South Africa
• Fibre-optic test equipment specialist Kingfisher International has signed a South African distribution agreement with Barlow Communications. Kingfisher manufactures a range of products aimed at professional installers and enterprise network maintenance teams, including visible light sources and optical time domain reflectometers (OTDR), with a reputation for build quality and reliability.
• Alan Knott-Craig Jr, previously the CEO of MXit and son of the former Vodacom and Cell C CEO, has launched an initiative to provide free Wi-Fi across South Africa. Project Isizwe is the name of the non-profit company he’s set up to work with municipalities and partners that include the likes of Neotel, Ruckus, DSTV, eNCA, CNBC Africa, SABC, Primedia, Forbes, DM, Dalberg, Inmarsat, Comztek, World Wide Works, Scoop, Just, MiRO, Hurley, Huawei, DLA Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyer, Western Cape Government and the City of Tshwane. The project makes use of low-cost, low-maintenance and durable equipment, under-utilised fibre that’s already in the ground and semi-skilled technicians and labourers.
Overseas
Business
• Massachusetts, USA based Nantero has received a $31,5 million boost towards the commercialisation of its super-fast, ultra-high-density NRAM (non-volatile random access memory) based on carbon nanotube (CNT) technology. The company is using the money primarily to recruit engineering talent to help it achieve its goal of supplanting Flash and DRAM as the predominant modern memory technologies. Nantero is ultimately targeting the development of terabit memories, but doesn’t expect discrete memories to be available until 2017 at the earliest.
• For its second quarter of fiscal year 2015, which ended 2 May, Analog Devices’ revenue reached a record $821 million, up 18% compared to the same period of last year. Earnings per share (EPS) was $0,65 on the strength of $205,3 million in net income, compared to EPS of $0,59 and net income of $187,4 million in the second quarter of 2014.
Companies
• Global electronic component distributor, TTI, has awarded Kemet its Global Operations Excellence Award in recognition of factors such as on-time delivery, receiving quality, customer-reported quality, administrative quality, operations, business systems, and sales and management support. Representing the highest recognition possible of a supplier’s performance within TTI, the award requires that the supplier earns the supplier excellence award in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and also scores the highest total points globally.
• Molex has purchased ProTek Medical, an Irish contract engineering design and manufacturing firm specialising in cleanroom injection moulding, assembly and other custom solutions for medical device OEMs. ProTek will continue to operate as a subsidiary of Molex Ireland Holdings, B.V.
• Sierra Wireless announced a new milestone in its collaboration with PSA Peugeot Citroën, with a next-generation design win for its AirPrime AR Series smart automotive modules, the Legato platform, and the AirVantage cloud. PSA Peugeot Citroën, which has been a Sierra Wireless customer since 2001, has connected more than 1,6 million vehicles to date. With its next generation of connected cars, PSA will utilise Sierra Wireless device-to-cloud technology to expand from emergency notification into additional value-added connected services for its customers.
• A US district court jury has found Power Integrations (PI) guilty of infringing on a Fairchild patent by continuing to market and sell its LinkSwitch II family of products, even after a 2012 jury found those same power conversion chips violated the patent. The two companies have made numerous claims against one another during their more than decade long patent litigation battle. Although Fairchild was the victor in this particular skirmish – having been awarded $2,4 million in damages – PI did land a $100 000 blow of its own in this latest court trial.
• Cypress Semiconductor and Uphill Investment Co. have been engaged in a tug of war over the American chip maker Integrated Silicon Solution, Inc. (ISSI). It started when ISSI entered into a 'definitive merger agreement' with Uphill in March 2015, valued at $19,25 per share. Cypress then made an unsolicited offer of $19,75 per share in May. Which way the ensuing bidding war is going to go is anyone’s guess at this stage. The latest announcement from ISSI recommends that its shareholders favour Uphill’s latest bid of $21,00 per share; Cypress’s best offer to date being $20,25 per share.
• Microsemi has teamed up with Sibridge Technologies to develop a suite of high-speed IP cores targeting Microsemi’s SmartFusion2 SoC FPGAs and IGLOO2 FPGAs. Having previously provided its triple-speed Ethernet media access controller (MAC), USB2.0 OTG controller, as well as PCI Express IP and verification IP suites, Sibridge is now working to add support for USB3.0 host and device controller, 10 gigabit Ethernet MAC, SATA Gen 1/2 host and device controllers, CAN2.0 network controller, and eMMC host controller as part of Microsemi’s CompanionCore programme.
Industry
• The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $27,6 billion for the month of April 2015, 4,8% higher than the April 2014 total of $26,3 billion and 0,4% lower than last month’s total of $27,7 billion. The Americas market posted double-digit growth compared to last year, leading all regions. SIA also endorsed a sales forecast from World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) which projected the industry’s worldwide sales will reach $347,2 billion in 2015, a 3,4% increase from 2014, followed by similar rates of growth in 2016 and 2017.
Technology
• Two years after launching a campaign to promote the industry-wide utilisation of copper wire assembly technology, Freescale Semiconductor has shipped its billionth copper wire component. The company says it now produces more components in technically superior copper wire bonding than in traditional gold wire. More than 300 million of these units are destined for automotive applications, many of them in demanding under-the-hood environments.
• Fujifilm has collaborated with Belgian nanoelectronics research institute, imec, in demonstrating full-colour OLEDs based on jointly developed photoresist technology for organic semiconductors. This paves the way to producing high-resolution and large organic electroluminescent (EL) displays and establishing cost-competitive manufacturing methods. Verified experimental results were achieved in patterning red, green and blue organic EL materials, and an OLED array of 40 x 40 dots at the resolution of 640 ppi was realised and illuminated with UV rays to confirm that red, green and blue dots separately emitted light. These results open new opportunities such as the creation of an OLED array that adds a fourth colour to red, green and blue.
• Infineon Technologies is working with Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) to develop advanced radar technology for gesture sensing and presence detection in wearables, Internet of Things, automotive and other applications. Based on Infineon’s 60 GHz RF technology and integrating transceiver, antenna and control electronics in a single package, the first implementations were demonstrated at the recent Google I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco.
• Tiny spirals of gold are at the centre of new research into an advanced method of preventing counterfeiting of identity cards, currency and other important objects. Vanderbilt University scientists have created Archimedes spirals so small that more than 100 of them would fit on each side of a square array just one hundredth of a millimetre wide. When subjected to laser light, these nano-spirals emit visible blue light due to a frequency doubling effect. This property can be exploited to produce a unique, customisable signature that would be all but impossible to counterfeit.
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