Electronics News
Personal computer assembler and distributor Mustek has announced it is acquiring a 34,2% stake in subsidiary Rectron for about R97m.
Altech and Giesecke & Devrient (G&D), a German smartcard company, have concluded an agreement whereby Altech has acquired G&D's minority interest in Altech NamITech. Altech now owns an effective 72% of Altech Namitech, while Pamodzi, the empowerment partner, retains its shareholding amounting to 28%.
PHD Powerhouse has been appointed as an authorised stocking distributor for IXYS and Westcode Semiconductors in the South African market.
ANSYS Integrated Systems has signed an agreement with Westinghouse Rail Systems Australia (WRSA), giving ANSYS exclusive rights to distribute its key railway signalling and control technologies. WRSA is part of the global Invensys Rail Group and is a world leader in railway signalling, train control and integrated management solutions. The distribution agreement also gives ANSYS access to signalling and control technologies from other members of the Invensys Rail Group, including Safetran Systems in the USA, Westinghouse Rail Systems in the UK and Dimetronic in Spain.
Trinity Telecomms has landed two new distribution agreements. The one is with Coronis Systems, a France-based designer and developer of ultra-low-power and short-range wireless solutions, and the other with EBS for its ActiveGuard Guard Touring Solution. EBS is a Polish producer of electronic security devices. Coronis is the developer of the Wavenis short-range wireless connectivity technology.
Actum Electronics has announced its expansion into the supply and distribution of RF coaxial cable and connectors.
Test & Rework Solutions has its new website up at www.testandrework.co.za.
Overseas
Business
Texas Instruments has narrowed its expected ranges for Q1 semiconductor revenue and expects them to be between $3,01 bn and $3,14 bn, compared to its prior range of between $2,95 bn to $3,20 bn.
Companies
Matsushita has accepted a bid by Texas Pacific Group (TPG) to purchase its JVC subsidiary.
Premier Farnell has announced that it is selling BuckHickman InOne to the BSS Group for approximately £27m. The distributor said that the sale is consistent with its strategy to focus on the faster-growing electronic design engineer market.
LED lighting company, Cree, has announced an agreement to acquire Cotco Luminant Device, headquartered in Hong Kong, for approximately $200m. The acquisition will provide Cree with strategic access to the fast-growing solid-state lighting market as well as provide Cree with a low-cost manufacturing platform.
Sanyo Electric is expected to sell off its semiconductor business as part of a restructuring plan, according to reports. Sanyo spun off its semiconductor operation into a separate independent company named Sanyo Semiconductor last July.
Infineon Technologies and Hyundai Motor Company, announced a strategic cooperation for the development of automotive electronics at the opening of the new Hyundai Infineon Innovation Center (HIIC) in Seoul. Infineon will partner in developing automotive electronic system solutions for the Hyundai and Kia vehicles.
Motorola has invested an undisclosed amount in wireless chip developer Amimon (Herzlia, Israel). Amimon's wireless high-definition interface technology is designed to deliver uncompressed HD video streams between a video source (such as a set-top box) and a high-definition TV. It operates in the unlicensed 5 GHz band.
Wireless Biodevices, a University of Glasgow spinoff, has received a £400 000 investment from IP Group. Wireless Biodevices is commercialising wireless sensor technology that can be deployed in a swallowable pill for use in medical diagnostics.
Industry
Semico Research has lowered its forecast for semiconductor growth in 2007, due to falling capacity utilisation. The company's outlook on semiconductor growth has been revised down to 5,8% for 2007 from 7% previously.
Robust short-term growth projections for the video surveillance camera market represents a big growth opportunity for chip suppliers. This will propel a major shift in semiconductor revenue, according to research firm iSuppli. Unit shipments of video surveillance equipment are expected to more than double from 29,8 million in 2006 to 65,7 million in 2011, a 17,1%. The firm projects the market for surveillance-camera chips will hit $1,25 bn in 2011, more than double the $525m in 2006.
DisplaySearch reported that the notebook PC market grew 27,7% Y/Y to 78 802 million units. For Q4 HP once again took the top spot with shipments of just under 4,7 million units to capture 20% share of the notebook PC market. Dell trailed HP with 3,5 million units and 15% market share. Number three spot saw Acer, whose notebook PC shipments swelled 29% for the quarter to 3,1 million units, giving it 13,3% share.
Leading chip supplier Intel suffered an 11,1% revenue decline in 2006 while smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) nearly doubled its sales, according to a final 2006 market share ranking released by market analyst iSuppli. "The revenue decline, which was due to Intel's bleak performance in its core PC microprocessor and flash-memory businesses, erased nearly all of the company's sales gains from its strong year in 2005. Intel's 2006 revenue of $31,5 bn was less than half a percentage point higher than its sales in 2004," said Dale Ford, iSuppli's vice president of market intelligence. As the result of a 91,6% increase in revenue - due in part to AMD's acquisition of ATI - AMD surged from 15th to 8th on iSuppli's list of the top 25 chip suppliers for 2006, said iSuppli. The analyst group said that overall, global semiconductor industry revenue rose by 9,3% to reach $260,2 bn, up from $237,98 bn in 2005.
Altera has announced that its structured ASIC design flow has been certified by the US government as complying with US arms control rules. Altera's HardCopy II design and manufacturing flow complies with the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ITAR regulates the import and export of US military goods and information, assuring that only US personnel working for US companies are aware of any of the designs generated by Altera customers.
The WiMedia Alliance's ultra-wideband 'standard' is now an official standard following the ISO and IEC having approved for release, the ECMA International organisation's common radio platform as ISO/IEC 26907. The standard specifies the distributed medium access control (MAC) sublayer and a physical layer (PHY) for wireless networks. The ECMA-369 standard was also approved as ISO/IEC 26908 and specified the MAC-PHY interface for a high rate, ultra-wideband wireless transceivers. The standard covers transceivers communicating data at 480 Mbps that operate in the UWB spectrum of 3,1 to 10,6 GHz.
NXP Semiconductors has announced it will close its manufacturing facility in Boeblingen, Germany, by the end of the year.
Nanoident Technologies has opened a production fab for printed organic semiconductors in Linz, Austria, which it says is the world's first. Initially the company will focus on sensors for life sciences, industrial and security applications.
Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a government-backed R&D organisation has inaugurated Taiwan's first flexible electronics pilot laboratory. The lab will be devoted to the research and development of flexible electronics and will be open for international cooperation, said ITRI.
Technology
Intel has expanded its line of Xeon quad-core processors with the introduction of two new energy-efficient chips. The 50 W L5320 and L5310 operate at 1,86 GHz and 1,60 GHz, respectively and feature 8 MB of on-die cache for faster memory data communication. The chips run on dedicated 1066 MHz front side buses.
Cree has announced that it has managed to increase the brightness and efficiency of its XLamp XR-E and XLamp XR-C white light-emitting diodes by more than 20%, enough to make them suitable for indoor 'warm white' lighting applications. Cree said that it can also drive these white LEDs into the 700 mA range, allowing them to produce about 142 lumens of brightness.
A supercomputer invented in Scotland that uses FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) as an alternative to conventional microprocessors, has been launched. The supercomputer, dubbed 'Maxwell,' was designed and manufactured by Nallatech and Alpha Data and built at the University of Edinburgh. It uses FPGAs provided by Xilinx. According to the group, the system provides unprecedented computing power in relation to energy costs and it anticipates that it could usher in a new generation of compact and energy-saving computers over the coming decade.
EM-SEC Technologies has developed a radio-frequency blocking paint for buildings to protect wireless data against hackers. Its EM-SEC coating reflects wireless signals, blocking electromagnetic interference and reducing the threat of electronic eavesdropping.
Sharp claims to have developed the highest power laser diode thus far, at 210 mW. The company's GH04P21A2G is a blue-violet 406 nm laser diode with 210 mW of optical power output in pulsed operation. It has a 10 000-hour lifetime at 75°C. The device will enable high-speed 6X recording on next-generation dual-layer Blu-ray Discs and HD-DVDs, said Sharp.
Intel has announced its entry into the solid-state drive business with a new NAND-based solid-state device. The Intel Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive with USB interfaces comes in 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB densities. Its read speeds are 28 MB per second and write speeds are 20 MB per second.
UniPixel Displays has developed novel display technology that it reckons will outperform OLED, plasma and LCD technology in every measurable dimension: it will provide a brighter, more intense image with higher contrast and more colour, while consuming less than one tenth of the energy. Traditional displays use three closely-spaced dots displaying different intensities of red, green and blue to create one colour, which the eye perceives as a single colour - 'spatial additive colour.' UniPixel's time multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) technology is based on 'temporal additive colour,' where short bursts of red, green and blue light are emitted through the same dot so quickly that the eye also sees them as a single colour. But in this case, different durations of colour create different shades and hues. The technology is also claimed to be simpler in construction than an LCD.
Taoglas has launched a new range of miniature antenna systems for the telematics market, including what it claims is the world's smallest active GPS antenna. The AP12-A is 13 mm square and has 26 dB gain.
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