Southern Africa
Dimension Data is rolling out a R1,8 million network infrastructure project to meet the network bandwidth needs of Engen Refinery. Designed as a three-phase approach, it involves the transfer to Gigabit Ethernet technology. To prevent loss of performance during the transformation, Dimension Data is integrating the current Fibre Distributed Data Interchange (FDDI) technology with that of Gigabit Ethernet.
Alstom has announced that its SA operations are to be included in the group's global strategy. Philippe Joubert, President of Alstom Transmission & Distribution worldwide and Chairman of Alstom South Africa Holdings said a start will be made during 2002 to further integrate Alstom South Africa's manufacturing and marketing operations, especially those of its transmission and distribution division (T&D), into Alstom International's globalisation programme. In a visit to South Africa during December, Joubert said technological upgrades of production facilities and standardisation of products in line with group operations worldwide will be made in the company's T&D business units, including the power and distribution transformer units and the medium voltage switchgear unit. T&D is the local company's largest division, contributing about 50% of its total annual turnover of over R2 bn.
Barlow Communications has been appointed as an official distributor for Fluke Networks in South Africa.
Mantech Electronics has merged with Mobicon Holdings of Hong Kong, effective 1 December 2001. Mobicon Holdings, a subsidiary of Mobicon Group, is a leading electronics distributor in Asia.
Microsoft SA has appointed Sahara Computers as its third local OEM distributor. Under the distribution agreement, Sahara Computers is licensed to sell Microsoft Delivery Service Partner (DSP) products to system builders, from January 2002.
Tripp Lite's distribution partner in Kenya, Electric Link has been awarded the UPS Company of the Year Award by the Computer Society of Kenya for 2001. This is the first year Tripp Lite has provided UPS systems to the Kenya market. Electric Link was voted the winner in a comprehensive national poll of leading IT solutions providers conducted by the Computer Society of Kenya.
Overseas
Business
VIA Technologies has announced that its net sales for December 2001 were NT$ 2,15 bn (US$ 61,58m approximately). Over the year 2001, the accumulated sales revenue total of over NT$ 34,15 bn (US$ 976m approximately) represents a 10,41% increase in accumulated annual sales revenue compared to net sales in 2000. According to Richard Brown, Director of Marketing at VIA Technologies, the increase is over 10% on the previous year which shows that VIA is still performing strongly despite the tough market conditions.
Companies
Military electronics company Raytheon has announced that it will sell its aircraft integration unit to L-3 Communications Holdings for $1,13 bn in cash.
Matsushita Electric Industrial (MEI) and five of its subsidiaries have announced that the five group companies will become wholly-owned subsidiaries of MEI through share exchanges. The five group companies are: Matsushita Communication Industrial (MCI), Kyushu Matsushita Electric (KME), Matsushita Seiko (MS), Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics Industries (MKEI) and Matsushita Graphic Communication Systems (MGCS). All but MGCS are listed companies. The purpose of the share exchange is principally to achieve new growth in the 21st century, said Matsushita. Restructuring will be implemented in accordance with basic policies to: eliminate duplication of business lines and counterproductive competition within the Group; unify and concentrate R&D resources into strategic areas; establish a system where there is a single window to customers, with full responsibility for development, production and sales for each product domain. The share exchanges will become effective on 1 October, 2002.
Lattice Semiconductor has acquired the FPGA business of Agere Systems for $250 million in cash. The transaction includes Agere's general-purpose ORCA FPGA product portfolio, its field programmable system chip (FPSC) product portfolio and all related software design tools. FPSCs are advanced system oriented products which combine generic FPGA logic with embedded cores dedicated to the implementation of advanced communication protocols and high-speed input/output (I/O) functions. Additionally, the parties will enter into a cross-license agreement whereby Lattice will receive rights to Agere patents and certain IP for use in current and future FPGA and FPSC products and Agere will continue to have access to the ORCA FPGA technology for incorporation into its 'system-on-a-chip' ICs.
Cypress Semiconductor is to purchase Silicon Packets for $25m in cash and stock. Silicon Packets is a start-up developer of 10 Gbps framer chips.
U.S. Robotics has announced a partnership with Analog Devices to develop new modems for asynchronous digital subscriber line (ADSL) broadband communications. The new ADSL modems will be based on Analog Devices' Eagle xDSL chip set.
Infineon Technologies and the semiconductor branch of Toshiba have announced a jointly-developed Bluetooth system solution for a variety of consumer products, especially PC-related applications such as desktop PCs, notebooks and printers. The joint solution is based on a radio frequency transceiver chip, manufactured by Infineon and the corresponding baseband controller chip produced by Toshiba. This will allow the two companies to offer their customers a total solution in Bluetooth wireless communications, expected to be available within the first quarter 2002.
LM Ericsson has announced it has licensed patented technologies for 2G and 3G cellular phones to Samsung Electronics. Samsung has been granted a non-exclusive licence for its patents covering GSM, TDMA, GPRS, Edge and W-CDMA mobile phone standards.
Nichia has licensed its white-light-emitting diode technology to Citizen Electronics, a subsidiary of Citizen Watch. Nichia's technology uses a blue LED combined with YAG (yttrium, aluminium, garnet) a yellow phosphor that can generate the white light. Citizen will use the LED technology in its specialised surface-mount device packaging.
Scottish company Intense Photonics has announced a strategic partnership with the III-V wafer specialist IQE. The partnership involves the design, modelling and growth of complex compound semiconductor crystal structures to help shorten Intense Photonics' path to market for its photonic ICs. IQE will be providing gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphide (InP) based epitaxy structures to support Intense Photonics' work in component sectors including pump lasers and photonic switches, for C and L optical networking frequency bands.
Industry
Worldwide revenues for high-complexity, cell-based designs, containing at least one or more blocks of embedded flash have been forecast to experience a compound annual growth rate of 26,4% from 2000 to 2005, according to analysts at In-Stat/MDR. "The use of embedded flash, for both programming (or code generation/development) and data storage, will continue to grow in the future, from the perspective of percent of design starts containing the function," said Jerry Worchel, Senior Analyst. "However, its growth, relative to inclusion in new design starts, will be slow, due to the technology's major disadvantage, programming voltage." In-Stat reveals that the embedded flash memory market is currently heavily dominated by the low-density, or code generation, segment, which accounted for nearly three out of every four designs in 2000. By 2005, domination on the code generation side will slip somewhat, to two out of every three design starts.
The worldwide wafer fab equipment market is on track for robust growth in the new millennium, with revenue forecast to reach $25 billion in 2000, an increase of 43,5% from 1999 revenue. This according to Dataquest analysts who recently announced their wafer fab equipment forecast at the Industry Strategy Symposium, California. The research group said that the industry is poised for double-digit growth through 2002.
After slipping slightly in 2001, cellular phone handset shipments will grow 10,1% to 435,7 million units worldwide in 2002, according to a new forecast released by the Yankee Group. The research group estimates that 395,8 million handsets were shipped in 2001. The forecast states that handset shipments wordwide will increase 14,4% to 498,5 million units in 2003. By 2004 the market is expected to have grown 8,9% to 542,8 million, followed by a 9,8% increase in 2005 to 596,0 million handsets.
Clear Logic has been awarded a patent on its bitstream-based ASIC conversion technology. US Patent 6,311,316, issued on October 30, 2001, protects Clear Logic's method of creating an ASIC using the bitstream from a programmable logic device.
Advanced Micro Devices has named Bertrand Cambou as Group Vice President of the company's Memory group, replacing Walid Maghribi, President of the Memory group, who has resigned from AMD effective 1 March. Cambou will report to Hector Ruiz, AMD President and Chief Operating Officer.
National Semiconductor launched an innovative Bluetooth Stack Partner Program at the Bluetooth Developers Conference held recently in Santa Clara. This will provide its customers with host and applications software for systems using Bluetooth wireless technology. National named Widcomm, a supplier of Bluetooth wireless solutions, as the first member of the partnership program.
LSI Logic has joined the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. HyperTransport technology is a new high-speed, high-performance, point-to-point link for integrated circuits to enable them to communicate with each other up to 48 times faster than with existing technologies.
Fairchild Semiconductor has announced that Kirk Pond, President and CEO, has been honoured by Update magazine as one of its 'Elite 100.' The Elite 100 members are a select group proclaimed by Update as the most powerful and influential US business leaders in technology, finance, business and industry.
Chrysler has announced the name of its In-Vehicle Communications System - 'U-Connect'. Chrysler said it will offer the service as an after-market item in its vehicles, with factory-installed availability in early 2003. U-Connect's communication is driven through a user's wireless phone using Bluetooth short-range wireless technology. It also allows multiple phones to be used within the vehicle's system, adapting to an individual or a family. Upon entering the vehicle, the mobile phone connects to the vehicle's electrical architecture with Bluetooth technology, and once engaged, the phone audio is fed through the vehicle's existing speaker system, overriding the radio.
Technology
In readiness for the era of In-Band On-Channel (IBOC) digital radio, Texas Instruments and iBiquity demonstrated the first IBOC digital radio receiver solution with five leading receiver manufacturers at the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, in January. A new licence agreement between the two companies allows TI to use iBiquity's IBOC-related intellectual property for this and the development of future products. TI's performance flagship TMS320C6000 DSP platform was used to reduce the number of DSPs from 12 in a test receiver to one, on the development board. The new DSP-based solution features static-free reception and CD quality sound and also provides for a host of wireless data services. The companies said they greatly reduced the risk of designing an IBOC radio by implementing the standard in software, as opposed to the more challenging ASIC route. A white paper titled "The Future of Digital Radio: DSP" is available at www.ti.com/sc/dr1201nr.
Samsung Electronics claims it has developed all the technology required for core chipsets used in ADSL networks - the Discrete Multitone(DMT) Processor IC, controller IC and Analog Front End (AFE) IC for use in digital modems with transmission speeds of up to 8 Mbps. It claims it is the only company which supplies all three core components for the ADSL modem, placing it in a position to offer the full lineup required by end users to configure optimal ADSL networks. Samsung estimates the ADSL modem market will hit around 10 million units this year and rise to 21 million units per year by 2005. Currently running a 0,18-micron CMOS processing allowing products to perform on 1,8 V, the company plans to produce a DMT processor IC and controller IC on a single chip and apply 0,13-micron technology in the second half of 2002.
VIA Technologies has introduced a new 933 MHz processor targeted at the desktop value PCs, notebooks, high-density servers, and the emerging generation of digital PC appliances. VIA's new C3 represents the third speed increase for the VIA Ezra core processor, which debuted at 800 MHz. The VIA C3 is fully Socket-370 compatible and is available at speeds of up to 933 MHz. The processor also comes with 128 KB Level 1 and 64 KB Level 2 full speed cache, as well as support for a 100/133 MHz Front Side Bus and MMX and 3DNow! multimedia instructions.
Swedish company Effnet has developed a licensable version of the Compressed Real-Time Protocol algorithm to support the realtime delivery of voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP). The CRTP algorithm can reduce bandwidth requirements for wireline VoIP by as much as 60% for IPv4, and 75% for IPv6 networks. EffnetEdge Header Compression technology is used to translate to more VoIP channels and improved voice quality at a given bandwidth. Effnet says the CRTP algorithm uses the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFC 2508, an industry standard developed to minimise header overhead for Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packets for interactive multimedia applications on wired links. The size of IPv4 IP/UDP/RTP headers are reduced from 40 bytes to as few as 2 bytes, leaving the packet's data payload unchanged, it claims.
Altera is shipping the APEXT II EP2A70, its largest programmable logic device (PLD).
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