South Africa
• The CSIR’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) has taken the top prize in the international Student Cluster Competition held at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Germany on 22 June. After winning the top prize in 2013 and 2014, and second prize in 2015, the centre entered another team of undergraduate students and took the overall prize, beating 11 other contenders from across the globe. In a real-time challenge, the 12 teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students built a small cluster of their own design on the ISC exhibition floor and raced to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications.
Overseas
Companies
• NXP Semiconductors announced an agreement to divest its standard products business to a consortium of financial investors consisting of Beijing Jianguang Asset Management and Wise Road Capital). Under the terms of the agreement the consortium will pay approximately $2,75 billion for the business, which is an industry leading supplier of discrete, logic and PowerMOS semiconductors focused on the automotive, industrial, computing, consumer and wearable application markets. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017, at which time the business will be branded Nexperia and headquartered in the Netherlands.
• Arrow Electronics is acquiring the global internet media portfolio of UBM’s technology and electronic design publications, which include EE Times, EDN, ESM, Embedded, EBN, TechONline and Datasheets.com. Last year, Arrow also acquired the United Technical Publishing arm of Hearst Media. This new agreement with UBM aims to strengthen its position as a thought leader and trusted advisor in IoT and technology design trends.
• US-based Universal Display Corporation, through its wholly-owned subsidiary UDC Ireland, has acquired the OLED intellectual property (IP) assets of BASF, the German chemical company. Representing 15 years of research and development, the assets include over 500 issued and pending patents around the world, in 86 patent families. Largely consisting of phosphor-escent materials and technologies, BASF’s OLED portfolio has an average lifetime of 10 years. The purchase price for the acquisition is approximately 87 million Euros.
• Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, mainland China’s largest semiconductor foundry, has signed an agreement to purchase a 70% stake of Italian wafer foundry, LFoundry, for a consideration of 49 million Euros. This represents the mainland China IC foundry industry’s first successful acquisition of an overseas-based manufacturer, which marks a major step forward in internationalising SMIC; furthermore, through this acquisition, SMIC has formally entered into the global automotive electronics market.
• Mouser Electronics received more than 17 top business awards from its manufacturer partners for 2015 – TE Connectivity, Molex, Littelfuse, Lumileds, Amphenol Corporation, Amphenol Industrial, Bourns, Vishay Intertechnology, ON Semiconductor, Ohmite, Harting, Keystone, Schaffner, Qualtek, Comchip, NorComp and Neutrik. Reasons cited for the honours included double-digit sales growth, fastest introduction of new products, breadth of inventory, best-in-class marketing campaigns, customer growth, outstanding point of sales (POS) growth, global expansion and commitment to teamwork.
Technology
• A new Chinese supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, captured the number one spot on the latest TOP500 list of supercomputers. With a Linpack mark of 93 petaflops, the system outperforms the former TOP500 champ, Tianhe-2, by a factor of three. The machine is powered by a new ShenWei processor and custom interconnect, both of which were developed in China, ending any remaining speculation that China would have to rely on Western technology to compete effectively in the upper echelons of supercomputing.
Industry
• The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced that its next release, coming late 2016 to early 2017, will be called Bluetooth 5 and will include significantly increased range, speed and broadcast messaging capacity. By quadrupling the range and doubling the speed of low-energy connections while increasing the capacity of connectionless data broadcasts by 800%, this will redefine the way Bluetooth devices transmit information, moving away from the app-paired-to-device model to a connectionless IoT where there is less need to download an app or connect the app to a device.
• The Semiconductor Industry Association announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $25,8 billion for the month of April 2016, a decrease of 1,0% from the prior month’s total and 6,2% lower than the April 2015 total. Additionally, it endorsed a forecast by World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) which projects the industry’s worldwide sales will be $327,2 billion in 2016, a 2,4% decrease from the 2015 sales total. WSTS projects year-to-year decreases across all regional markets for 2016: Europe (-0,1%), Asia Pacific (-1,2%), Japan (-1,7%) and the Americas (-7,3%). On the positive side, it predicts growth in 2016 for several semiconductor product categories, including discretes, analog and MCU products. Beyond 2016, the semiconductor market is expected to grow at a modest pace across all regions, with WSTS forecasting 2,0% growth globally for 2017 ($333,7 billion in total sales) and 2,2% growth for 2018 ($340,9 billion).
• Industrial semiconductor revenues rose slightly in 2015 despite weakness in the overall semiconductor industry and, in particular, economic headwinds in China, which is a major global consumer of industrial chips. Year-over-year global industrial semiconductor revenue rose less than 1% in 2015 to reach $41,9 billion. This slight revenue increase in 2015 follows solid growth of 11,5% in 2014 and 9,8% in 2013, according to IHS. Texas Instruments maintained its strong position as the largest industrial semiconductor supplier in the world in 2015, followed by Infineon Technologies and Intel. STMicroelectronics dropped to fourth place, while Analog Devices remained in fifth position.
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