South Africa
Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) has secured R3,5 billion from a syndicate of lenders made up of banks, financial institutions and development funding agencies, to provide corporate debt financing needed to fuel the next stage of the company’s growth. As the owner of its own carrier-neutral dark fibre infrastructure for the transmission of primarily metro telecommunications traffic, DFA leases to telecommunications operators, Internet service providers, media conglomerates, tertiary education institutions, municipalities, government organisations and other businesses.
MB Silicon Systems has become an authorised South African distributor for Redpine Signals, a wireless systems company with chipset and system level products covering industrial, wireless sensor, wireless audio and video, voice over Wi-Fi and high-end consumer requirements. Redpine’s technology spans the complete end-to-end wireless solution and includes an extensive patent portfolio on OFDM, MIMO, embedded processor architectures and low-power techniques. The company’s offerings include both the hardware and the software as differentiated sub-systems to provide flexibility and ease of integration to the system integrator.
Science and Technology minister, Naledi Pandor, was on hand to unveil a new accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) facility in Gauteng – the first of its kind on the African continent. Situated at the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences (iThemba LABS), the instrument will be put to use in the fields of radiocarbon dating, biomedicine, Earth sciences, and climate and environmental research. The facility is funded by the Department of Science and Technology, the National Research Foundation and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Overseas
Business
Royal Philips has initiated the process of combining its Lumileds (LED components) and automotive lighting businesses into a standalone company within the Philips Group, and is exploring its options in terms of attracting capital from third-party investors. Philips intends to remain a shareholder and customer of the new company, and will continue the existing innovation collaboration. Sales of the combined businesses were approximately 1,4 billion Euros in 2013.
Electronics manufacturing equipment maker, MYDATA Automation, has changed its name to Mycronic Technologies, in an effort to unify the operations of MYDATA and parent company Mycronic, formerly Micronic Mydata, under a single brand.
Companies
Atmel has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Newport Media, a provider of low-power Wi-Fi and Bluetooth solutions, for a purchase price of $140 million. Newport Media recorded $43 million in annual revenue during 2013 and the acquisition is expected to be accretive to Atmel’s non-GAAP financials in the second half of 2015.
ASM Pacific Technology (ASMPT) – a leading supplier of electronics assembly and packaging equipment – has completed its purchase of printing technology specialist DEK. Under its new banner as ASMPT’s Printing Solutions Division, DEK joins the formerly acquired SIPLACE (now the Placement Solutions Division) to form the parent company’s SMT Solutions Segment.
The long-running legal battle between Power Integrations and Fairchild Semiconductor continues as a US court has granted PI’s request for another permanent injunction against Fairchild products that infringe PI’s patents. The ruling follows a 2012 jury verdict in which approximately 80 Fairchild products were found to violate three of PI’s patents, which related to certain integrated frequency jitter and saw limiter technologies. In this latest development, the court ordered Fairchild to provide notification of the injunction to all customers, distributors and other third parties that have purchased the infringing products. Financial damages stemming from the infringement are to be determined in a future court proceeding.
TE Connectivity has completed its acquisition of the SEACON group, a leading provider of underwater connector technology and systems. The newly acquired product range will join TE’s Aerospace, Defence and Marine business unit within the Industrial Solutions segment, and will deepen its access to the military marine and sub-sea sectors for remotely operated vehicles (ROV) / autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), oil and gas, environmental and oceanographic applications.
Mentor Graphics announced the acquisition of XS Embedded (XSe), a technology leader in the creation of automotive system architectures and hardware reference platforms. XSe brings a pioneering approach to accelerate system design and verification by providing automotive-grade hardware and software to reduce the time to start of production (SOP). Mentor is now well positioned to address the cross-functional collaboration needs required to address the trends towards integration of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), driver information and infotainment domains.
Industry
A new report in a series of on-shoring studies has been published by IPC: ‘On-Shoring in the North American Electronics Industry: Update on Trends and the Impact on Companies’ presents data collected by IPC over the past two years, and highlights North American electronics industry trends in on-shoring and domestic sourcing, including new data on the business impact from companies that have actually engaged in some form of on-shoring. According to the 2014 report, many companies have considered on-shoring, but only a few have taken action. North American and European companies from this select group reported the impact of on-shoring and domestic sourcing on their operational and financial performance, addressing metrics such as costs, delivery time, time to market, quality control, inventories and sales.
According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $26,86 billion for the month of May 2014 – 8,8% higher than the May 2013 total of $24,69 billion and 2,0% more than the April 2014 total of $26,34 billion. Year-over-year and month-over-month sales increased across all regions for the first time since August 2010. Sequential monthly sales were up 2,1% in Asia Pacific, 2,1% in Europe, 1,8% in the Americas, and 1,6% in Japan.
Technology
Chemists at Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich, Germany, have found a way to boost the performance of white-emitting LEDs – using a novel type of red phosphor material. The first prototype LEDs reportedly generate 14% more light than conventional white-light LEDs and have an excellent colour rendering index. The process for synthesising the new red phosphor is currently being optimised for large-scale manufacture.
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