Southern Africa
South African fleet management solutions company, DigiCore Holdings announced its interim results for the six months ended 31 December 2000. It said revenue increased fourfold to R173,3m from R43,2m in 1999, putting the company on track to meet its R300m annual revenue forecast made last September. Operating profit increased in correlation with revenue, it said, reaching R23,7m.
In a contract believed to be worth R15m over the next 24 months, VELOCIT-e has announced that it has been appointed by Internet-based transaction network provider, i-Control, as its development and deployment partner for the construction of a web-based authentication and nonrepudiation network at its headquarters in Silicon Valley, USA. The network is to rely heavily on the integration of biometrics, digital certificates and PKI infrastructure. Said Clive Handley, a Director of VELOCIT-e: "This is a breakthrough export deal for us. We were chosen by i-Control to handle the development because of our considerable experience and skills in the development and deployment of large scale biometric systems, secure networks and biometrics/PKI integration." Handley said the company had invested a considerable amount in developing its own homegrown biometric certificate product - a product it believes has a vast potential both locally and abroad.
T-Systems, which came out of the bundling of two of the strongest players in the global IT and telecoms fields - debis IT Services and Deutsche Telekom - was recently launched in South Africa. According to the group, the new entity has 37 000 employees around the globe with 800 in South Africa. Wolfgang Jakob, previously CEO of debis IT Services Southern Africa, will fulfil the same role at T-Systems and will also maintain the relationship with debis' empowerment partner, African Renaissance Holdings (ARH) who retains a 25,1% stake in the new entity. Jakob said that despite T-Systems' Deutsche Telekom link, it has no plans to be a telecoms provider. He believes there is a huge market for e-business solutions driven by the convergence of IT and telecoms in South Africa because of, rather than in spite of, the country's unique features - and this is where T-Systems intends to focus.
Hillcor Holdings has announced that its Tech Rubber agency has been certified to QS-9000/ISO 9002. Tech Rubber is a manufacturer of high specification industrial silicone rubber keypads. The company reports that over 180 000 keypads have been supplied to the South African market over the last 12 months. Tech Rubber has recently also opened another division for the manufacture of high quality membrane keypads and nameplates.
Computer users fortunate enough to have video input devices may be tempted to point their web cams or video recorders at the Sun on 21 June 2001 when hundreds of millions of people from Cape Town to Tamanrasset, from Mauritania to Madagascar will be blanketed by a solar eclipse. Tony Mechin, producer of SolarEclipseAfrica.com says that it will be webcasting from the path of the totality of the eclipse in Lusaka, the Zambezi Valley, and Nymapanda to the South of Zimbabwe and in Madagascar on 21 June. Since many people from all over Africa are able to capture their own images of the eclipse, SolarEclipseAfrica.com has established a directory at www.vicfalls.com/eclipse where prospective 'eclipse-casters' can include their own web address.
Overseas
Business
Intersil has announced that revenue and earnings for the first quarter of 2001 will be lower than previously expected due to slowing demand across the semiconductor industry. In addition, it will repurchase up to $50m of the company's stock. Intersil said it began experiencing orders-softness in the fourth quarter of 2000 as customers adjusted inventory levels due to weakening global market conditions. Intersil announced that it now believes first quarter revenue - excluding sales from its Discrete Power products - will be approximately 25% lower than the fourth quarter of 2000, instead of a previously estimated decline of approximately 11%. Intersil plans to use the proceeds from the recent sale of its Discrete Power product line to Fairchild Semiconductor, for complementary communications acquisitions, alliances and product development efforts.
Micrel has cut its revenue and earnings guidance for the first quarter and said it now anticipates first-quarter revenues will be 30% below $92,8m in the fourth quarter 2000. Previously, Micrel had been predicting a 9% sequential decline in revenue. Despite the current industry-wide slowdown, Micrel said it plans to continue its investment in new product development in order to be positioned for growth when market demand recovers. Micrel said it is encouraged by the high level of customer design activity that is taking place and design wins remain strong.
TheSupply, an e-commerce solution provider for the electronics materials industry, has announced that it has secured $11m in its second round of financing. The round includes strategic investments from Air Products and Chemicals and other pre-eminent companies in the semiconductor industry. TheSupply, who markets its solution to semiconductor fabs, foundries, test and assembly facilities, and PCB manufacturers, will use the financing to enhance its e-commerce solution and professional services and accelerate its sales and marketing efforts.
Companies
Intel has announced a major structural change in its communications products businesses, combining Intel's chip-selling Network Communications Group and its systems-oriented Communications Products Group. It says this single operation will better serve its Internet infrastructure customers. The new organisation will be called the Networking and Communications Group.
Cadence Design Systems, has completed its acquisition of design tools firm CadMOS Design Technology.
Philips Semiconductors and Stonestreet One have announced an alliance offering comprehensive Bluetooth products and development services. Stonestreet One is a designer of embedded Bluetooth product prototypes. In terms of the agreement Philips Semiconductors will supply customers with Bluetooth radio, baseband controller and supporting software elements, while Stonestreet One will provide software tools, system design, integration, application development and product testing. Stonestreet will shortly release a Bluetooth Developer's Kit featuring Philips' Blueberry PCF87750 second generation Bluetooth baseband controller.
Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba and IBM are joining to research and develop an advanced chip architecture for new devices in the emerging broadband era. The companies announced that they will invest more than $400m in the next five years to design a 'supercomputer-on-a-chip' at a development centre within an IBM facility in Austin, Texas. Code-named 'Cell', the new microchips will employ the world's most advanced research technologies and chip-making techniques, including copper wires, silicon-on-insulator transistors and low-K dielectric insulation, with features smaller than 0,10 µm, according to the companies. The new Austin R&D centre will employ nearly 300 computer architects, chip designers and other technical specialists. The result of their work will be consumer-system ICs that are more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, they said.
SwitchCore of Sweden and National Semiconductor have announced they will work together with their local area networking technologies and products to demonstrate Gigabit Ethernet switch solutions for desktop systems. National's GigPHYTER physical layer technology will be combined with SwitchCore's integrated switch products for a 'ready-to-build' Gigabit Ethernet switch reference design.
Irvine Sensors has won an approximate $2m US Government R&D contract to demonstrate ultra-high-speed memory technology to support its SuperRouter initiative and other high performance signal processing applications. Dubbed 'SuperMemory', the planned multichip modules will combine Irvine Sensors' Neo-Stacking technology, with low temperature, serial superconductor electronics. The new contract, administered by the US Navy Naval Research Laboratory, is a twenty-four month award.
RF Micro Devices has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to expand its alliance with Qualcomm where the companies will cooperate on the development of a Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) power amplifier (PA) module for inclusion in Qualcomm's MSM5200 integrated circuit family.
Hitachi has announced it will use Dublin-based Parthus Technologies' Bluetooth-enabled IC platform to develop system-level chip products. As part of the cooperation, Hitachi has licensed the BlueStream baseband controller and protocol stack from Parthus which it will use with its own BiCMOS-based RF device. The Bluetooth-enabled chip solution will be based on Hitachi's SuperH architecture.
Infineon Technologies and Sanyo Electric have announced a joint agreement in production of ultra high-frequency ICs for wireless applications. Infineon will supply high end SIEGET RF transistor chips to Sanyo who will assemble the devices in leadless ECSP (Environmentally-considered Chip Scale Packages) for Infineon. Infineon and Sanyo will market these Infineon RF transistor chips under their own brands. The ECSP package has dimensions of only 1,0 x 0,6 x 0,48 mm.
Industry
Worldwide sales of semiconductors came in at $16,87 bn in January 2001, an increase of 13,7% over a year ago, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said in its latest report. On a sequential basis, January sales were 5,7% below the December 2000 level of $17,89 bn. The factors causing the current decelerating sales are reflected in each semiconductor product sector and in every geographic region. Compared to January 2000, this January the Japanese market grew 23,2% and the Asia/Pacific market 2,9%. The Americas market rose 15,4% and the European market 14,6%.
Despite having played a limited role in the last semiconductor boom of 1993 to 1995, the foundry business has become a primary industry driver as IDMs (Integrated Device Manufacturers) and OEMs become increasingly dependent on outsourcing manufacturing. This is according to Cahners In-Stat who says that while the overall semiconductor industry grew by 36,8% in 2000, leading foundries grew even faster with the largest achieving growth rates in the 60125% range. It says that while the semiconductor industry braces for much slower growth in 2001, the foundry segment is expected to outperform the industry as a whole with its revenues expected to rise from $7,6 bn in 1999 to $35,4 bn in 2004. In-Stat finds that both IDMs such as Motorola and system OEMs are shifting more of their manufacturing to third party foundries with some IDMs even converting older fab plants into foundries. With several fabless chipmakers leaping into manufacturing, the industry's well-defined functional segmentation lines are becoming blurred. Foundries will have a major impact on the new hybrid semiconductor development strategy, says In-Stat.
According to IDC, the DRAM market will decline sharply this year. Total DRAM revenue will reach $23,8 bn in 2001, a revenue decrease of 18% and severe 46% price erosion compared with 2000. It said that the DRAM market suffers from a combination of sluggish demand in the PC industry and a harsh inventory correction in the overall supply chain. According to IDC, the average DRAM content per PC will reach 174 MB - a 36% bit growth over 2000 - as a result of price elasticity, pushing overall bit demand growth in 2001 to 56%, while supply will grow by 52%. Despite the small gap, lingering inventories, limited memory budgets of PC OEMs, IDC says that the lack of a new OS to drive more hungry applications on PCs will still remain as the key inhibitors to demand. For suppliers to remain competitive they will have to be more tactical this year as they support broader and more profitable interface products such as EDO (extended data out), PC66/100 SDRAM, DDR (double data rate), and Rambus, says IDC.
Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) has reported that despite some early setbacks, the Internet appliance market is expected to hit $39 bn by 2006. In total, the worldwide market for line-powered Internet appliances is expected to jump from 21,4 million in terms of unit shipments in 2000 to 174,4 million units by 2006.
The migration to next-generation handsets is a major driver of chip growth. According to IDC, worldwide digital handset semiconductor revenues will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18%, from approximately $17 bn in 1999 to over $38 bn in 2004, while handset shipments will post a healthy 24,4% CAGR during this same period to reach over 780 million units in 2004. IDC says that the GSM cellular segment currently accounts for more than half of all chip revenues due to its large installed base of users, particularly in Europe and Asia. However, beyond 2002, GSM growth will continue to slow as CDMA, TDMA, and 3G penetrate further into the market and gain share. By 2004, 2G, CDMA and TDMA markets will account for over 43% of the total market. The advancement of 3G handsets, which includes primarily CDMA2000 and W-CDMA standards, will also start significantly impacting the future of the market as voice and data-enabled cellular systems drive convergence, believes IDC.
Intel has lowered revenue estimates for its first quarter by about 25% and said it would cut its work force by 6%, or 5000 jobs, mainly through attrition. Intel said this was a result of the current economic slowdown which affected demand for personal computers. IT said this has spread to other sectors, including networking, communications and servers.
Proxim has filed lawsuits against companies for violation of its direct sequence wireless networking intellectual property, which it claims is a key element of the 2,4 GHz IEEE 802.11b standard. Proxim announced US lawsuits against six wireless LAN companies: 3Com, Cisco, Intersil, SMC, Symbol, and Wayport. Proxim says its patents provide the basis for achieving optimum range, data rate and bandwidth using direct sequence WLAN products and services, and since higher data rates has been the most significant differentiating factor of IEEE 802.11b products, many WLAN vendors have been successful largely due to the use of its 'valuable' intellectual property.
ZiLOG has appointed James M Thorburn as Acting CEO while the company continues to search for a permanent successor. Thorburn, former Chief Operations Officer of ON Semiconductor and former Chief Financial Officer of ZiLOG, returns to ZiLOG in the capacity of Senior COO.
ABI estimates that dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) market will grow by more than eight-fold by 2006, from $3 bn in 2000 to $25 bn by 2006. This growth includes the market opportunities for DWDM multiplexers and erbium doped fibre amplifiers (EDFAs) in long-haul networks. It says the three key forces driving the DWDM equipment market are enterprise services on the business side, two-way CATV on the consumer side, and long-haul capacity on the carrier sector.
The CDMA Development Group (CDG) says that wireless Internet users based on code-division multiple access (CDMA) technology is expected to more than double this year. This is according to a new CDG report that says that there are currently more than 22 million subscribers using wireless Internet services over existing CDMA networks, and that this represents nearly a 30% penetration rate of total CDMA subscribers worldwide.
Strategy Analytics' new report warns that UK set-top box sales are likely to fall this year and worldwide growth will slow significantly. It predicts a growth rate of 24% this year, down from 51% in 2000. In the UK, sales will fall from 3,8 million units to 3,2 million. Growth in the US is predicted to fall from 53% to 19%. The near completion of BSkyB's digitisation of its UK operation, is given as part of the reason for the slowdown. The report indicates that satellite delivery will dominate the digital market, with 65% of customers choosing it compared with 31% choosing cable.
Stanford Resources has reported that the flat-panel display monitor market is expected to grow by 40% over the next six years. The market research company says that worldwide shipments of flat-panel monitors is projected to grow from 12,2 million units in 2001 to 91,2 million by 2007. LCD monitors, previously limited to niche applications, are moving into the mainstream in 2001, said the group, and CRT vendors will have serious competition in the next few years.
The ITU has closed the Third World Telecommunication Policy Forum with the adoption by government and industry of four 'Opinions' that reflect the common understanding on Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony. In his opening remarks, Yoshio Utsumi, ITU Secretary-General, set the tone with three key questions. Why do we need a new network to carry telephone calls when we already have one - the public switched telephone network (PSTN) - which does the job very well indeed? What does IP Telephony mean for developing countries? Why the big fuss over a new technology, which provides what is essentially an old service? Utsumi provided a number of key points to answer these questions. See www.itu.int/newsroom/wtpf/</a>
Texas Instruments announced it is to close its 6-inch wafer fab in Santa Cruz, California, which primarily produces analog ICs for hard disk drives. The company said the decision was made to make the company more competitive. Products from that fab will be transferred to other manufacturing plants in Dallas and Houston.
New datacasting services will fuel the rapidly growing market for PC TV tuners over the next couple of years. Datacasting - the delivery of data services via terrestrial airwaves or satellite - will take off this year and contribute to the 50%-plus annual PC TV tuner market growth for the next two years. So says Cahners In-Stat Group which forecasts that the market for analog tuners will slow in 2003, but the market for digital tuners, both terrestrial and satellite, will accelerate through at least 2005. It says graphic cards that integrate TV tuners account for 40% of the market and the European market is currently the largest with over 50% of total sales.
Intel has opened a new Intel Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA) Competency Center in Japan to help OEMs develop products based on its communications chips. The centre will also focus on the development of products for fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) applications.
The Semiconductor Industry Association has announced the US industry's basic research Focus Centers' initiative for universities has been doubled in funding with two new additional research programmes. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will lead research into Advanced Materials, Structures and Devices. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) will lead a team studying Circuits, Systems, and Software Design. The focus centre is designed to channel over a half billion US dollars into the nation's leading research universities over a 10-year period to ensure continued advancements in microelectronics technology. The Focus Center Research Program is jointly funded by the US semiconductor industry (50%), the semiconductor equipment manufacturing industry (25%) and the Department of Defense (25%).
Technology
Infineon Technologies has introduced what it says is a revolutionary packaging technology. Its new TSLP (thin small lead-less package) represents a milestone in size, performance and package innovation, meeting market demands for smaller components in a broad range of wireless and portable products, it claims. Superior chip-scale packaging concepts and manufacturing processes have enabled Infineon to come up with an innovative plastic lead-less package for discrete devices that it says consumes only 20% the space of a standard SC-75 package. The overall footprint is 1,0 x 0,6 x 0,4 mm. Along with ultra-miniature package size with a reduced soldering footprint, it also is significantly reduced in height compared to the widely used SC-79 package.
RF chip provider, Ashvattha Semiconductor has announced a technology that it says will allow it to integrate multiple complete RF front ends on a single chip. Initial silicon, manufactured by IBM in 0,25 µm SiGe BiCMOS process technology, has demonstrated all the performance characteristics required to support the high-integration for combining three separate complete RF front ends supporting wireless, GPS, and BlueTooth standards on a single chip according to the company.
Samsung Electronics has announced a multichip package that stacks a 64 Mb NAND flash memory chip with a 32 Mb random access memory, called the 'Uni-transistor' RAM. Targeted at cellphone applications, the UtRAM can replace conventional SRAMs in portable systems. It uses a low-power storage cell based on a single-transistor and one capacitor.
Texas Instruments' new PT8000 is being touted as the first 60 A digital multiphase power converter. Designed to provide a high-efficiency power solution for the latest multiprocessor computing applications, the digital multiphase technology is said to enable an effective switching frequency of 1,4 MHz, reducing input/output ripple and increasing transient response.
Adaptive Silicon (ASi) announced at the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference 2001 in Germany, its new MSA 2500 Programmable Logic Core (PLC). Developed for application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and application-specific standard product (ASSP) system-on-chip designs, it says the licensable MSA 2500 PLC represents the first commercially available silicon IP for embedded programmable logic. It said the core will enable ASIC and ASSP manufacturers to add the flexibility and reduce the engineering costs of FPGAs in their products.
National Semiconductor has announced an enhancement to its Geode GX1 processor that it says will speed up synchronous DRAM performance in systems by 10% and provide users of thin-client devices with improved graphics. This new version of the Geode GX1 processor at 333 MHz along with the new CS5530A companion chip, supports a display resolution of 1280 x 1024 x 16 bit/pixel colour depth at 85 MHz screen refresh rate, which further improves graphics performance and display resolution. This benefit translates to less stress on users' eyes says National.
Infineon Technologies has announced the fastest version of its 128 Mb synchronous DRAM, and the related unbuffered modules. At 133 MHz operating speed, the memories can be operated at a CAS-Latency of 2 instead of 3, thus shortening the read cycle by one clock period, said the company. The 128 Mb SDRAM, which is offered in organisations of 32 Mb x 4, 16 Mb x 8 and 8 Mb x 16, will continue to be available in the previous speed versions of PC133 CAS-Latency-3 and PC100 CAS-Latency-2.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version