Erratum
It has been brought to Dataweek's attention by RF Design that, contrary to Siemens' claim - in the cover story of the 8 August 2007 issue - of supplying the market's only wireless modules capable of performing GSM and GPS functions simultaneously on the same board, Telit in fact supplies modules with the same functionality. Dataweek regrets the error.
Southern Africa
APC-MGE has revealed its southern African team responsible for South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.
Overseas
Business
National Semiconductor has reported sales for its first 2008 fiscal quarter - ended 26 August - of $471,5 million, less than the $541,4 million a year ago, but up from the $455,9 million for the fourth quarter of 2007. Net income of $85,6 million, or $0,30 per share, was down from the $120,1 million, or $0,35 a share, a year ago and $90,1 million, or $0,28 per share, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. Sales growth in the latest quarter was attributable to increased demand for the company's new analog products, primarily in the wireless handset and portable device markets.
Companies
Atmel and Barco Silex, a micro-electronic design company and subsidiary of the Barco Group, have announced an extension of their long-standing collaboration to develop systems-on-chip for their mutual clients, based on Atmel's CAP ARM-based customisable microcontroller, with design expertise and European customer support from Barco Silex. In terms of the agreement, Barco Silex will work together with clients to transform their design specifications into netlists for the metal programmable portion of the AT91CAP customisable microcontroller, incorporating IP blocks from Barco's libraries of advanced signal processing functions as required.
Infineon Technologies and IBM have announced that, subject to governmental and regulatory approval, they will sell their shares in Altis Semiconductor to Advanced Electronic Systems. Altis is a joint venture between Infineon and IBM which has been manufacturing primarily semiconductor components for communications, automotive and security applications in 250 to 130 nanometre technologies since 1999. Terms of the agreement have not been disclosed.
LSI Corporation has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tarari for approximately $85 million in cash. Tarari is an award winning, privately held maker of silicon and software that provides content and application awareness in packet and message processing, enabling a new class of advanced security and network control for service provider and enterprise networks. Tarari is based in San Diego and has approximately 45 employees. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2007, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
Seoul Semiconductor, the eighth-largest LED manufacturer in the world, announced that it has signed a Cross-Licence Agreement with Osram GmbH that the two companies share their patents pertaining to white and visible LED technologies. Osram Opto Semiconductors, a wholly owned subsidiary of Osram GmbH, is also incorporated into the agreement. The scope of the agreement incorporates the companies' housing and white patents related to white and visible LED technologies. Under this agreement, both companies will collaborate and build on each other's strengths as strategic partners.
Toshiba and SanDisk recently celebrated the opening of what is thought to be the world's largest NAND facility. Fab 4, the latest 300 mm wafer fabrication facility at Toshiba's Yokkaichi Operations, in Mie Prefecture, Japan, has been built in response to continuous rising demand for NAND flash memory used in a wide range of digital applications, including digital media players, mobile phones, PCs and memory cards. Fab 4 is expected to start mass production in December 2007 and reach a production capacity of 80 000 wafers a month in the second half of 2008.
MediaTek has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the assets related to Analog Devices' Othello radio and SoftFone baseband chipset product lines, as well as certain cellular handset baseband support operations, for approximately $350 million in cash. These product lines represented approximately $230 million in revenue for Analog Devices, based on fiscal year 2006 financial results. Through this acquisition, MediaTek's wireless handset division gains a global team of approximately 400 experienced product development and customer support professionals.
Atmel and Lead Tech Design (LTD) have announced a collaboration to develop video systems-on-chip, based on Atmel's AT91CAP customisable microcontroller for their mutual clients, with video expertise and hardware and software IP blocks contributed by LTD, a French service company specialising in the design of integrated circuits (SoC, ASIC and FPGA) and embedded software (Linux, low level development, hard realtime/XENOMAI, etc). In terms of this agreement, LTD will work with clients to transform their design specifications into netlists for the metal programmable portion of the AT91CAP.
Industry
Frost & Sullivan expects the voltage regulator market to grow steadily due to new designs using insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) switches, microprocessors and other electronic designs. New analysis has revealed that revenues in the worldwide AC voltage regulator market were an estimated $241,9 million in 2006 and will grow at a compound rate of 6,3% over the next five years. The report also predicts that electronic designs with Buck Boost technology will penetrate the traditional voltage regulator market towards 2012, and is likely to replace the UPS as it is sometimes used as a voltage regulator.
Micron Technology, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Spansion, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments have announced their support for the universal flash storage (UFS) specification for removable memory cards and embedded memory products. The companies believe UFS will significantly reduce access times for Flash memories, ease high-speed access to large media files and reduce power consumption in consumer devices. UFS is expected to reduce, for example, the access time for a 4 gigabyte, high definition movie from three minutes to merely a few seconds.
An abundance of skilled labour, proximity to Western Europe, surging economies and growing local markets are propelling the growth of the electronics manufacturing industry across the Ukraine, Middle East and North Africa (UMENA). Although electronics manufacturers in UMENA face major obstacles, including inadequate infrastructure and an underdeveloped component supplier base, strategic initiatives are having a positive impact on electronics manufacturing services providers in the region. Frost & Sullivan reckons that the UMENA electronics manufacturing market earned revenues of $425,35 million in 2006 and estimates this to reach $1071,9 million in 2013.
IC Insights is expecting the analog IC market to decline for the first time since the 2001 semiconductor recession, after five consecutive years of growth. The research firm's mid-year forecast shows that sales have dropped by 2% to $36,2 billion in 2007, compared to 2006 figures of $39,9 billion which represented an increase of 16% over 2005. Unit shipments are expected to rise by just 4%, compared to an annual average increase of 16% per year between 2002 and 2006.
Known for their high levels of reliability and long shelf lives, thermal batteries are used in applications that provide an immediate or sudden demand for electric power. Their low maintenance requirements, robust design and the ability to perform well even in volatile environments make them ideal for applications that require superior reliability and performance in harsh environments, such as in the military. However, being a niche market, manufacturers face stiff competition, high production costs, and possible supply threats as demand cycles are uneven. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan reveals that revenues in the world thermal battery market totalled $88,3 million in 2006. The market is expected to increase at a stable level due to the importance of this battery system usage in military applications.
Technology
Starling Advanced Communications, an Israeli company, has successfully tested an antenna that it says can provide broadband connections capable of delivering Internet and entertainment features to commercial airliners. During the test of the 76 cm diameter, 15 cm high Ku-band antenna, simultaneous video conference calls, Skype VoIP calls, and downloads of e-mails and large files over the Internet were carried out, with Starling claiming that downlinks of more than 20 Mbps and uplinks of more than 5 Mbps were achieved.
Canadian scientists at Opalux and the University of Toronto have developed a new type of flexible electronic paper (e-paper) display, dubbed P-Ink, in which each pixel can be tuned to any colour, utilising photonic crystals made out of silica beads measuring 200 nanometres in diameter. Others have developed e-paper capable of displaying coloured pixels using techniques such as grouping red, green and blue pixels in trios or stacking pixels, but P-Ink is said to provide brighter images, using technology that is simpler and cheaper. Video applications are still some way off, since currently P-Ink can only switch pixels in just short of a second - similar to other e-paper displays.
Researchers at the UK's National Physical Laboratory are proposing a new type of sensor design which they believe could allow data densities in hard disk drives to reach 1 terabit per square inch, five times what is said to be possible with current technology. Read heads currently make use of the magneto-resistive effect to read bits of data on a disk, but by exploiting the magneto-electric effect, it is believed that hard disks could accomplish these higher densities, as well as consume less power and increase read speeds from one gigahertz to as high as 10 gigahertz.
US-based company Unipixel claims to have designed a handheld display that is 60% more efficient than traditional displays. The display uses a process whereby red, green and blue LEDs are shone into the edge of a plastic screen. This light becomes trapped in the screen until a membrane is brought into contact with it, bending the light toward a viewer. This specially designed membrane consists of microscopic structures that direct light from the plastic screen to the viewer. By allowing more light to reach the viewer than LCD displays, this technology could significantly increase battery life in handheld devices.
IBM has unveiled semiconductor technology which it says overcomes the obstacle of withstanding voltage surges at antenna inputs. The company says that seven RF front-end functions can be integrated onto a single CMOS chip using this technology, as opposed to current solutions using up to seven chips, resulting in reduced costs and chip counts for cellphone chip set makers.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics claims to have developed a semiconductor substrate which, at only 80 microns thick, is 20% thinner than the world's current thinnest substrate at 100 microns, developed by the same company. It says that this technology could be used to stack up to 20 layers of flash memory and static random access memory chips.
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