Southern Africa
In an empowerment deal Sahara Holdings has divested 27% of its shares to a newly-established consortium, the mining and mineral resource Group, Mvelaphanda Holdings, local investment consortium, Afripalm Consortium and the Sahara Employees Trust Fund. The shares are being sold for R173m. The agreement offers both Mvelaphanda, headed by executive chairperson Tokyo Sexwale, and Afripalm, headed by Lazarus Zim, with a 12,10% stake in the company, while the further 2,8% of the shares will be subscribed to the Sahara Employees Trust Fund.
ICT company CommuniCom Technologies SA has won an R8m mobile network contract from Ericsson SA. This contract involves network deployment and the supply of five mobile base station (BTS) units to be deployed in Madagascar. CommuniCom will be required to deliver a fully functional radio base station, tested and ready to carry voice and data traffic, integrating with local networks. CommuniCom will also supply a turnkey mobile network roll-out including switch room preparation, switching and BTS deployment.
Altech announced solid results for the six months to 31 August 2006, with headline earnings per share up 9%. Revenue increased by 13% to R3,3 bn and operating profit by 16% to R289m.
MultiChoice South Africa has announced the sale of 45 million shares in its holding company to black investors, as part of its BEE programme. This represents 15% of MultiChoice South Africa, with a value of R2,25 bn.
German company Beckhoff Automation has established a subsidiary in South Africa and is now directly represented on all continents. The new branch (www.beckhoff.co.za) is located in Randburg, Johannesburg. Contact details are: Unit 8, Boskruin Business Park, Randpark Ridge, Randburg. Tel: +27 (0)11 792 3374 fax: +27 (0)11 792 5453.
Leaf Wireless has secured the distribution and marketing rights to High Tech Computer Corporation's (HTC) Smartphones and PDA phones in southern Africa.
ECS has been appointed as a local distributor for Array Electronic.
Barlow Communications has been awarded the distribution rights for Wilcom's products in southern Africa. Wilcom manufactures optical fibre and telecommunication test equipment and also offer a full range of transmission repeaters, line-powered amplifiers and loop extenders.
ASSTech Process Electronics & Instrumentation has moved to new premises at: Unit 18, APD Industrial Park, Elsecar Road, Kyasand, Randburg. New contact numbers are: tel +27 (0)11 708 9200; fax +27(0) 11 708 9219.
Overseas
Companies
Videocon Industries, an Indian consumer electronics company, has signed an agreement to acquire digital imaging and electronics company Polaroid in a deal valued at around Rs 900 crore (approx $200m).
Test and measurement supplier LeCroy has acquired Catalyst Enterprises, a manufacturer of data bus analysis and emulation tools for serial data communications, for $30m in cash and a $3,5m note.
Power-One has signed an agreement with Magnetek to acquire its Power Electronics Group for $71,7m. Magnetek's Power Electronics Group sells power supplies and alternative energy products.
NXP Semiconductors will purchase the SSMC (Systems on Silicon Manufacturing Co) shares currently held by EDB Investments in the three months following completion of the separation of NXP from Royal Philips. SSMC is a manufacturing joint venture between Philips (50,5%), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (32%) and EDB Investments (17,5%) located in Singapore. SSMC is recognised as a leading manufacturer of semiconductor technology.
Acquicor Technology, the 'blank cheque' equity firm run by three former executives from Apple Computer (Steve Wozniak, Gilbert Amelio and Ellen Hancock), has entered into a merger agreement with foundry provider Jazz Semiconductor in an all-cash transaction valued at $260m. Jazz Semiconductor is an independent wafer foundry primarily focused on specialty CMOS process technologies, including high voltage CMOS, SiGe BiCMOS and RFCMOS for making highly integrated analog and mixed-signal semiconductor devices.
Optical components and subsystems supplier Bookham has signed an agreement to sell its Paignton, UK, assembly and test plant for $9,5m.
Nanoexa, a nanotechnology-based clean energy company, and Decktron, a lithium battery and display company, have signed an agreement to develop and commercialise lithium batteries with increased power output, storage capacity, safety and lifetime for high discharge rate applications such as hybrid/electric vehicles, power tools, and radio control devices. They will use technology that was originally developed at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.
IBM and Intel, with support from other companies, have developed a proposal to enhance PCI Express technology to address the performance requirements of new usage models, such as visualisation and extensible markup language (XML). The 'Geneseo' proposal outlines enhancements that are said to enable faster connectivity between the processor and application accelerators, and improve the range of design options for hardware developers. Applications that could benefit include visualisation, such as complex weather modelling; maths and physics, such as data-intensive financial applications; and content processing, such as the encryption and decryption.
ARM has announced that STMicroelectronics and Actel have licensed its Cortex-M3 microcontroller core IP.
Omron Electronic Components Business - Europe (OCB-EU) has announced a 'growth through investment' strategy, with a series of initiatives to expand its business in Europe. A new switch engineering centre, an expanded new technology team and restructured, expanded regional sales teams are three of the initiatives announced by OCB-EU to develop Omron's business in the region.
Industry
The three-month average of worldwide sales of semiconductors was a record $20,54 bn in August, an increase of 10,5% from the $18,59 bn reported in August 2005, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). Sales increased by 2,1% from the three-month average reported in July 2006.
The EDA Consortium has announced that EDA revenue reached an all-time high in the second quarter, topping $1,25 bn -an increase of 15% from the same period of 2005.
The worldwide demand for substrates for gallium nitride devices is forecast to grow from $340m in 2006 to $880m in 2010, according to Strategies Unlimited, a market research firm. This represents a compound annual growth rate over the period of about 27%.
The worldwide market for wireless LAN integrated circuits will reach $3,2 bn in 2010, a 17% compound annual growth rate, according to market research company IDC.
Advanced Forecasting has warned that the semiconductor industry will suffer a 'downward turning point' around mid-2007. By the second half of 2007, the semiconductor industry will have reached the end of a nearly six-year continued growth stage, except for the short plateau in the second half of 2004, according to the research firm.
Two of the hottest consumer applications for semiconductors now are digital television (DTV) and compressed audio/portable media players, according to IDC. The group expects the DTV semiconductor market to grow at a CAGR of 18% and reach $7,7 bn in 2010, while the compressed audio/PMP semiconductor market will grow at 28% and reach $8 bn in 2010.
By 2010, shipments of cellular handsets containing Wi-Fi will exceed 132 million devices, reports In-Stat. Carriers have been reluctant to offer Wi-Fi-capable handsets for several reasons, but, says In-Stat, Wi-Fi has spread so fast that carriers will not be able to resist much longer.
The ZigBee Alliance released an updated specification, called ZigBee 2006 or 'enhanced' ZigBee, that includes some significant changes from the original 2004 specification, with which it is not compatible. The ZigBee Alliance said that future releases would be backward-compatible.
The IEEE is developing a standard to enhance performance for lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries used in digital cameras and camcorders. The IEEE P1825 standard will set uniform criteria for the design, production and evaluation of lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries. It will address battery pack electrical and mechanical construction, packaging technologies, and pack and cell charge and discharge controls. The effort will build on existing IEEE standards for rechargeable laptop and cellphone batteries.
Nokia has developed a new wireless LAN technology called Wibree that is similar to Bluetooth but operates at up to one tenth the power consumption. An open industry initiative, this radio technology is intended to complement other local connectivity technologies to link PCs and small, button cell battery powered devices such as watches, wireless keyboards, toys and sports sensors. Wibree operates at a range of up to 10 metres and with a data rate of 1 Mbps and uses a 2,4 GHz carrier in the licence-free ISM band.
Flash-based solid state drives (SSD) have the potential to dethrone hard disk drives (HDD) as the top laptop storage choice within 10 years, according to In-Stat. It believes that the SSD market share in mobile computers could reach 50% by 2013.
Intellectual property (IP) standards body, the VSI Alliance (VSIA), has formed a verification IP quality workgroup. The workgroup is a subgroup of its IP quality workgroup, which is responsible for the creation of the VSIA quality IP (QIP) metric. The group said it plans to create a verification IP quality worksheet that will address the challenges facing designers as they evaluate and implement standard verification IP components.
Technology
Patients could soon provide a pin-prick blood sample in the comfort of their home, and minutes later, be discussing the test results with their doctor thanks to a new Australian technology. Melbourne-based company MycroLab has developed a cellphone-sized computer that can perform complex analytical tests on blood, saliva or other biological samples. Unlike other handheld devices, MycroLab says the device can be very quickly re-programmed and re-configured to include new or updated tests.
Intel has introduced wireless UWB Link 1480 MAC (media access controller) silicon and reference designs for ultra-wideband host solutions. The designs are based on the Certified Wireless Universal Serial Bus (USB) specification from the USB Implementers Forum and the WiMedia Network specification from the WiMedia Alliance. Certified Wireless USB technology enables wireless access up to 480 Mbps within 3 metres or 110 Mbps within 10 metres. The Intel host solution allows Certified Wireless USB and WiNet to operate concurrently.
LG.Philips LCD is claiming the world's slimmest TFT-LCD panel for slim mobile phones. The panel measures 1,3 mm thick. TFT-LCD panels currently used measure between 1,9 and 2,9 mm in thickness while OLED displays used in mobile phones are typically between 1,5 and 1,8 mm, according to LG.Philips.
Fabless programmable logic supplier MathStar has introduced its second generation of field programmable object arrays, claiming operational speeds of up to 1 GHz. The company claims that this speed is up to four times faster than today's top FPGA architectures, depending on the application.
Mentor Graphics has announced the Edge Development Suite, a bundled version of its Edge Development Tools that includes an integrated development environment (IDE), software simulator, compiler and debugger, at a low price point. The suite is currently available for Altera's Nios II processor, ARM cores, Freescale's ColdFire and PowerPC families, MIPS cores and the Xilinx MicroBlaze microprocessor.
Intel has unveiled details of its terascale research prototype silicon, including the development of the world's first programmable processor said to deliver 1 trillion floating point operations per second (Tflops). Speaking at the 10th Intel Developer Forum, Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, said that 'during the next decade, online software services hosted by mega data centres with more than a million servers will allow people to access personal data, media and applications from any high-performance device to play photorealistic games, share realtime video and do multimedia data mining. This new usage model will challenge the industry to deliver high-speed computing performance and terabytes of bandwidth.'
Lucent Technologies's Bell Labs claims it has transmitted 10 channels of 107 Gbps Ethernet traffic over 2000 km of fibre using components commonly applied in long-haul 40 Gbps transmission. The researchers used a prototype lithium niobate differential quadrature phase-shift keying modulator developed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, Japan) and Sumitomo Osaka Cement.
Fractus has been granted the world's first technology patent for an IC package including a miniature fractal antenna. The technology, commonly referred to as antenna-in-package (AiP), has been granted in the US under Patent 7095372. Fractus technology allows the antenna, traditionally a separate component, to be integrated with other RF components such as the radio and RF processor. Using fractal geometry with its extremely economical use of space, Fractus has created a solution that is small enough to be incorporated onto the IC and accommodate multiple bands.
Intel has disclosed details of its next-generation Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology platform that will enable laptops to operate faster and with enhanced wireless communication capabilities. Intel's low power, high performance Core2 Duo processor will be at the heart of the platform. The Core 2 Duo processor will have new power saving capabilities in the CPU and a faster front-side bus from 667 MHz up to 800 MHz. The platform will contain a new Wi-Fi solution that will be compliant with the emerging 802.11n specification to ensure seamless communications with a variety of Wi-Fi access points.
JVC has developed an optical engine to allow a rear projection TV to have a much smaller depth. It allows a 60-inch screen class TV to to be only 27 cm deep. JVC's Slim HD-ILA optical engine uses a concave mirror to reflect the light beam instead of a conventional convex mirror, enabling a wide 138° projection angle.
Microdisplay company Microvision is to develop a commercial scanned-beam head-up display (HUD) product for automotive applications. The company has signed an agreement with an as yet unnamed top-tier automotive supplier to produce several head-up display prototypes using its laser-based scanned-beam display technology.
Two significant distance records have been set for distributing 'keys' (or codes) for quantum encryption, the most secure method known for protecting the privacy of information. Quantum key distribution (QKD) systems represent cryptographic keys as sequences of single photons transmitted with their electric fields in different quantum states to represent the binary values 1 and 0. The laws of quantum physics dictate that a photon cannot be intercepted without changing its quantum state, which will reveal an eavesdropper. Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, NIST and Albion College used careful laser adjustments and a special NIST-designed photon detector to generate and transmit secret quantum keys (secure against 'reasonable attacks') over 184,6 km of fibre-optic cable; and with slightly different adjustments 'absolutely secure' transmission over 67,5 km - both new records.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Germany, have produced a miniature projector that uses a laser beam and a single fast-moving mirror to produce an image. The 16 x 9 x 9 mm projector could be used to project images from mobile phones, PDAs or laptops, allowing small portable devices to also offer large high-resolution displays. As yet, the prototype only uses red and blue lasers and so does not offer a full colour gamut.
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