Southern Africa
Ingram Micro, a global technology distributor and the MB Technologies Group, a South African supplier of IT products, have announced they are joining forces in a partnership that will see the first Ingram Micro office opening in Africa on 1 June. The new Ingram Micro South Africa subsidiary will distribute IT components products to VARs, system integrators and OEM customers into the broad sub-Saharan territory.
Electronic research and development house, NetShield SA, is gearing up for a major thrust into Africa following the acquisition by IT systems and communications distributor Comztek of an additional stake in the company. NetShield specialises in optical transmission (fibre and free space), computer networks, video networks, data- and telecommunications. The company said that with this investment it will be well placed to leverage Comztek's presence in southern, central, east and west Africa to deliver products into those markets and potentially, into other regions.
austriamicrosystems, the Unterpremstätten, Austria-based designer and manufacturer of high-performance analog IC, is now locally represented in South Africa by ASIC Design Services, Future Electronics and NuVision Electronics.
Due to expansion, Osiris Technical Systems has moved to 274 Venter Street, Capital Park, Pretoria. New numbers are: tel 0861-OSIRIS, fax 086 503 2095.
CST Electronics, which recently moved to Linbro Business Park, Sandton, has received its new phone lines: tel +27 (0)11 608 0070, fax +27 (0)11 608 0401.
Overseas
Business
CSR has announced its 2006 financial results with the company showing revenues for the year up 45% to $704,7m ($486,5m in 2005) and operating profits up 33% to $149,0m ($111,9m in 2005). CSR said more than 50% of the company's revenue in 2006 came from noncellular business and prominent design wins included Sony's Playstation 3 (CSR's FastStream Bluetooth technology), Motorola S9 stereo headset, the Sony Ericsson MBR100 music receiver, a Samsung Plasma TV, and Samsung's Yepp T9 MP3 player.
Companies
Leadis Technology, a developer of display driver ICs, has acqured Mondowave, an analog semiconductor company specialising in low-power consumer audio applications.
Picolight, an optical communications components developer, is being acquired by JDSU for $115m.
Cypress Semiconductor has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its image sensor unit, SMaL Camera Technologies, to Sensata Technologies. SMaL Camera provides cameras and camera subsystems for automotive advanced driver assistance systems.
Mosaid Technologies has signed an agreement to sell certain assets of its System division's automatic test equipment (ATE) business to Teradyne for $20m.
Dover has announced that its Dover Electronics subsidiary has completed the acquisition of Pole/Zero. Pole/Zero is a leader in innovative RF interference mitigation products used primarily in airborne and naval defence communications applications.
Fairchild Semiconductor has announced the successful completion by one of its wholly owned subsidiaries to acquire 95,59% of System General's outstanding shares. The company intends to acquire the remaining of System General shares through a share swap and merger, provided that certain conditions are met. Both companies' managements will work together to combine their power conversion businesses and form a single business unit targeting worldwide AC/DC offline power conversion applications.
RF Monolithics (RFMI) is restructuring its components business. It said it will complete the process of outsourcing all its manufacturing and become fabless. The company expects to increase its profitability by leveraging existing lower-cost contract manufacturing relationships. This will enable it to increase its focus on the wireless solutions business.
The Spectrum Electronics Group has established a new business called Silicon Design, to spearhead IntellaSys' penetration of the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets. IntellaSys develops distributed digital media semiconductor solutions via three major product brands: SEAforth multicore processors, Indigita content secure connectivity devices and OnSpec secure storage controllers. Silicon Design is based in the UK.
C-Mac MicroTechnology has been selected as a partner in the MEMS Application for Defence (MEAD) consortium, led by Qinetiq. The MEAD consortium will develop microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology for the UK defence industry in a MoD-backed project, with GBP 3,2m of funding over three years. C-Mac will provide the MEAD consortium with high reliability hermetic packaging for the delicate MEMS devices, protecting them from environmental contamination and ensuring their integrity in the harsh environments in which they will operate.
Arrowhead Research has announced that its subsidiary, Aonex Technologies, has entered into a collaborative agreement with Kyma Technologies to develop materials to reduce the cost of gallium nitride (GaN)-based devices such as blue laser diodes and blue light-emitting diodes. Competing next-generation DVD formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, both rely on blue laser diodes, but manufacturing them is difficult and costly.
Industry
Semiconductors sales in January totalled $21,47 bn in January, up 9,2% on the corresponding month in 2006, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association's three-month average. However, this represents a seasonal decline of 1,2% from the $21,74 bn reported in December. The SIA said that its forecast for mobile phones unit growth in the 10 to 15% range for 2007 appears to be realistic, which will drive more than $40 bn of semiconductor demand. DRAMs sales led the industry both in total sales and in year-on-year growth in January, said the SIA.
Gartner has lowered its forecast for the overall IC market in 2007. The research firm has cut its forecast from 9,2% to 6,4% for this year, due to soft market conditions and excess inventories.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has approved the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance's HomePNA 3.1 multimedia networking specification as a standard, making this currently the only internationally standardised home networking technology. This upgraded specification supports data rates up to a combined 320 Mbps over two simultaneous channels, up from 128 Mbps over a single channel from the alliance's previous specification.
The US Department of Defense is investing $41,2m in universities to help purchase laboratory equipment needed for military-related research. The DoD's Defense University Research Instrumentation Program is designed to address problems researchers confront in purchasing expensive equipment under research contracts or grant programs.
Major high-tech manufacturers, including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell, Ericsson, Philips and Cisco Systems, have joined a UN initiative to standardise recycling processes globally and harmonise world legislative and policy approaches to 'e-scrap' (electrical and electronic scrap). Additional goals of the 'Solving the E-Waste Problem' (StEP) initiative are to harvest valuable components in e-scrap and extend the life of products and markets for their re-use. The StEP initiative was formally launched on 7 March. StEP is expected to introduce a logo to indicate which equipment has been produced using its standards and guidelines.
The IET (The Institution of Engineering and Technology), Europe's biggest engineering Institution, and the British Sub Aqua Club (BSAC), have challenged engineers to design and create a tracking device for divers who get into difficulties at sea. The DiveTrack competition was set up in memory of Penny Glover, a diver and a satellite communications engineer, who died in a tragic diving accident. Her body was only discovered after seven weeks. The aim of the competition is to develop and manufacture a simple and inexpensive device that will ensure divers can be easily found. The device should be able to be worn by the diver and used to communicate from depths of up to 200 metres, with a range of 400 metres. See www.bsac.org/page/631/divetrack-competition.htm
"The next 25 years of digital signal processing technology will literally integrate hundreds of processors on a single chip to conceive applications beyond our imagination," said Mike Hames, senior vice president of Texas Instruments, speaking at the 5th annual Texas Instruments Developer Conference. In 1982, the world saw the first successful digital signal processor (DSP) - TI's TMS320C10. According to Forward Concepts, almost 10 billion DSPs have shipped since this first DSP was introduced, and TI has shipped half that number. Hames said that the potential for the next 25 years of digital signal processing is profound, as are the challenges it lays out for the industry.
Technology
Fractus, a pioneer of fractal antenna technology, has launched a 2,4 GHz ISM band antenna that is says is the size of a grain of rice. The 3,7 mm by 2 mm antenna is intended for use in Bluetooth and mobile handsets.
Techno Mathematical of Tokyo claims to have developed the industry's first H.264/MPEG-4 intellectual-property core to offer a one-chip encoder/decoder LSI solution. The High Profile core features high-definition (1920 x 1080i) image compression and decompression.
Texas Instruments has rolled out version 3.3 of its Code Composer Studio Platinum integrated development environment (IDE). The company claims this version raises multiprocessor support and analysis features to a higher level to meet the evolving needs of embedded system development. Version 3.3 is designed to meet the needs of increasingly complex DSP embedded systems that use multiple processors and run very large programs, often with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, according to the company.
Freescale Semiconductor is launching a version of its MSC8144 StarCore DSP that has a code-protection mechanism on-chip. The key for the encryption is distributed throughout logic blocks on the chip, so that code cannot be accessed by any type of I/O, either serial ports such as RapidIO and PCI Express, or scan pads using JTAG, according to the company. The feature will help OEMs protect system-level code in such applications as Internet Protocol multimedia subsystems and basestations.
LifeWave, an Israel-based startup, has developed a medical device it claims can treat chronic wounds such as bed sores, pressure ulcers, and diabetic ulcers, by electrically stimulating tissues around the wound. The LifeWave BST (Bed Sore Treatment) includes a pair of electrodes that are placed on the skin adjacent to the affected area. The company says that an electrical signal is delivered that mimics the electrical activity of a ‘normal wound’ and this accelerates the healing rate.
Researchers claim to have crafted transistors that are just one atom-thick and less than 50 atoms wide from a new class of material. Using the world's thinnest material to create the world's smallest transistor, physicists at the University of Manchester believe this innovation will allow the rapid miniaturisation of electronics to continue when silicon-based technology runs out of steam. The substance, dubbed graphene, can be described as a two-dimensional crystal - a single sheet of atoms. Graphene behaves as if the electrical current is not carried by normal electrons, but by charged particles with no mass at all: when at rest they are like photons of light but carry electric charge.
TeraVicta Technologies has developed what it claims is the world's fastest MEMS switch. The 26,5 GHz, single-pole, double-throw switch measures 3,25 by 4,5 by 1,25 mm and is aimed at digital television, satellite communications and phased-radar applications. TeraVicta introduced a 7 GHz MEMS switch last year, targeting ATE and RF wireless applications.
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