Africa
Jasco Electronics Holdings announced year-end results to 30 June 2010. Revenue decreased by 7% to R559,3 million and profit attributable to shareholders was down 10% to R21,3 million. Earnings per share decreased by 10% to 19,1 cents per share, while headline earnings per share decreased by 24% to 16,6 cents per share. Although performance by the group’s telecommunications and security interests was poor, the negative effects were buffered somewhat by resilience in the electrical and domestic products divisions.
Qualcomm has joined the African Telecommunications Union (ATU) as an associate member. The company says it will work together with the ATU’s 18 other associate members and 46 members toward harmonising policies and regulations for information and communications technology (ICT) development in Africa.
Overseas
Business
ON Semiconductor recently announced plans to expand production capacity at its 150 mm wafer manufacturing facility in Belgium, by approximately 40% with a total equipment investment in 2010 of 12,3 million Euros. The Belgian factory specialises in the manufacture of application specific high-voltage technologies for the automotive and industrial industry, and in integrated and discrete standard products for a wide range of market segments.
Companies
Arrow Electronics has signed an agreement to acquire Nu Horizons Electronics in an all-cash transaction in which shareholders of the latter company will receive $7,00 for each share of common stock they own. Nu Horizons is a global distributor of advanced technology semiconductor, display, illumination and power solutions to a wide variety of commercial original equipment manufacturers and electronic manufacturing services providers.
PLX Technology has agreed to acquire all of the outstanding shares of capital stock of Teranetics, a privately held fabless provider of high-performance mixed-signal semiconductors specialising in 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper physical layer (10GBase-T PHY) technology. Under the terms of the merger agreement, PLX will acquire Teranetics in exchange for 7,4 million shares of PLX valued at approximately $27,6 million based on today’s closing price, cash of approximately $1,0 million and two promissory notes aggregating approximately $6,9 million. PLX will also assume or repay approximately $18 million of Teranetics corporate obligations, including indebtedness, transaction expenses and cash bonuses payable to Teranetics employees.
Sharp has reportedly reached an agreement to acquire Recurrent Energy, a solar project developer and generating company, for up to $305 million in cash. Sharp has stated its intent to become a total solutions company in the photovoltaic field, extending from developing and producing solar cells and modules to developing and marketing power generation plants.
Microsemi has gone on a spending spree, buying two companies in as many days. Its acquisition of VT Silicon, a designer and manufacturer of multiband radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) solutions for the mobile wireless broadband market, serves to extend Microsemi’s interests in the WLAN and WiMax markets. The second acquisition was for privately held Arxan Defense Systems, a solutions provider for defence clients in securing systems against tampering, piracy and reverse engineering. Financial details were not disclosed for either transaction.
Freescale Semiconductor announced that it has acquired certain key assets of Swell Software, a developer of graphical user interface (GUI) software tools. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Swell’s C/PEG, PEG Pro and PEG+ product offerings include embedded GUI development tools that work tightly with real-time operating systems, C/C++ compiler suites and reference platforms. Swell products are currently used in a variety of embedded applications, including printers, MP3 players, handheld GPS units, home security systems, medical electronics and digital cameras.
Industry
Worldwide semiconductor capital equipment spending is projected to approach $36,9 billion in 2010, a 122,1% increase from 2009 spending of $16,6 billion, according to Gartner. In 2011, semiconductor capital equipment spending will grow 4,9%. Capital expenditure (capex) is above 95% due to strong spending by the foundry and logic segments, along with a technology upgrade for the memory manufacturers. In 2011, capex growth is expected to slow to 10%, because a slowing economy will negatively impact electronic and semiconductor sales.
According to a report issued by Solarbuzz, after a weak start in 2010, Q2’10 global photovoltaic (PV) demand soared to 3,82 GW, up 54% quarter-on-quarter. The PV industry remains on target to deliver over 15 GW installations this year. As a result of 2010 performance to date, Solarbuzz also raised its five year demand scenario forecasts in the report. Total industry revenues were approximately $17,2 billion in Q2’10, compared to $12,0 billion in Q1’10 and $6,2 billion in Q2’09. Germany, at 2,30 GW, accounted for 60% of global demand in Q2’10. The next largest country market was Italy, which grew 127% quarter on quarter, was still just 11% of the size of the German market. France and the US also put in strong performances.
Annual revenue for core silicon, the largest segment in the semiconductor industry, is set for unprecedented growth in 2010, wiping out the decline of the last year, according to market research firm iSuppli. At no time in the past decade has the core silicon industry enjoyed anything like the growth forecasted for 2010, with global revenue expected to hit $102,7 billion, up 21,2% from $84,8 billion in 2009. Revenue will continue to increase until the end of the forecast period in 2014, when the industry will be worth $127,2 billion, but growth rates will not exceed 8% after 2010. Core silicon refers to the semiconductors that implement specific, individual functionality in an electronic system – for instance, the integrated circuit that makes a DVD player what it is and not some other type of system, such as a washing machine.
Technology
Fujitsu Semiconductor has introduced a second generation single-chip 8-bit MCU featuring embedded FRAM (ferroelectric random access memory). The high-speed, non-volatile nature of FRAM writes so fast that the MCU does not need to wait for the write operation to complete. In addition to the ability to retain data in memory without power, the FRAM features a reduced internal write voltage, and can be erased and rewritten 100 000 times more than its predecessor. The read/write endurance is specified as 1015 times, with data retention guaranteed for 10 years. Assuming that memory is accessed with four cycles at a constant rate of 10 MHz, it will take more than 12,5 years to exhaust the ferroelectric material.
ARM and Ittiam, an embedded media processing systems company, announced at IBC in Amsterdam, the implementation of the Dolby MS10 multistream decoder on ARM Cortex-A Series of processors including optimisation on NEON. This implementation includes Dolby Digital Plus (DD+), Dolby Digital (DD), Dolby Pulse decoder and Dolby Digital Encoder in a single package for next generation digital televisions (DTV) and set-top-boxes (STB).
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