Africa
JDSU's Communications Test and Measurement division has closed a deal with an as-yet undisclosed leading North African operator to deliver a fibre test system - the JDSU optical network management system (ONMS) - and services. The deal was won at the expense of several other competitors based on product capabilities and by establishing a positive track record for meeting commitments.
Tata Communications announced that it will become the major stakeholder in South Africa's new converged communications network operator, Neotel. Upon the implementation of the agreement, Tata Communications together with Tata Africa would hold an effective 56% stake in South Africa's second national operator.
Overseas
Business
Continuing its transformation programme, Siemens intends to make job cuts primarily in administration-related functions. Plans call for eliminating approximately 12 600 jobs worldwide. An additional 4150 jobs will be affected by restructuring projects, resulting in an overall loss of 16 750 jobs. In November 2007, Siemens announced its intention to reduce sales, general and administrative (SG&A) costs to a competitive level. Against the backdrop of an impending global economic downturn, plans call for reducing costs in absolute terms by 1,2 billion Euros by 2010. The company's Managing Board has also been reduced from 11 members to eight and the CEO principle introduced at the levels below.
Companies
LG Electronics has announced a strategic business partnership with Honeywell, covering intelligent building systems, in which Honeywell is a well established player. The partnership agreement embraces comprehensive cooperation across sales, marketing, training, product development and technology services for building solution systems.
UHF Gen 2 radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions provider Impinj has announced the acquisition of Intel's RFID operation. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Elpida Memory and Numonyx have signed a letter of intent to enter into a foundry agreement for Numonyx to utilise Elpida's 300 mm wafer fab in Hiroshima to manufacture NOR Flash memory. The agreement will enable Numonyx to increase production while reducing the costs to make high-density NOR Flash commonly used in mobile phones and embedded applications.
Nokia has completed its acquisition of Navteq, a provider of digital map information. As part of Nokia, Navteq will continue to develop its expertise in the navigation industry, service its customer base, and invest in the further development of its map data and technology platform. It will continue to build out and expand coverage of countries already included in its database as well as add new pieces of both static and dynamic content. In turn, Nokia will use Navteq's technology to add context - time, place, people - to Web services optimised for mobility.
IMEC and Qualcomm announced that Qualcomm is the first fabless IC company to participate in IMEC's industrial affiliation program (IIAP) on three-dimensional (3D) integration. Qualcomm and IMEC researchers in the program will collaborate to understand and develop solutions for the use of 3D technologies in future wireless products. IMEC's 3D integration program explores three-dimensional technology and design for application in various domains. The technology research program focuses on 3D wafer-level packaging and 3D stacked-ICs to find innovative solutions for the cost-effective use of 3D interconnects at different levels of the wiring hierarchy.
Freescale and Arada Systems have collaborated to create a production-ready reference design offered to help speed and simplify the development of concurrent 802.11n access point devices. The solution supports advanced 802.11n features such as security, QoS and multiple SSID for both video and VoIP applications. The reference design leverages Freescale's MPC8377E-RDB platform to deliver more than 330 Mbps of TCP/IP throughput in the combined 2,4 GHz and 5,0 GHz bands, while providing enough processing power to address other enterprise-class applications.
Microsemi, a manufacturer of high performance analog mixed signal integrated circuits and high reliability semiconductors, has announced its acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Semicoa. Founded in 1968, Semicoa specialises in the design, development and manufacturing of semiconductors and smart munitions optoelectronics for the high reliability military, commercial aerospace and satellite markets and is a contender in the small signal high reliability transistor markets, as evidenced by its long list of DSCC qualifications. Total consideration for the acquisition was approximately $25 million in cash.
Industry
The EDA Consortium announced that the electronic design automation (EDA) industry revenue for Q1 2008 declined 1,2% to $1350,7 million compared to $1366,8 million in Q1 2007. The four-quarter average growth rate, which compares the most recent four quarters to the same four quarters in the prior year, was up 5,9%. Companies that were tracked employed 27 329 professionals in Q1 2008, up 5,8% from the 25 820 employed in Q1 2007. EDA's largest category, computer aided engineering (CAE), generated revenue of $535,4 million, representing a 2,7% increase over the same period in 2007. For IC Physical Design & Verification, the next largest category, revenue decreased to $325 million, a 9,1% decrease compared to Q1 2007.
Just one year after the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced 802.11n draft 2.0 certification, the upward trajectory of this next-generation Wi-Fi technology continues unabated. Nearly 50% of Wi-Fi chipsets sold this year are expected to adhere to the new superfast draft standard - double the number from 2007. To date, the Wi-Fi Alliance has put the Wi-Fi Certified seal of approval - indicating validated product interoperability - on 325 products and is seeing strong numbers of 802.11n draft 2.0 products presented for testing. ABI Research forecasts that by 2013, more than 90% of Wi-Fi products will support 802.11n, underscoring the tremendous benefits of advanced Wi-Fi technology and the importance of inter-operability certification in delivering an enhanced user experience.
The 1394 Trade Association announced that the IEEE Standards Board has approved the 1394-2008 specification, which combines all IEEE-1394 specifications developed since the world's leading audio-video multimedia standard was founded in 1994. The 1394-2008 High Performance Serial Bus Standard updates and revises all prior 1394 standards dating back to the original 1394-1995 version, and includes 1394a, 1394b, 1394c, enhanced UTP, and the 1394 beta plus PHY-Link interface. It also incorporates the complete specifications for S1600 (1,6 Gbps bandwidth) and for S3200, which provides 3,2 Gbps speeds. Known commercially as FireWire and i.LINK, 1394 has been designed into a wide range of consumer, computer, industrial and other products since its inception, and is emerging as a powerful new standard for use in automotive entertainment systems.
Intensifying competition is compelling microcontroller manufacturers to differentiate their products by promoting factors beyond performance benefits. The microcontroller market's increasing tilt toward standard cores such as the ARM and 8051 further propels efforts towards differentiation. A report from Frost & Sullivan indicates that the worldwide microcontrollers market earned revenues of $14,64 billion in 2007 and estimates this to reach $19,08 billion in 2011. The 32-bit cores from ARM feature a variety of on-chip peripherals, especially for communications, such as USB, CAN, as well as I²C interfaces and SPI. A surge has taken place in the number of microcontrollers that integrate Flash memory because of its clear advantage centred on programmability. Low-power micro-controllers are in demand because of an increasing focus on energy efficiency and the proliferation of battery-powered applications.
Technology
Cambridge Consultants has launched its next generation XAP processor core - the XAP5 - offering wireless and sensor chip designers an advanced level of 16-bit processing performance combined with low energy consumption and efficient use of low cost memory, making it suited for cost-sensitive high-volume products. Typical applications include ZigBee and Bluetooth wireless networks, energy metering, sensor networks, tagging and transactions using RFID or NFC, location systems such as GPS and any other embedded ASIC application that requires a robust and capable software environment. The processor employs very high code density that minimises the size and cost of program memory, and achieves 68 Dhrystone MIPS when clocking at 100 MHz on a 0,13 micron CMOS process.
At the recent Broadband World Forum Asia, Infineon announced enhancements to its portfolio of ADSL2+ and VDSL2 solutions for customer premise equipment (CPE) that optimise support for such applications as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) and provide excellent QoS across a wide range of deployment conditions. The IPTV over DSL feature package includes innovative features such as predictive error decoding (Erasure Decoding) and Gamma Layer Retransmission for xDSL CPE solutions.
Engineers at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, have proposed a model for the development of an acoustic cloak. The technique employs the fact that sound waves travelling through the cloak from different directions have different speeds, creating scattering effects which should result in the sound waves being reconstructed on the other side of the cloak unchanged, much like water flowing around a rock in a stream. Although currently only theoretical, promising simulations make the engineers optimistic that layers (up to 200) of sound-scattering metamaterials - materials which have properties unmatched by nature - could be used to make an object 'invisible' to sound waves. This means that the object would be undetectable by sonar, and anybody inside a cloaked object would hear no external sound whatsoever.
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