Financial
• It was reported that the South African manufacturing industry experienced a 5,2% downturn in production in February 2023, when compared to the same period in 2022. Of the contributing factors to this decrease, the rampant loadshedding that the country has been experiencing unsurprisingly tops the list.
• IT industry leaders have expressed concern about the recent collapse in the value of the Rand. In the second week in May, the Rand fell to a low of under R19,47 against the US dollar (a level that has not been seen since 2020), following the explosive accusation that South Africa supplied weapons and ammunition to Russia in its fight against Ukraine. This exchange rate will have a knock-on effect for all IT and manufacturing as there is very little buffer in the supply chain to absorb this shock.
• Globally, the revenue decline of the top ten IC design companies increased to almost 10% in Q4 2022, with the decline expected to continue into Q1 2023.
• TrendForce has reported that adverse factors such as weak overall consumption, restrictions from China, and the slowdown of corporate IT spending have contributed towards the decrease in revenue of the world’s top ten IC design houses, leading to a QoQ decline of 9,2%, or approximately $34 billion.
• Since March, silicon producers have been actively trying to increase shipments in order to alleviate inventory pressure. Meanwhile, production capacity of silicon continues to expand while silicon wafer makers struggle to absorb excess inventory. This has led to a gradual and persistent decline in silicon prices. TrendForce has predicted that silicon prices will continue to fall in May, and have reported that the standard DRAM and NAND Flash prices are expected to fall further in 2Q 2023 by around 13% due to high inventory levels.
• The company has also reported that the mass production of new server platforms is imminent. However, recent market reports have indicated a PMIC compatibility issue for server DDR5 RDIMMs; DRAM suppliers and PMIC vendors are working to address the problem. This is likely to lead to two effects. Firstly, DRAM suppliers will temporarily procure more PMICs from Monolithic Power Systems which supplies PMICs without issue. Second, supply will inevitably be affected in the short term as current DDR5 server DRAM production still uses older processes.
• Meanwhile, the rapid popularity of conversational AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard has driven up demand for AI server shipments. This has led to an increase in demand for high-capacity RDIMMs in early Q2 2023, and moving production talks towards high-bandwidth memory.
• The average selling price of battery-grade lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide saw a MoM decline in April. However, lithium salt prices have begun to show signs of stabilisation and rebounded in late April. Additionally, prices of lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6) – a key raw material used in electrolytes – have recently started to rise again; prices of anode materials, iron phosphate, and lithium battery copper foil have almost bottomed out, and China’s EV battery industry chain is gradually stabilising.
Companies
• Ams OSRAM has released its first quarter results and sees continued subdued demand trends in the second quarter. The company’s Q1 2023 revenues totalled €927 million, a decrease of 26% YoY. The company has an expected second quarter revenue of €800 million to €900 million.
• Gravitricity, the energy storage company which is developing below ground gravity energy storage systems, is set to enter the US market as the Biden administration has made $450 million available for clean energy projects. These projects are directed at the site of current or former coal mines as part of an effort to combat climate change.
• Microchip Technology has recently announced plans to invest $880 million to expand its silicon carbide (SiC) and silicon production capacity at its Colarado Springs manufacturing facility over the next several years. This is in response to the surge in automotive/E-mobility, grid infrastructure, green energy, and aerospace and defence applications.
• As part of the authoring team, Samtec engineers Istvan Novak and Gustavo Blando have been announced as winners of the DesignCon 2023 Best Paper Award. The paper titled ‘Connection artifacts in PDN Measurements’ analyses via and trace coupling effects using hybrid and full-wave solvers. In the project detailed in the paper, more sophisticated DUT boards were also used to analyse the parasitic probe-via coupling in two-port shunt-through transfer impedance PDN measurements. Robert Branson, signal integrity engineer at Samtec, the lead author on ‘Cascaded vs End-to-End Multi-Pin Interconnect Simulation Models’ was also honoured as a finalist for his paper.
• Yamaha Motor Company has announced its establishment of a new company in Singapore aimed at expanding its robotics business. The new company, named Yamaha Robotics Solutions, will specialise in the surface mounted and industrial robot fields.
• Avnet Abacus has announced it is adding, with immediate effect, the ERNI range of products from TE Connectivity. The ERNI Group, which was acquired by TE in 2021, has built up a large portfolio of high-speed and fine-pitch connectors for factory automation, automotive, medical and other industrial applications, which include robust devices suitable for deployment in harsh environments.
• SK hynix had planned to transition its Wuxi fab’s mainstream process from 1Y nm to 1Z nm, decreasing the output of legacy processes. However, due to limitations imposed by the US ban which came into effect in October 2022, the company instead opted to increase the share of its 21 nm production lines, focusing on DDR3 and DDR4 4Gb products. SK hynix’s long-term strategy involves shifting its capacity expansion back to South Korea, while the Wuxi fab caters to domestic demand in China and the legacy-process consumer DRAM market.
• In a bizarre news story, Eskom has won its high court case against a private company Rural Maintenance, preventing them from continuing to supply the rural town of Frankfort with solar-generated power to ‘void’ the implementation of loadshedding. The company has been supplying power to the Mafube Municipality in the local town of Frankfort in the Free State, effectively allowing them to reduce the severity of loadshedding imposed by Eskom. “Rural now has no alternative but to switch off portions of the sunfarm during the day as from Friday, 21 April 2023, allowing readily available capacity to go to waste,” the company said .
Technologies
• According to IoT analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of smart homes in Europe and North America reached 120,5 million in 2022. The North American market grew by 12% during this period. The most popular smart home products include thermostats, light bulbs, security cameras, door locks, smart plugs, and speakers.
• NeoCortec, manufacturer of ultra-low-power bi-directional wireless mesh network modules, has extended its NeoGateway software with a new network management tool. The network management tool automatically monitors the health of the deployed NeoMesh wireless sensor networks. It regularly checks parameters such as network integrity, routing paths, battery level, and node temperature. If pre-set limits are exceeded, the monitoring tool will automatically trigger an alarm, allowing the problem to be checked and corrected.
• Microchip has demonstrated its new e-Fuse designed for battery electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles. Enabled by silicon carbide (SiC) technology, the e-Fuse is available in six variants for battery systems from 400 to 800 V and up to 30 A. The e-Fuse demonstrator is capable of detecting and interrupting fault currents in microseconds, up to 500 times faster than traditional mechanical approaches. The fast response time substantially reduces peak short-circuit currents from tens of kilo-amps to hundreds of amps, which can prevent a fault event from resulting in a hard failure.
• Power Integrations has introduced the SCALE-iFlex LT NTC family of IGBT/SiC module gate drivers. The new gate drivers target the popular new dual, 100 x 140 mm style of IGBT modules, such as the Mitsubishi LV100 and the Infineon XHP 2, and silicon carbide (SiC) variants thereof, up to 2300 V blocking voltage. The SCALE-iFlex LT NTC drivers provide Negative Temperature Coefficient (NTC) data – an isolated temperature measurement of the power module – which enables accurate thermal management of converter systems. This is particularly important for systems with multiple modules arrayed in parallel, ensuring proper current sharing and dramatically enhancing overall system reliability.
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