Southern Africa
Local RFID technology developer, Trolley Scan, has developed a new RFID technology that it has trademarked 'RFID-radar'. In the past RFID readers were limited to identify tags that were in the reader zone. Based around a major discovery it has made, Trolley Scan claims RFID-radar based readers will now be able to identify, locate and track multiple tags in the reader zone. Says managing director Mike Marsh: "The breakthrough with RFID-radar is the ability to measure the distance travelled by a signal from a transponder to a reader accurately, over long distances, using minimal radio spectrum to minimise effects on other users, and with very low cost transponders and readers. This measurement allows us to identify, locate accurately and track the movement of tens of transponders in front of a reader at the same time." Since the operating range of today's RFID systems is in the tens of meters, obtaining location information together with identity information has now become important. Trolley Scan claims its technique allows it to measure the range of a transponder to an accuracy of 0,5 metres and a pointing direction of 1°, in 2D and 3D, for transponders as far away as 100 metres, with up to 100 transponders in the zone at a time.
Sentech received the 'Most Innovative ICT Company in Africa' award at the African ICT Achievers Awards Ceremony on 31 October at Gallagher Estate. The annual event recognises top achievers in the African ICT sector.
Square One Solutions Group has been appointed the first certified partner in Africa of NexTone, an international developer of carrier products for scaleable session management of voice over IP (VoIP) and related realtime IP network services. NexTone technologies and products are focused on boosting the efficiency of IP networks in the transportation of voice traffic and critical realtime applications such as video streaming and on-line gaming.
TerraSip, of Estepona, Spain, has announced that it can offer South Africans free phone calls with friends and family worldwide. Using Internet Telephony or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which uses the Internet via Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protocol to transmit phone calls globally, the company claims members can 'call each other for free at any time of the day or night, for as long as they like, from anywhere in the world, without any commitment to a contract, no monthly fees, no membership charges, and no hidden costs.' It says that both individuals or businesses with a broadband Internet connection can make use of the service. TerraSip CEO, Susan Scheiber, says, "We wanted to give people a sense of community in which we are all partners, rather than present TerraSip as just another anonymous carrier." Using special IP phones, users do not need a computer to make calls. An adapter is also available that enables a normal phone to be VoIP capable, according to the company.
Cape Town Fluke specialist, Coast to Coast Cape, has relocated to new offices: Unit 15, Woodbridge Business Park, Koeberg Road, Milnerton, 7441. Tel: +27 (0)21 552 3379 or +27 (0)21 551 5631; Fax: +27 (0)21 552 9276; e-mail: [email protected]. Coast to Coast Cape is the sole Fluke/Comtest value-added reseller for the Western and Eastern Cape.
Overseas
Business
Ixys has posted earnings of $5,5 m on sales of $63,4 m in its second 2006 fiscal quarter, compared to $3,8 m on sales of $61,4 m in the year-ago fiscal quarter. For the six-month period ended 30 September, Ixys reported sales of $126,7 m, up 4,4% from $121,3 m for the same period the prior fiscal year. "We see continued demand in our power and telecom sectors, with overall book-to-bill ratio of 1,06 for the quarter, which is an improvement from that of last quarter," said Nathan Zommer, Ixys chief executive.
Maxim reported sales of $424,4 m for the first quarter, a 6% increase over its fourth quarter of fiscal 2005. GAAP net income was $105,4 m, which compares to $126,1 m for the previous quarter. Maxim reported bookings for its first quarter of approximately $459 m, a 15% increase from the fourth quarter's $398 m.
Altera posted third quarter 2005 sales of $291,5 m, up 2% from the Q2 and up 10% from the third quarter of 2004. Net income for the quarter was $77,8 m compared to net income of $83,1 m in Q3 of 2004. In the previous quarter, Altera posted a profit of $67,6m.
Actel posted net revenues of $46,4 m for the third quarter of 2005, up 18% from Q3 of 2004 and up 2% from the second quarter of 2005. Actel reported net income of $2,2 m, for the third quarter of 2005 compared with net income of $0,5 m for the third quarter of 2004 and net income of $2,2 m for the second quarter of 2005.
CSR has released record results for its Q3 earnings in 2005. Financial highlights include an increase in revenue of 109% to $162,5 m and an increase in operating profit of 150%, to $44,7 m. The net profit in Q3 2005 was $37,6 m on revenues of $162,5 m compared with $15,1 m made on revenue of $94,8 m in Q2 2005 and $18,4 m net profit made on revenues of $77,7 m in Q3 2004.
Companies
Ericsson is to acquire the majority of the assets of Marconi in a cash deal valued at £1,2 bn. The Swedish group is buying Marconi's optical transmission equipment and broadband access and fixed wireless access units, its softswitch technology and most of its data networking and associated services, mainly based in the US. Also included are non-UK service operations. Marconi will retain its UK services business, which will be renamed Telent.
PMC-Sierra has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) and Silver Lake Partners to acquire the storage semiconductor business of Agilent Technologies for about $425m in cash. The storage semiconductor business is part of Agilent's Semiconductor Products Group, which KKR and Silver Lake Partners are in the process of acquiring.
Arm has acquired Keil, a leading independent provider of software development tools for the microcontroller (MCU) market. Keil operates jointly through two privately-owned companies, Keil Elektronik in Munich, Germany, and Keil Software in Plano, Texas; and has combined gross assets valued at $4,6m.
Freescale Semiconductor has acquired CommASIC, a fabless semiconductor company, to strengthen its offerings in wireless broadband technologies. CommASIC provides modem processing multimode technologies, including OFDM-based solutions, such as Wi-Fi-certified 802.11 a/b/g.
SanDisk has acquired Matrix Semiconductor, a developer of three-dimensional memory chips, for $238m.
Micronas Semiconductor has signed a definitive agreement to acquire fabless semiconductor company WISchip International for $80m. WISchip develops advanced audio and video system-on-chip IC and software solutions.
RF and analog semiconductor supplier Microsemi has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Advanced Power Technology, a supplier of high-power switching products, for cash and stock. Besides high-power switching products, Advanced Power Technology has advanced development efforts in silicon carbide.
Infineon Technologies is working with VeriSign on extending the security of transactions made with personal computers. VeriSign will certify Infineon's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Certification Authority with its own Trusted Computing Root Certification Authority. This will enable the creation of VeriSign secure digital certifications on computer systems that include Infineon's TPM hardware.
PicoChip and Wintegra are working together on a reference design for a new generation of WiMAX basestations.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Nokia Research Center have announced a research collaboration to advance mobile computing and communications technologies. The two will work on a view of the future where small handheld devices such as mobile phones will become 'parts of an ecosystem of information, services, peripherals, sensors and other devices.'
FPGA supplier Altera has formed a partnership with Canadian broadband wireless technology provider Wi-LAN, to deliver a programmable, low-cost WiMAX-compliant base transceiver station (BTS) modem solution that supports the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard.
Motorola and Intel have announced a collaboration to foster greater industry momentum for WiMAX and to advance the use of mobile WiMAX technology, based on the proposed IEEE 802.16e standard, for both fixed and wireless broadband applications. The companies will collaborate on specification efforts within the WiMAX Forum to ensure that network and device interoperability issues are addressed adequately.
Industry
Worldwide sales of semiconductors increased to $19,6 bn in September, an increase of 5,2% from August, reported the Semiconductor Industry Association. Global chip sales increased by 5,6% from the September 2004 period. Third-quarter sales at $58,7 bn were up by 8,9% from Q2, it said, while semiconductor sales for the first nine months of 2005 totalled $167,6 bn - an increase of 6,1% from the first nine months of 2004. "Global semiconductor sales were very strong in September despite earlier concerns that rising energy prices and declining consumer confidence would impact sales of electronic products," said SIA president George Scalise. "The September numbers show strong demand across most major product lines. Demand for chips used in a wide array of consumer products accounted for much of the September increase."
Constant innovation in the IC industry, coupled with a growing demand for high-performance electronic devices, is driving the uptake of novel design platforms such as structured ASICs, according to a study by Frost & Sullivan. In addition, the inability of current FPGAs and standard-cell ASICs to meet medium-volume (more than 10 000 units) requirements is further bolstering demand for structured ASICs. The structured ASIC cuts the nonrecurring engineering (NRE) expenses by more than 85% in derivative chips and is set to become a crucial element in the upcoming deep sub-micron (DSM) designs, according to the research group. Though the benefits of structured ASICs are known, researchers still need to address issues such as cross talk and signal integrity when implementing designs at DSM levels. In the more advanced process nodes, power leakage is a serious issue that needs to be resolved. Another challenge is in generating awareness and popularising structured ASICs across a diverse range of end-user applications, it says.
According to a market study by Northern Sky Research, 2006 will be a critical year for broadband wireless technologies, as UWB, ZigBee and WiMAX launches begin to complement growing 3G and Wi-Fi deployments. Significant progress will be made in establishing the 802.16e standard for mobile WiMAX. The study predicts 500 000 users will have signed up for fixed officially-standardised WiMAX service by the end of 2006. It expects the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard to be ratified this year. Also, the study predicts that UWB products for consumers will be released in 2006, as will ZigBee-enabled products typically to be used for tasks such as home automation.
Near field communications (NFC) applications will transform consumer commerce, connectivity and content consumption, beginning with trials through 2006 and volume deployments into 2007, according to a new study from ABI Research. NFC, a short-range contactless communications protocol, enables easy-to-use, secure Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity between devices. It provides high-bandwidth content acquisition and transfer, contactless payment capability and smart object interaction. ABI reckons NFC's growth time from 'infancy' to 'young adult' status will play out over three years. Commercial NFC products will reach the market in 2006, and by 2007, the research indicates, higher-volume NFC deployments will be common, first in wireless handsets, then in other kinds of consumer electronics.
A new report from Global Sources predicts that in 2005, mainland China and Taiwan production of set-top boxes is expected to top 28 million units - up 64% from 2004.
The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium has announced that it will license its benchmark software to commercial users. Previously available only to EEMBC members, the consortium's benchmark software helps predict the performance of embedded processors and memory subsystems in a range of applications. Beyond the traditional competitive model, EEMBC says its benchmark software has many uses. It can be used as a tool to analyse, tune, and validate new processor and system architectures; to prove product capabilities; and to compare processors according to more important criteria than clock rate.
The IEE and the NMI (National Microelectronics Institute) have said they welcome the UK's Department of Trade and Industry announcement of funding for the creation of an electronics knowledge transfer network (KTN). They said the recognition by the UK government of the importance of such a network to the UK electronics industry and to the UK economy is very encouraging. The IEE and NMI are among a number of organisations that have called for the creation of a dedicated knowledge transfer network for electronics, in the interests of helping to ensure the future of the UK electronics industry and the markets that it underpins.
The TPL Group, a global intellectual property management company, has announced it has filed a broad-based intellectual property claim against four major Japanese electronics manufacturers. The claim cites Fujitsu, Matsushita, NEC and Toshiba for infringement of at least three of the 10 patents in the Moore Microprocessor Patent Portfolio. These patents specifically relate to: multiple instruction fetch; clocking CPU and I/O separately; and the use of multiple cores and embedded memory.
Agilent Technologies has announced it is the first test and measurement equipment manufacturer to join the ZigBee Alliance, an association of more than 100 companies working to enable cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked monitoring and control products based on an open global standard.
Technology
IBM has celebrated the completion of the world's fastest supercomputer, announcing that its Blue Gene/L system had doubled its previous performance, setting a new high of 280,6 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second). This surpasses a top speed of 136,8 teraflops that a half-complete version of the system achieved in June. The race is now on to reach the 1000 trillion calculations per second milestone, it said. Blue Gene/L achieved the new result running benchmark software called Linpack, which is used to create a list of the world's 500 fastest computers.
Imagine a future in which the rooftops of residential homes and commercial buildings can be laminated with inexpensive, ultra-thin films of nano-sized semiconductors that will efficiently convert sunlight into electrical power and provide virtually all of our electricity needs. This is the future envisaged by a team from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who claim to have developed the first ultra-thin solar cells comprised entirely of inorganic nanocrystals and spin-cast from solution. In a paper in the October issue of Science, Berkeley researchers describe a technique whereby rod-shaped nanometer-sized crystals of two semiconductors, cadmium-selenide (CdSe) and cadmium-telluride (CdTe), were synthesised separately and then dissolved in solution and spin-cast onto a conductive glass substrate. The resulting thin films displayed efficiencies for converting sunlight to electricity of about 3%. This is comparable to the conversion efficiencies of the best organic solar cells, although still substantially lower than conventional silicon solar cell thin films, they say.
PolyFuel claims to have achieved a critical milestone in the accelerating development of fuel cells for portable electronics applications. It announced that its hydrocarbon DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell) membrane has passed the 5000-hour mark in durability testing. Industry observers believe that commercially viable portable fuel cells must demonstrate lifetimes in the 2000-3000 hour range. Fuel cell membranes are engineered films of various plastic polymers - resembling stiff cellophane - that when covered with a catalyst material, enable fuels such as methanol or hydrogen to generate an electric current capable of powering electronic devices, or even automobiles.
E Ink, an electronic paper display technology company, and LG.Philips LCD, a supplier of thin-film-transistor (TFT) liquid crystal displays, have developed a 10,1" flexible electronic paper display the companies believe is the largest flexible display produced to date. The tablet-sized display is less than 300 microns thick, achieves super VGA (600 x 800) resolution at 100 pixels per inch and has a 10:1 contrast ratio with four grayscale levels.
EnOcean, a provider of energy-harvesting wireless technologies, has introduced a solar-powered RF magnet-contact sensor claimed to eliminate the dependence upon batteries for wireless security systems. It says its STM250 can operate virtually forever without maintenance, using only ambient indoor or outdoor light. When the contact is opened/closed it sends a signal 300 m outdoors (or 30 m indoors through walls). It also sends a periodic presence signal every quarter-hour to indicate that the node is operating. It can also store energy for up to six days use in total darkness, says the company.
Sanyo is to begin marketing a rechargeable nickel-metal-hydride battery it claims is designed to be environmentally-friendly while offering the user the convenience of a dry cell battery. The battery, 'eneloop', can be used repeatedly, and once used completely, can be recycled, said Sanyo. The company also claims the battery can be used a thousand times over without memory effects. It can be used immediately after purchase, like a dry cell, but without the disposal issues.
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