South Africa
Electrocomp has been appointed as an official South African distributor for Wima’s comprehensive range of capacitors.
Overseas
Business
For its first 2013 fiscal quarter, Analog Devices brought in revenue totalling $622,1 million, lower than both the previous quarter ($695 million) and the first quarter of 2012 ($648,1 million). Net income was similarly down at $131,2 million ($0,42 per diluted share), compared to $179,2 million ($0,58 per diluted share) in the fourth quarter of 2012 and $139,4 million ($0,46 per diluted share) in the first quarter of 2012.
Avago Technologies reported financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2013, ended 3 February. Net revenue was $576 million, a decrease of 7% compared with the previous quarter and an increase of 2% over the same quarter last year. Net income was $125 million, or $0,50 per diluted share. This compares with net income of $159 million, or $0,64 per diluted share, for the prior quarter, and net income of $125 million, or $0,50 per diluted share, in the same quarter last year.
After recording a $21,8 million net loss for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 and $37,6 million for the year, Intersil has announced plans to cut its workforce by roughly 18% as part of an effort to decrease annual operating expenses by $30 million.
Companies
Intel’s foundry business has secured Altera as its third chip customer, adding momentum to the company’s relatively new business unit which also counts Tabula and Achronix amongst its customer base. According to Altera, Intel will in future manufacture Altera FPGAs based on its (Intel’s) 14 nm tri-gate transistor technology.
ZTE, the world’s fourth-leading provider of mobile phones, has selected Cypress Semiconductor’s TrueTouch Gen4 solution to implement the touchscreen for its Nubia brand smartphone. Gen4 delivers leading signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to limit noise interference and provide accurate performance in any operating environment. The technology also offers enhanced waterproofing capability, enabling accurate touch input and finger tracking in the presence of moisture from rain, condensation or sweat.
Industry
Adoption of ARM’s big.LITTLE processing technology is gaining traction with Samsung and Renesas Mobile having already announced their plans, and subsequent implementations set to be revealed during 2013 by five more companies including CSR, Fujitsu Semiconductor and MediaTek. Targeted primarily at mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, big.LITTLE pairs a high-performance processor with a low-power one, allowing mobile devices to use the appropriate one for a specific task to increase system performance while lowering energy consumption.
Rosenberger has been added to German economics magazine Wirtschaftswoche’s list of top 100 fastest growing medium-sized companies in Germany, placing it number 13 on the list. The analysis considered German companies with sales of at least 50 million Euros and a leading world market position in their field of business.
Spending by utilities transitioning their networks to Smart Grid capabilities reached $23,68 billion in 2012, according to ABI Research. Highlighting the growing momentum behind the spending, 2012’s total alone represents 48% of Smart Grid spending to date. Even so, these remain the early years of Smart Grid investments and spending will continue to grow over the next five years to reach $80,8 billion during 2018.
Technology
The most recent addition to the long list of the amazing properties of graphene was announced in Nature Physics in a paper authored by ICFO researchers. The research demonstrates that graphene is able to convert a single photon that it absorbs into multiple hot electrons, and that the higher the photon’s energy, the larger the number of hot electrons created. This could lead to solar cells that harvest energy from the entire solar spectrum and convert it to electric current with high efficiency.
Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois have demonstrated a lithium-ion battery that is not only flexible enough to stretch to 300% its original size, but can also be recharged wirelessly. With its most promising potential in medical electronics, the battery was demonstrated to power a commercial LED even when stretched, folded, twisted and mounted on a human elbow. The power and voltage of the stretchable battery are similar to a conventional lithium-ion battery of the same size.
Cree has reported accomplishing an R&D efficiency of 276 lumens per Watt for a white power LED. This milestone exceeds Cree’s previous R&D record of 254 lumens per Watt and was achieved on the company’s SC³ Technology Platform.
Freescale Semiconductor has introduced the new Kinetis KL02, touting it as the world’s smallest ARM-powered MCU. Measuring just 1,9 x 2,0 mm, it includes the latest 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ processor, low-power functionality and a range of analog and communication peripherals.
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