroluminescent (pSEL) touch displays, backlights and specialised driver electronics, has announced an integrator partnership with Memtron Input Components in the US. Memtron is the membrane switch division of Esterline. The companies will combine their expertise to create a range of fully integrated display solutions marketed under the SELect brand name.
Nokia is forming a joint venture with Giesecke & Devrient, a specialist developer of smartcards, to develop applications and management systems for use with near field communication (NFC) technology.
Laird Technologies, a handset antenna manufacturer has announced an agreement with RFMD, a provider of radio frequency ICs, to jointly develop RF systems for the wireless industry. The two will work on developing integrated modules with built-in antennas to meet the need for more capabilities in smaller handset sizes.
Organic electronics company ORFID has signed an agreement with BASF Future Business (BFB) to collaborate on developing printable organic electronic devices for display backplanes, RFID tags and other next-generation electronic products. ORFID has developed an organic electronics technology called the VOFET (vertical organic field effect transistor), which offers performance similar to conventional silicon transistors, but can be produced at significantly lower cost, according to the company.
The International Telecommunication Union and Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications Company of the UAE have concluded an agreement to provide portable satellite terminals to assist countries in disaster mitigation and relief. Thuraya is contributing handheld satellite terminals along with solar chargers while the ITU said it will pay for airtime at discounted rates offered by Thuraya and cover the transportation costs of telecommunications equipment to and from disaster-hit areas. The WTDC-06 meeting in Doha in March called upon ITU to develop ICT-based solutions in emergency telecommunications directed at improving early-warning communication, disaster preparedness and mitigation.
Seven movie companies have launched a $150m campaign to promote the HD DVD video format. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Warner Home Video, Paramount Home Entertainment, HP, Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba are jointly forming a trade organisation named the North American HD DVD Promotional Group.
Staktek Holdings, Austin, Texas, has agreed to license its NAND flash memory-stacking technologies to Japan-based Toshiba.
Rambus has announced it has signed a new patent licence agreement with Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial.
Industry
Worldwide sales of semiconductors of $19,7 bn in May grew by 9,4% over the May 2005 sales according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). Sales rose by 0,7% from April 2006. Sales of cellphones and other consumer electronics products were once again principal contributors to growth, it noted. Sales of analog chips grew by 21,5% from the same period last year, while DSP sales grew by 13,7%. Sales of PC microprocessors declined by 2% from May of 2005.
iSuppli has upgraded its semiconductor forecast for 2006 fractionally to 7,9% from 7,4%.
EDA revenue was up 10% year-to-year during the first quarter, the first time EDA posted double-digit growth in more than two years, according to the latest report by the EDA Consortium's Market Statistics Service. Worldwide EDA revenue reached $1,215 bn during the first quarter, up from $1,108 bn in the first quarter of 2005. Total product revenue, without services, increased more than 10% to $1,136 bn in the first quarter, said EDAC. In the first quarter: computer-aided engineering generated revenue of $512m, up 10% from the same period of 2005; IC physical design and verification increased 13% to $315m; intellectual property grew 12% to $225m; services revenue increased 3% to $79m; PCB and multichip module revenue totalled $84m, down 4%.
Handelsbanken Capital Markets has lowered its worldwide semiconductor forecast amid sluggish May growth and weak PC demand, now projecting that the market will grow 5% in 2006 over 2005. This is down from 6% in its previous forecast.
Analyst firm DisplaySearch expects LCD TV shipments to more than double from 41 million units this year to 96,9 million in 2009, while CRT TV shipment will drop from 138 million units to 90,4 million in 2009.
Annual worldwide shipments of consumer electronic system-on-chips are expect to grow from 1,11 billion in 2005 to 1,77 billion in 2011, a compound annual growth rate of approximately 6,9%, according to a report from the The Diffusion Group (TDG).
LG Electronics is the leading supplier in the plasma display panel (PDP) industry in the first quarter of 2006, according to new rankings from iSuppli. LG's share of worldwide PDP unit production rose to 31,1% in the first quarter, up from 27,5% in the fourth quarter of 2005.
Converged Wi-Fi/Cellular handsets are expected to exceed 132 million devices by 2010, according to market research firm In-Stat. Carriers have been reluctant to offer Wi-Fi-capable handsets for several reasons, it notes, but Wi-Fi has spread so fast that carriers will not be able to resist much longer.
The EU fined Microsoft $357m on 12 July for failing to obey its 2004 antitrust order to share program code with rivals. It has threatened new fines of $3,82m a day beginning 31 July unless the company supplies 'complete and accurate' technical information to developers of software that works with Windows.
The US government is concerned that foreign-manufactured integrated circuits could be a security risk for its weapons systems. Among the concerns are that ICs could be 'doctored' to fail early or could be engineered to misbehave under specialised circumstances. As a result, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is soliciting research proposals under the 'Trust for integrated circuits' initiative, which can be found at www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2005-02-HPMS_Report_Final.pdf.
The current 'green' lead-free manufacturing effort has helped bring about the revival of the mature SMT equipment market, according to new analysis from Frost & Sullivan. Lead-free manufacturing has caused process changes in the SMT line that have placed more emphasis on cleaning. With more residue left on the assembly during lead-free manufacturing, industries that did not historically clean are likely to do so between 2006 and 2010, creating new market opportunities, according to the research group.
Technology
The world's fastest supercomputer, BlueGene/L (BG/L), located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA, is now officially even faster. Currently ranked no. 1 by the Top500 organisation for its peak speed capabilities, BG/L set a new record in June for sustained performance of 207,3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS), using the 'Qbox' computer code for conducting materials science simulations critical to national security. The performance of the Qbox code, specially designed to run on large-scale platforms such as BG/L, has implications for the broader research community and will likely enable the development of new materials of interest to many industries.
Samsung Electronics has announced it has developed a 2 GB OneNAND flash memory chip based on 60 nm process technology, claiming it is the world's fastest memory device.
Freescale Semiconductor has started commercial shipments of its 4 Mbit magneto-resistive random access memories (MRAM). The Freescale MRAM products have read and write times around 35 ns. The non-volatile MRAM is said to have 'unlimited' durability.
OMS Displays claims to have developed a method of producing optical magnifying sheets as a solution for manufacturing low-cost slim flat large magnifying panels for displays. The technology is a unique method in which an input pattern is optically magnified by guiding its content at the pixel level. Two main applications are envisioned: low-cost slim large format panel displays that have the performance of the high-end micro-display rear projection TV, but are slimmer and lighter than current plasma and LCD displays; and as high efficiency backlighting panels for high-end LCD and panel display TV sets backlit by LEDs.
An electrical engineering scientist at UCLA has devised a way to cut the energy needs in silicon laser devices, making them more practical for CMOS electronics. The solution is to recycle the excess energy that would have been wasted as heat with a photovoltaic effect that converts it back into electricity to power the chip.
BP, London and the California Institute of Technology are jointly developing a new type of solar-cell technology, an array of silicon nanorods. A solar cell based on such arrays will be able to absorb light along the length of the rods by collecting the electricity generated by sunlight more efficiently than a conventional solar cell, according to the companies.
Ricoh has announced the development of an optical component that it claims reads and writes all disk formats - Blu-ray Disc; HD-DVD, DVD and CD - with one pickup and one objective lens.
Panorama Labs has developed microphotonics technology that it believes will improve the quality and lower the cost of a broad range of applications, including video displays, telecoms, and ICs. In particular, it is exploiting the concept of magneto photonic crystals (MPC) to develop high-resolution cinema-quality displays. It claims the technology would enable fast pixel refresh rates as well as better grey-scale and colour rendition than existing flat-panel technologies such as LCDs and plasma. MPC technology uses the Faraday effect, whereby polarised light is rotated by travelling through a magnetic field.
Scientists working at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) in collaboration with physicists from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory believe they are coming closer to understanding the mechanism behind high-temperature superconductivity. They have reported strong evidence that magnetic fluctuations are key to a universal mechanism for pairing electrons and enabling resistance-free passage of electric current in high-temperature superconductors. They believe these observations and findings should open new avenues of research into the exotic properties of high-temperature superconductors.
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