Southern Africa
The Go Open Source Task Team Conference held in Johannesburg in August, brought together government departments, private sector, academia and non-governmental organisations. The conference ended on a positive note with all delegates signing a declaration to collaborate towards the adoption of a national open source strategy (www.go-opensource.org). The primary outcome was the view that a comprehensive national Free and Open Source Software and Open Content (FOSS/OC) strategy supports the South African national strategic objectives for socio-economic development. Delegates affirmed that a successful strategy should include both technological and environmental elements, that Free Software and Open Content are characterised by accessibility, collaboration, interoperability, open standards, transparency, customisability, contribution and open licensing. All projects' updates can be found at: http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce.
Recognising the demand for identification management in South Africa across a wide scope of industries, the Harmonic Group has introduced biometrics solutions to its product range. Managing director, Barry Baetu, says that initially, the company will restrict its product offerings to fingerprint biometrics solutions as this is where there is most demand. However, as newer technologies become more feasible, such as voice and retina recognition, the company will then address these on their merits.
RF Cable & Connector Supplies has been appointed as agents for the Cape range of radio communications support products, which includes remote speaker microphones, covert ear micropones, single- and multiway portable radio chargers, etc.
Webb Industries has been appointed as a distributor for S.G. McGeary Company and Penn Engineering Components. S.G. McGeary is a manufacturer of precision high-frequency coaxial connectors and Penn Engineering specialises in waveguide systems.
Overseas
Business
National Semiconductor reported net earnings of $85,6m on revenues of $493,8m for the first quarter of its 2006 fiscal year. Sequentially, National's revenue rose 5,7% from the fourth quarter, on sales of $467m. Sales declined 10% from the first quarter of fiscal 2005, when the company reported sales of $548m, and net earnings of $117,7m. First quarter gross margin rose 1,5% to 56,2%, which the company attributed to increased sales of higher-value analog products.
Companies
Intelsat has acquired PanAmSat Holdings for $3,2 bn in stock. Using a combined fleet of 53 satellites, the company said it will now serve customers in more than 220 countries and territories.
Ageia Technologies, a supplier of hardware-accelerated physics chips for games, has acquired Meqon Research, a Sweden-based industrial physics development company. Ageia's recently-launched PhysX chip with physics processing unit (PPU), is a device intended to accelerate attributes of games software coding to support more life-like action and graphics.
Infineon Technologies has sold its 'PTB' series of bipolar RF transistors - including wafers, die, packages, lids and specialised assembly equipment - to specialist RF transistor maker Peak Devices for an undisclosed price. The PTB line includes transistors from 1 W to 220 W of RF output power, operating from 420 MHz to 2,2 GHz.
Antenova has announced the acquisition of the gigaAnt short range wireless antenna business from Perlos. gigaAnt develops antennas for short range wireless devices used in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and WiMedia applications.
SigmaTel has acquired Oasis Semiconductor, a fabless designer of semiconductor solutions for the multifunction printer market.
Andrew has acquired certain assets of Nortel's wireless location business. Andrew intends to integrate Nortel's mobile location products, services and associated R&D resources into its Geometrix mobile location system business, part of Andrew's Network Solutions Group.
Gracenote has acquired the audio identification and fingerprinting technology of Royal Philips Electronics and entered into a research and development agreement with Philips Research. The partnership combines Philips' research capabilities with Gracenote's focus on audio and video and its database of track identification information on more than 50 million songs.
Expanding its efforts in storage, Marvell Technology has announced a definitive agreement to acquire the hard disk and tape drive controller semiconductor business of Qlogic for $225m in cash and stock.
Intel Capital has signed an agreement to acquire a $16m stake in Grisoft, a provider of anti-virus security software in the Czech Republic.
Ferroelectric RAM company Ramtron International has acquired Goal Semiconductor, a Canadian fabless chip company, for $7,6m. Goal is an analog and mixed-signal chip company focused on the embedded data acquisition market.
Israeli silicon foundry provider, Tower Semiconductor, has reorganised and established three distinct product line units: CMOS image sensors and embedded non-volatile memory products; radio frequency/mixed signal; and CMOS.
Launched at the Mobitex Association Conference in New York, Mobile Expertise is a new UK company formed out of the sale of the Maxon radio business last December. Mobile Expertise designs and manufactures RF radiocommunications devices and its product portfolio comprises PMR/TWR, Mobitex and data modems and GSM/CDMA devices.
Analog and mixed-signal semiconductor supplier SigmaTel has finalised the acquisition of Protocom, a privately-held semiconductor supplier of multifunction imaging chips.
Hynix Semiconductor, NanoAmp Solutions, and Winbond Electronics have joined the CellularRAM workgroup, an organisation creating common specifications for high-performance pseudo-SRAM (PSRAM) devices for future 2,5G and 3G handset designs.
RFI Global Services has signed a formal strategic collaboration with Sporton International of Taiwan, to form the RFI-Sporton Mobile Communication business unit and provide 'world-class' GSM certification services in the region. It says the move is in response to the fact that mobile phone development has migrated from Europe to Asia to such an extent over the last five years that Taiwan is now a world centre.
A new company has been founded to develop, commercialise and licence floating-body effect memory intellectual property (IP) for system-on-chip/MPU applications. The floating-body effect is a naturally-occurring parasitic phenomenon in silicon on insulator (SoI) transistors. Innovative Silicon (ISi) claims it has harnessed this effect to develop memories that are at least twice as dense as existing DRAM solutions, resulting in dramatic IC cost savings. ISi is a US (Delaware) corporation with its R&D centre based near Lausanne in Switzerland.
Matsushita Battery Industrial and Intel have announced they are jointly working to develop batteries able to run a notebook PC for 8 hours without recharging. The collaboration leverages Intel's low-power technology for notebook PCs with Matsushita's lithium-ion battery technology. Matsushita Battery has already produced a li-ion battery that uses nickel oxide for the positive electrode in place of cobalt oxide, improving the battery's energy density by around 15%.
Industry
A principal analyst with the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), Doug Andrey, has warned that the effect of hurricane Katrina could potentially cost the worldwide semiconductor industry nearly $25 bn in overall sales growth. The SIA has already warned that rising global oil prices could soon affect the chip market. Although the SIA did not alter its overall chip forecast for 2005, it said it remains wary of the semiconductor climate.
Advanced Forecasting's latest IC Revenues Cycle Forecast predicts that the next upward turning point in the IC cycle will take place in the first half of 2006. In addition, it expects double-digit annual growth for 2006 over 2005, as revenue shipments strive to catch up with forecasted demand. The mid-2006 upswing will be driven by IC used in the communications, consumer electronics, and computer industries, it said. To meet additional IC demand, fab capacity utilisation rates will increase. The continued utilisation increase will drive ASPs upward and improve IC revenues, thus fuelling the 2006 upswing, it reported.
Research firm iSuppli has trimmed its figures for 2005 chip sales and modified its outlook for the industry's present growth cycle, citing the effect of rising oil prices on people's purchasing ability of consumer electronics. The iSuppli report predicts that global semiconductor sales will still outpace last year, hitting $232,7 bn in 2005, up 2,4% from 2004's $227,2 bn. But that lags previous forecasts by 3% for an estimated 5,9% worldwide semiconductor growth in 2005.
Worldwide semiconductor sales in July were worth $18 bn, down 0,3% from the previous month and flat on a year-on-year basis, according to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organisation. On a year-to-date basis, the July figure represents a 5,8% increase, down from the 6,4% recorded in June.
IMS Research has forecast that the global market for power semiconductor devices will decline in 2005 from $11,2 bn in 2004, which was up by more than 20% on 2003. IMS said that the market would experience a compound annual growth rate of 8,3% over the next six years.
Both fixed and mobile WiMAX will complement, not compete with Wi-Fi and 3G cellular data, according to a new Forward Concepts study. The report predicts that sales of fixed and mobile WiMAX equipment will increase from $72m this year to more than $2 bn in 2009. At the same time, sales of WLAN equipment also will increase. The study said that cellular carriers will eventually adopt mobile WiMAX because it will be cheaper to deploy than 3G services. As such, the two types of service will work together, the study noted.
The 'printable electronics' market is forecast to generate over $7 bn in 2010, according to analyst firm NanoMarkets. Demand for printable displays, RFIDs, photovoltaics, computer memory and other printable products, will drive the market. Areas with the largest growth opportunities include printable displays, which it projects to be a market worth over $3 bn by 2010, printable RFIDs which will be worth $2,2 bn, and computer memory and photovoltaics, which will achieve almost $770m and $580m respectively. 'Printable electronics' refers to circuitry created out of conductive polymer and nano-metallic inks using a wide variety of printing technologies.
According to a report from The Information Network, MEMS-based microphone and speaker markets are taking off due to growth in consumer electronics. The market is set to reach 5% of the nearly 2 billion microphones sold worldwide in 2005 and is projected to grow to 15% of the nearly 3 billion microphones sold in 2008 - a CAGR of 240%, according to the research firm. The MEMs microspeaker market will see 500 million units shipped in 2008, it said.
The market for semiconductor intellectual property (IP) is set to grow to more than $2,04 bn in 2009 from $1,2 bn in 2004, according to market research company iSuppli. This gives a CAGR of 10,6% over the period.
Global cellular phone revenues are set to reach $570 bn in 2005, according to research company Strategy Analytics. In addition, the worldwide cellular user base will increase from 1,7 billion people at the end of 2005 to 2,5 billion people by the end of 2010 - a 38% penetration rate.
Telecommunications providers in many parts of the world are rolling out, or will soon roll out, TV services, reports In-Stat. At the end of 2004, there were 1,6 million telco TV subscribers, and it forecasts that number to rise to 32 million by the end of 2009, with over half of the total coming from Asia. It says many telcos start their deployment offering broadcast TV and VOD, while advanced services like digital video recording (DVR), HDTV, and additional communications applications are layered on later.
IBM has unveiled an initiative to help startups in the emerging markets of Brazil, China, India and Russia develop products around standards-based technology. It has also announced the formation of the Venture Capital Advisory Council that will work with IBM to accelerate technology development in these areas, as well as other emerging markets. As part of the initiative, IBM will roll out more than 40 'online workshops' through its Virtual Innovation Center to help developers and independent software vendors get to market faster and cheaper with their applications.
Though Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can add many desirable new features to business telecom systems, vendors and customers face difficult security challenges to realise these benefits, reports In-Stat. As a result, more than 75% of the companies that have implemented VoIP plan to replace their security appliances within the next year. Traditional firewall technologies, for example, can complicate several aspects of VoIP, notably dynamic port trafficking and network address translation. Security product vendors are adding functions that address voice applications in their products, but, as history has shown, security typically lags behind advances in technology, says the analyst group.
The voting members of the PC/104 Consortium have approved a number of proposed changes to the EBX specification. The EBX standard was introduced by Motorola Computer Group and Ampro in 1997 as a larger form factor that provides ample space for larger CPU chips and chipsets, as well as expanded connector space. The Technical Committee has recommended a number of changes (www.pc104.org/technology/pc104_tech.html) designed to effect the transfer and increase the functionality of the board.
The MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) has announced it has approved the 'ATA on MMC Specification Ver. 1.0' - the interface designed especially for small form-factor disk drives in next-generation portable consumer electronic devices.
Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) has marked the next step of its worldwide expansion with the official opening of a wireless hardware design centre in Sophia Antipolis, France.
STMicroelectronics has announced that it has been chosen as one of the top 20 sustainable companies worldwide by The Progressive Investor newsletter for the fourth year running.
Technology
Texas Instruments has developed a new digital video platform that will let manufacturers quickly produce digital video devices with more power and features. The company hopes the new technology, called DaVinci, will give it the same strength in digital video devices that it enjoys in the market for mobile phones. DaVinci will be based on the TMS320C64x+, TI's newest DSP core. The DaVinci processors will consist of DSP-based system-on-chips, integrating DSP and CPU cores, accelerators, peripherals and necessary software.
Toshiba has developed a multimedia processor based on its configurable MeP architecture that achieves a clock frequency of 1 GHz. Toshiba's MeP-h1 is based on Toshiba's 'media embedded processor' (MeP) architecture for digital consumer and other high performance SoCs. It gives designers the flexibility to customise processors at the design stage, including the ability to change processor configurations and add custom instructions to satisfy application requirements.
LG Chem, a South Korea-based chemical supplier, claims to have developed a method to produce colour filters used in LCDs that uses ink printing rather than photolithography. This reduces manufacturing cost and time, it says.
Samsung Electronics has developed a 256 Mbit pseudostatic RAM using 90 nm manufacturing process technology, which it claims is the industry's first. Pseudo-static RAM is essentially a DRAM with circuitry that keeps the core refreshed like a static-RAM with the interface of an SRAM or NOR flash memory device. Described as a unitransistor RAM, or UtRAM, it operates at a clock frequency of 133 MHz and is available as a standalone device or as a key component within multichip packages (MCPs).
Philips subsidiary, PolymerVision, demonstrated a prototype rollable display based on its PV-QML5 display at the Internationale Funkausstellung consumer electronics show in Berlin. The Readius mobile e-reader prototype has a 100 μm, QVGA (320 x 240 pixels), active-matrix 5-inch display, and rolls up into a 7,5 mm tube when not in use. The Readius is a prototype of a connected consumer device for business professionals unwilling to sacrifice readability, mobility, performance, or weight in a pocket-sized, e-reader concept, said the company.
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