Southern Africa
Allied Electronics (Altron) has been nominated as one of the Top Ten Companies for 2001/02 by the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce and Industry (JCCI). The selection of the top 10 companies is based on a range of criteria including growth, performance, contribution to the economy, export orientation or global expansion, job creation and transformation, says JCCI. The nominated companies cover the full spectrum of business and industry, but all had one factor in common: they are local companies that have achieved unparalleled success in their particular fields within our borders, in Africa or on the world stage. Altron is the holding company for a group of high-technology driven companies operating in the telecommunications, information technology, multimedia and power electronics industries. The group recorded revenue of R10 billion for the year ended February 2002.
Hans Meiring, chief executive of Aberdare Cables has been nominated as one of South Africa's top 10 business personalities for 2001/2 by the South African Chamber of Business. These persons are nominated in terms of contribution to business, to development and to the economy. According to SA Top 300 Companies, many of the best business people are not constantly in the public eye and their achievements go unrecognised outside their immediate sphere of influence. Meiring, a mechanical engineer who joined Aberdare in 1980, runs the country's biggest cable manufacturer with 10 factories in South Africa as well as two overseas. It exports from two continents to 37 countries around the world.
Siemens Information and Communications Group has said that the first subscriber connection for a wireless local loop network in Lesotho, has gone live. The company was recently selected as the preferred supplier for Lesotho's largest telecommunications contract. In terms of the R211 million contract with privatised telecoms operator, Telecom Lesotho, Siemens is rolling out a turnkey wireless local loop solution. So far, three of the 16 base stations have been installed, covering up to a third of the projected 24 000 subscriber capacity.
Reunert has acquired Marconi Plc's 51% share in local telecommunications cable manufacturer ATC for an undisclosed price. Although the transaction is subject to the fulfilment of a number of suspensive conditions, Reunert said it will take immediate management control. On completion of the transaction, Reunert will own 79% of ATC. The 21% share held by African Cables Limited in ATC will remain unchanged. Reunert owns 50% of African Cables, a power cable manufacturer based in Vereeniging. ATC has been experiencing difficult trading conditions following the downturn in the telecommunications industry worldwide. However, Reunert chief executive Gerrit Pretorius is confident that market conditions will improve in the longer term and that ATC will be a valuable asset going forward.
Cabling and networking company, Cable Applications, has been appointed an official distributor of the Planet Networking and Communication range of products, by Planet Technology of Taiwan.
Overseas
Business
JDS Uniphase has trimmed its outlook for its first quarter ending 30 September, saying it anticipates net sales will be $190m to $200m as compared to earlier guidance of $200m to $210m. It blamed continuing weakness in the company's telecommunications markets for the decline.
RF Micro Devices has raised its outlook for revenue saying it expects revenue of approximately $118m for its Q2 fiscal 2003 ending 30 September. This compares to July's guidance of revenue of approximately $109m to $114m.
National Semiconductor made net income of $1,3m in Q1 of 2003 compared to a loss of $54,6m in the same period a year ago. Revenues were $420,6m, a 24% increase year-on-year from 2001. Chairman Brian Halla said that National's strategy to increase the analog content in wireless handsets helped offset weaker sales in the PC market.
Companies
Integrated Device Technology has acquired Solidum Systems of Canada, a provider of classification and network processors, for an undisclosed price. Solidum offers a family of programmable classification processors that can be configured to inspect and classify packets in applications at up to OC-48 line rates.
JDS Uniphase has announced its acquisition of the transceiver/transponder business unit of OptronX, a maker of 10 Gbps optical transport modules, for an undisclosed amount.
NEC USA is merging its two US research laboratories to create a stronger R&D organisation dedicated to the development of new technologies for NEC's core business units. The new organisation, NEC Laboratories America (NEC Labs), will be created by merging the research operations of Princeton-based NEC Research Institute (NECI) and the research operations of NEC USA's Computer and Communications Research Laboratory (CCRL) of Princeton, and Cupertino, California.
Fairchild Semiconductor and Royal Philips Electronics, two of the industry's largest standard logic suppliers, have formed a working relationship to become a multisource supplier for small-scale logic packaging. This development increases the availability of the industry's two leading packaging technologies - Fairchild's MicroPak and Philips' Depopulated very-thin Quad Flat-pack No-leads (DQFN) packages.
Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS), and Microsoft are collaborating on the underlying technology to drive new capabilities for handheld devices. Motorola said its DragonBall platform application development system based on ARM technology now supports the Microsoft Windows CE operating system. Motorola's SPS has also joined the ARM Consortium for Windows CE.
Motorola has announced a new chip for global positioning system (GPS) applications, based on technology from IBM's Microelectronics Division. The companies announced a deal under which IBM will manufacture the device on a foundry basis for Motorola. The new 7 x 7 mm chip, called Motorola Instant GPS, is a single-chip GPS receiver small enough to fit into a wristwatch.
Industry
Market research firm IC Insights has updated its preliminary rankings for the silicon foundry business in 2002. In total, the worldwide foundry industry is expected to hit $8,745 bn in terms of projected sales for 2002, up 28% from $6,839 bn in 2001. In 2001, the market fell 37% from $10,789 bn in 2000, according to IC Insights. The updated version only includes the top five players in terms of projected sales for this year: TSMC, UMC, Chartered, Anam, and X-Fab. With the exception of Taiwan's UMC, IC Insights lowered its sales forecast for these providers.
Dataquest says that the worldwide wireless LAN market is showing strong growth with unit shipments set to grow 73% in 2002 compared with 2001. A unit shipments boom is being accompanied by some price erosion as revenue is expected to increase 26% in 2002, but such growth is set to continue through to 2007 according to its report 'Wireless LAN Equipment: Worldwide, 2001-2007'. In 2003 worldwide WLAN shipments should total 26,5m units, up from 15,5m units in 2002 and revenue will reach almost $2,8 bn in 2003, up from $2,1 bn in 2002. It said that in 2002 approximately 10% of all mobile PCs will be shipped with a wireless LAN included, and this will increase to 31% in 2004.
Telecoms equipment supplier Tellabs is to close its manufacturing plant in Shannon, Ireland to reduce losses.
Sipex has announced it will close its 4-inch wafer fab in San Jose and exit the analog display IC business.
At the opening of the International Telecommunication Union's 16th Plenipotentiary Conference in Morocco, Yoshio Utsumi, ITU secretary-general, told delegates that 'a concerted global policy effort is needed to eliminate the gap between rich and poor when it comes to the flow of, and access to information.' He noted that while telecom capacity grew by 200 times between 1995 and 2000, '1,5 million villages in the world still lack a basic telephone connection and these could be connected for less than the price paid for a third-generation mobile licence in one of the developed countries that is already well-served.'
According to a new Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) study, nearly 20% of all new vehicles worldwide will contain embedded Bluetooth hardware by 2007.
A survey of engineers responsible for electronics measurement, reports that new communications protocols such as Ethernet, long touted as a likely successor to the widely-used GPIB and serial interfaces, are finally seeing widespread adoption. In addition, Linux is also seeing acceptance for measurement applications. Keithley Instruments' Measurement Trends study (see www.keithley.com/whatsnew), is a review of measurement performance and future requirements based on a survey of engineers involved in electronics test and measurement applications across a wide spectrum of industries. Ethernet's popularity was seen in several questions while expected trends continued for use of computer backplanes for data acquisition boards. Future use of PCI and ISA boards showed expected declines, while use of VXI and PXI backplanes was forecast to rise. Planned use of PCMCIA in 12 months remained flat. With the popularity now of the USB standard, PCMCIA was not expected to show much further development.
Infineon Technologies has launched its 'Agenda 5-to-1' program outlining its strategy for future growth. Infineon has set out its strategic goals for the next five years and the cornerstones of the further enhanced company strategy for achieving those goals. Infineon said it intends to secure a place among the top four semiconductor manufacturers by 2007; in each of its five business groups, the company plans to be among the top three; it is aiming for a top two position in profitability in all of its business groups; and it intends to establish its position as the number one for solutions in the semiconductor industry.
Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components used in civil avionics systems could endanger the operation of aircraft systems at high altitudes, a specialist has warned. Andrew Chugg, senior principal engineer in the radiation effects group of Matra BAE Dynamics says that the COTS devices, particularly semiconductors, could be susceptible to the effects of radiation at high altitude. According to Chugg, although the parts may pass radiation tests performed at ground-level, these may not sufficiently reflect the conditions they will encounter at the highest cruising altitudes used by civil aircraft, where radiation can be hundreds of times more intense.
In a keynote address at the 'FEI Forum on Finance and Technology' in Las Vegas, Hector Ruiz, AMD president and CEO, asserted that semiconductor manufacturers must change their business models to achieve success. 'In traditional relationships between suppliers and customers, the lines that define where one company begins and the other ends are very clear - and can be very disruptive,' he said. 'I believe this old model is broken. To be successful, we believe that semiconductor companies must build relationships with customers and partners that truly blur the lines, and create a 'complementor' relationship where the companies are connected and invested in each other's success.' Ruiz stressed that semiconductor manufacturers should not stop investing in improving manufacturing capabilities, but rather that companies need to focus on high-impact areas such as transistor development, advanced process control (APC), and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology where the IP investment can be directly linked to specific customer needs.
E-mail volume will continue to explode as person-to-person e-mails are joined by rapidly-growing numbers of spam and e-mail alerts and notifications, according to IDC. In 2006, the total number of e-mail messages sent daily is expected to exceed 60 billion worldwide, up from 31 billion in 2002, and slightly more than half of these messages will be person-to-person e-mails. As e-mail overwhelms our abilities to navigate growing currents of content, users will demand greater access to message filtering technology to quickly distinguish between high and low priority messages and to delete spam.
The Tokyo District Court has ruled that the key patent for gallium nitride-based blue LEDs and laser diodes belongs to Nichia, and not to Shuji Nakamura, who invented the technology while working for Nichia. Nakamura, now a professor at the University of California, filed a lawsuit against Nichia in August 2001 seeking ownership of the patent.
Technology
Two US inventors claim to have devised a cheap, insecticide-free way to destroy mosquitoes - by blasting their larvae with high-frequency sound ranging from 16 to 32 kHz. The 100 W sound delivered by a waterproof loudspeaker causes the larvae to be blown apart, according to the team. The technique works because the frequency matches the acoustic resonance of a small air bladder in the larva, causing it to vibrate and destroy the surrounding tissue. A speaker towed behind a boat is enough to clear an area about 25 m across, they claim.
Agilent Technologies has revealed an infrared transceiver that combines IrDA (Infrared Data Association) compatibility with infrared remote control operation. The HSDL-3002 allows manufacturers to enable consumers to use handheld PDAs and mobile phones to activate and control, at a distance of up to 6 m, consumer appliances and almost anything else using an infrared remote control. It offers an extended IrDA short-range link distance of up to 50 cm compared to the standard IrDA low power specification of 20-30 cm says Agilent.
Altera has introduced the Cyclone FPGA, built from the ground up with low cost in mind. Claimed to be the industry's lowest-cost FPGA family, the company says that they are the first FPGAs that offer the right density, features, and performance to rival ASICs for high-volume applications. The stripped down devices are priced as low as $1,50 per 1000 logic elements (LEs) - half the cost of competing low-cost FPGAs claims the manufacturer.
ON Semiconductor's new NL17SZ74US is a full-function, edge-triggered, single D flip-flop in a tiny 2,1 x 3,0 mm package capable of toggling at speeds greater than 200 MHz. With full SET, CLEAR, Q, QBAR and CLOCK pins, the device is usable as either a divide-by-2 or storage element. The company says it designed the device as a full-featured product rather than a limited functionality device in order to provide design flexibility for its customers.
UK-based signal processing specialist RF Engines launched a radical new patented filter bank design, called tuneable pipelined frequency transform (TPFT), at the Communications Design Conference in San Jose. TPFT allows the user to dynamically select sections of spectrum (channels) of differing bandwidths, from a broad band of spectrum, and to acquire and process these channels in real-time. The design, moreover, disregards the processing of those sections of spectrum that are not of interest, so improving the silicon efficiency even further, according to the company. The TPFT is targeted at a range of applications where reconfigurable front ends are required, from wideband multistandard receivers eg satellite earth station receivers, base station receivers, reconfigurable radio systems through to instrumentation.
Casio is developing miniature fuel cells for portable equipment such as PDAs, pocket TVs and laptop PCs. It claims its 'micro reactor' design is unique. It uses a silicon device which reforms methanol and water to produce hydrogen gas in the presence of catalyst with 98% efficiency, according to Casio. The electric energy is generated from the hydrogen through a generating cell. Pictured is Casio's Cassiopeia FIVA laptop which can run continuously for more than 20 hours.
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