Southern Africa
Tellumat has announced that it will target the rapidly growing US market for wireless communications technology through a new distribution agreement with Hutton Communications of Dallas, one of the largest wireless communications equipment distributors in North America. According to Ian Masson, Managing Director of Tellumat's microwave division, recent research indicated that by next year corporate organisations would be spending 20-30% of their telecommunications budget on wireless technology and worldwide wireless voice usage would exceed that of wired telephony in 2003 and 2004. Masson said that Tellumat's locally developed MDR series of digital microwave radios were typically used by telecommunications companies, cellular operators and private carriers, with applications ranging through to internet and video surveillance data. The agreement with Hutton followed interest from North and South American parties when the radios were shown at an international expo in San Francisco earlier this year.
VELOCIT-e has signed a contract that will see it become the southern African distributor for UK-based XN Corporation, a solutions provider to the retail and hospitality industry. XN Corporation is based in the UK and offers a portfolio of products and services, including the latest radio technologies and multitouch screen terminals - as well as what it claims is the world's first dual-touchscreen POS terminal, dubbed the XN 500.
Cellexpo Africa, the annual cellular and pocket computing exhibition is now a wholly-owned event of Reed Exhibitions SA (RESA). The South African rights to Cellexpo were bought from UK company, Trident Exhibitions, for an undisclosed amount.
Bryanston-based TLC Software has announced the signing of a strategic partnership agreement with LeQ (Leader Enterprise Intelligence), a global solutions provider via Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. LeQ is currently engaged in a process of consolidating its global business operation in sub-Saharan Africa. LeQ has also formed a partnership with Geospace, an SA-based geographical information systems company and the local developers of digital mapping platforms, which interface with generic web-based back-office software. LeQ has also announced partnership agreements with a global security service company, and with Orbcomm Maghreb, the national licence holder for Orbcomm low-earth satellite constellations for Morocco, Tunisia, Mauritania, Algeria and Libya.
Fleet management and information technology company, DigiCore Holdings has received the Vehicle Security Association of South Africa (VESA) award for 'Outstanding product innovation and loss reduction in fleet management'. Digicore said it clinched the prestigious award with its C-Track 12 /24 GPS and GSM product. Digicore's C-Track is a satellite tracking and fleet management system which has attained success in the local market as well as abroad.
Yebo Electronics has announced that as of 1 September it formally broke all links with Maplin in the UK and ceased trading as Maplin South Africa. It is now trading as Yebo Electronics. with new online website at www.fort777.co.za
Overseas
Business
Molex has reported record revenues for its first fiscal quarter ended 30 September 2000. Revenues of $625,9m increased 27,3% from last year's first quarter of $491,9m, while net income of $64,5m increased 41,8% from last year's first quarter of $45,5m, said the company. Net return on sales for the first quarter was 10,3% compared with 9,2% for the same quarter a year ago. The company said that currency translation decreased revenue by $8,3m due primarily to the decline in the value of the Euro. Research and development expenditures for the first quarter were $36,5m, compared with $32,3m for the same period last year, said Molex.
STMicroelectronics reported record sales of $2,04bn in the third quarter ended 30 September, up 60,3% from $1,3 bn in the like period a year ago. Net income also reached a record of $415,3m, a 206,9% jump over the $135,3m reported for the last year. ST said that sales to each of its end markets - namely automotive, consumer, computer, telecom, and industrial - increased in the third quarter, with telecom and industrial including smartcards, posting sequential gains of 15,3% and 20,3%, respectively. ST is confident for 2001 and said that it is positioned to grow faster than the overall semiconductor market.
International Rectifier has reported revenues grew 64% to $249,4m in the company's fiscal first quarter, ended 30 September compared to $152,2m in the period last year. Net income reached a record $42,1m in the quarter compared to $5,1m in the period a year ago, said the power semiconductor maker. Sales of analog power ICs, advanced-circuit devices, and power systems surged 142% in the quarter, it said. For fiscal 2000, ended 30 June, IR posted revenues of $753,3m and a net income of $68,3m.
Intersil reported a 63% increase in sales of $218,6m for its third quarter ended 29 September versus $133,9m a year ago. The company said net income was $19,1m, compared to a loss of $23,2m a year ago. Intersil attributed the results to strong demand for its communications chip lines, especially its Prism line of wireless networking chips, which accounted for more than 20% of total Intersil revenues during the quarter.
Texas Instruments reported its semiconductor sales grew 29% to $2,7bn in the third quarter compared to $2,1bn in the same period last year. For the TI group, revenues were up 25% to $3,1bn from $2,5bn last year, including sales of calculators, materials and controls components. In the third quarter, TI's semiconductor sales grew 8% sequentially due to strong demand for digital signal processors and analog devices. TI said its DSP revenues were up 36% in the third quarter from sales in the period last year. Sequentially, TI said wireless chip revenues were up 37% from a year ago in the quarter and 2% sequentially from the second quarter.
Altera posted record sales of $395,4m for its third quarter ended 30 September, an 84% jump over last year's third quarter figure of $215,1m. The company also reported a net of $118m for the period, a 112% increase over the $55,7m posted in the like period a year ago. The company said that its growth continues to be led by customers in the communications market.
National Semiconductor has issued a sales and profits warning. The company announced that sales and earnings for its second fiscal quarter of 2001, ending 26 November 2000, and third period, ending 25 February 2001, may be below those of the recently completed first quarter. National said it expects second quarter sales to decline between 6-8% from the first quarter but to resume sequential growth in the third quarter.
Analog-chip maker Linear Technology has reported sales of $232,1m in its first fiscal quarter ended 1 October, an increase of 57% over the $147,5m figure posted in the like period a year ago. The company also reported a net of $102,2m in the quarter, an increase of 75% over $58,5m posted for the year ago period.
Programmable logic device supplier Xilinx has reported a net of $114,1m, for its second fiscal quarter ended 30 September, an increase of 93% from $59,2m, in the like period a year ago. Sales $437,4m in the period, an 83% jump over a year ago. Xilinx cited strong demand for its chip products in the communications sector, with the communications end market contributing a record 78% of company revenues during the second quarter.
Fairchild Semiconductor has reported sales of $476m for its third quarter ended 1 October, up 42% over $335,8m in the year ago period. Third quarter net income was $84,0m, an increase of 449% reported a year ago. The chip manufacturer said that penetration across broad electronics markets continued to serve it well.
Intel has reported sales of $8,7 bn in the third quarter ended 30 September, up 19% from a year ago. Intel's sales were up only 5% from last quarter. In the third quarter, net income, excluding acquisition-related costs, was $2,9 bn, up 52% from the same period of 1999 but down 18% sequentially, said Intel.
RF Micro Devices has reported financial results for its fiscal 2001 second quarter and six months ended 30 September, 2000. Revenues for the quarter were approximately $102,2m, an increase of 48,3% over revenues of $68,9m for the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2000 and an increase of 4,1% over the previous quarter's revenues of $98,2m. The company said the increase in revenues was attributable to demand from the handset industry along with an increase in the demand for its broadband products. Gross profit for the quarter rose 61,6% to $51,9m, versus $32,1m for the year ago period.
Atmel has reported sales of $530,4m for the third quarter ended 30 September, up 56% from $340,2m a year ago. The company attributed the results to strong demand in its flash-memory chip business. Net income was $76,5m, compared to $61,3m for the year ago.
Israeli company EZchip Technologies, a subsidiary of LanOptics, has announced it has received $22m in its second round of financing to launch its US operations and complete development of its NP-1 network-processor line. The products are for 10- (OC-192) and 40 Gbits (OC-768) applications.
Companies
The new Internet Home Alliance (IHA) consortium has been established for the emerging home-networking/automation markets. Led by Cisco, General Motors, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, and Texas Instruments, the group says it will work towards defining and developing the critical 'building blocks' to minimise barriers currently inhibiting the mass adoption of Internet-enabled services to the home. It says it will also work to facilitate communications between other consortiums and companies involved in the home-networking arenas like the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi), the Home Automation & Networking Association (HANA), the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA), and ComTIA.
Cypress Semiconductor has announced a reorganisation of its units to expand its communications focus. The company said it will split its communications chip product development efforts into four major organisations: wide-area networking (WAN), storage-area networking (SAN), wireless infrastructure, and wireless terminals. Each organisation, which will have its own profit and loss responsibilities, will define and co-develop communications-oriented chips in conjunction with the company's existing four product divisions, said Cypress. Those include the data communications, interface products, memory products, and timing technology divisions.
Hitachi and STMicroelectronics have announced an extension of their partnership in RISC processor development to next-generation 64 bit architectures for multimedia and Internet appliances for consumers. The upcoming SH-6 and SH-7 architectures will be developed for digital video camera and video telephone applications, and Internet appliances. Hitachi's embedded products will be called the SH-6 and SH-7 series, while STMicroelectronics will designate its products as the ST60 and ST70 families. According to the companies, the SH-6 will operate up to 1 GHz and deliver over 2 billion instructions per second, while the SH-7 architecture will expand on the SH-6 to provide more advanced processing performance for multimedia applications.
Mitel Semiconductor has appointed the UK arm of specialist distributor Azzurri in the UK to handle its communications products. The agreement will also cover high-performance network packet processing, switching and routing solutions from Vertex Network, now available from Mitel after its recent acquisition.
Need2Buy, an online marketplace for the electronic components industry, has announced that it has acquired Unimate Electronics, a leading Munich-based component trading and fulfillment company. This strategic acquisition provides Need2Buy with the operations infrastructure, region-specific expertise and extensive customer relationships to further drive the company's expansion in the European market, it said.
Micronas Semiconductor, Zurich, has acquired Infineon Technologies' Image and Video consumer electronics IC operations in a deal worth EUR 250 million. For the Micronas Group, the acquisition represents an investment in complementary technology and markets that will allow the company to significantly expand its expertise in the audio and video area, it said. Infineon said that the sale will allow it to more effectively concentrate resources on its core business.
Synopsys and STMicroelectronics have announced an alliance to develop and deploy advanced design-for-test software used on complex system-on-chip products. Under the alliance STMicroelectronics will help Synopsys identify new design-for-test (DFT) requirements, which will be used to enhance existing solutions. The companies said they will initially focus on improving ST's SoC design flows to speed development and more accurately predict the testability of complex SoC integrated circuits.
Philips Semiconductors has launched a new business line it calls BL-AST (Business Line ASIC Telecom) dedicated to the development of baseband ASICs for telecommunications applications. With an emphasis on CMOS baseband products, BL-AST is based in Sophia Antipolis in Southern France, with production taking place at Philips Semiconductors' San Antonio fab and engineering and testing being undertaken in San José. The company says there is currently a 50-50 revenue split between Europe and the USA, although plans are in the pipeline to develop capabilities in the Asia Pacific region.
Cambridge Positioning Systems (CPS) and Nortel Networks have signed a deal relating to mobile phone location technology for third-generation (3G) networks. Under the agreement, CPS will develop a version of its Cursor location technology, which uses time differences between the arrival of signals from base stations to estimate position. This technique avoids the use of the global positioning system (GPS). CPS reports that it can get a 50 m accuracy on 2G and expects to get down to 5 to 10 m on 3G.
Motorola has announced agreements with TEMIC, CUE, Object Technology International (an IBM subsidiary), Embedded Planet, Virtual Prototypes, and QNX Software Systems to further develop its mobileGT Java-based architecture. Initially targeted for automotive driver information systems, mobileGT is scaleable across a wide range of products for applications such as dynamic navigation, wireless connectivity, natural language speech processing, car audio, virtual dashboards etc.
As part of its plans to introduce broadband wireless networking, Intersil has announced it is to acquire wireless broadband specialist SiCOM, for approximately 3,7 million Class A shares. Broadband technology allows wireless access data rates to be increased from the present 11 Mbps to the much higher IEEE-802.16 rates of 155 Mbps and 622 Mbps to bring high rate Internet and network access to the office and home.
Peregrine Semiconductor has announced an alliance with Mini-Circuit Lab, to develop and market advanced radio-frequency components for RF basestations, based on Peregrine's Ultra-Thin Silicon (UTSi) technology. According to the company, the UTSi silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology produces Quad MOSFETs with IP3 inputs of greater than +31 dBm at 2 GHz. Under the agreement, Peregrine will ship more than one million of its Quad MOSFETs to Mini-Circuits per month, beginning November. The contract is renewable and valued at more than $10m.
Sweden's LM Ericsson has announced it will acquire US-based Microwave Power Devices, a supplier of solid-state amplifiers for microwave and radio-frequency systems, for approximately $100m. Ericsson said MPD's technology will play a key role in development of communications equipment for third-generation (3G) mobile phone networks. Ericcson says that 3G basestations use Multi Carrier Power Amplifiers (MCPA), as opposed to traditional combiners, and as such the amplifiers are vital building blocks in the 3G radio networks.
Intel and IBM have announced an alliance to co-develop telematics products for automobiles. Under the agreement, the companies intend to co-develop system-level products and reference design kits based on Intel's XScale chip technology and IBM's VisualAge Micro Edition Java application development tools. These kits will enable OEMs to develop telematics-enabled platforms for cars, said the companies. These platforms include cellular services, Internet-access, navigation, entertainment, and others.
Advanced Micro Devices and LSI Logic will jointly develop interfaces between AMD's flash memory chips and LSI's baseband processors for wireless handsets, based on the code division multiple access (CDMA) transmission standard. The companies plan to collaborate on development of multichip packages to house flash memories and the baseband processor in a 'system-in-a-package.' According to the companies this will boost handset performance and lower power consumption.
Silicon On Insulator Technologies (Soitec) and Kopin have announced a partnership whereby Soitec will apply its silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processes to Kopin's microdisplay products as well as a range of other applications. The companies say the concept is to generate 'silicon-on-anything' (SOA) capabilities by delaminating a flexible film of circuits from the top layer of wafers, using Soitec's Smart Cut technology. The companies hope to apply SOA processes to other applications such as smartcards and high-volume products that could use flexible circuits with a thickness of about one micron. This could then be layered on a plastic film for product applications.
Pixelworks and Analog Devices have announced a collaboration to combine ADI's analog and digital receiver technology with Pixelworks' ImageProcessor ICs for a single-chip solution to integrate all the functions needed to operate an LCD monitor. The new ImageProcessor chip will provide scaling technology, on-screen display (OSD) controller, on-board microprocessor, PLLs, as well as digital and analog receivers, say the companies.
Industry
Market researcher Cahners In-Stat Group has predicted that the system-on-chip, or SoC, business will exceed 1 billion units in 2004, compared to about 345 million devices last year. System-on-chip designs have generally been defined as ICs with embedded processors, memory, and other functions that make them much more complex than basic building-block semiconductors. According to the group, the definition of SoC shifts, but SoC becomes more application or customer specific because of the higher levels of integration. Communications products are the largest market segment for SoC designs, said In-Stat, but over the next several years consumer products will grow the fastest in the market, averaging an increase of 43% per year through 2004, it predicts.
The world's first Internet-based, regulated trading exchange for semiconductor intellectual property (IP), The Virtual Component Exchange (VCX), went live on the 23 October. Formed two years ago, the organisation has attracted more than 40 IP-providing member companies so far.
Marconi has announced plans to outsource the bulk of its telecoms equipment manufacturing to focus on developing products. Although Marconi says no involuntary job losses are expected, employees in the UK, US, Italy and Germany will have their jobs transferred to the as yet un-named contract manufacturing partner.
Intersil has announced that it has just celebrated shipping its two-millionth Prism II WLAN chipset, only three months after reaching its millionth shipment milestone. The company cites several factors driving increased sales of WLAN systems: lower prices driven by higher-performance, low-cost chip set technology; a global standard (IEEE-802.11) for delivering 11 Mbps wired Ethernet data rates in the home or office; and the introduction of PRISM-based wireless products by certain computer, networking and telecommunications industry giants.
Washington-based Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association's (CTIA) mid-year report has revealed that the US cellular industry grew by a healthy 27,2% in terms of total subscribers over a one-year period, with the population as a whole signing up for wireless services every 1,5 s. The average local monthly bill is currently $45,15.
AT&T Wireless has just introduced instant short text messaging for mobile phones in the US. This is the first US cellular company to offer the two-way SMS service that has become extremely popular in Europe and other parts of the world. The GSM Association has revised its year-end forecast and predicts cellphone users worldwide will send more than 15 billion short text messages per month.
Technology
Advanced Micro Devices has launched its 1,2 GHz Athlon microprocessor. According to the company, Compaq, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard are planning to offer PCs based on its 1,2 GHz Athlon. The Athlon is now available in speed grades between 1,2 GHz and 850 MHz, while AMD's Duron is shipping with speeds of 800-700 MHz.
Hitachi Semiconductor America has unveiled its H8S/2214F bluetooth controller line that combines a 16 MHz static CPU core, 128 KB of flash-memory, and 12 KB of RAM on the same device, thereby enabling developers need to meet the point-to-point performance requirements of the Bluetooth specification. The MCU's UART is capable of asynchronous serial data transfer at speeds up to 720 Kb. High-speed clock-synchronous serial data communications can be achieved by using the device's data transfer controller (DTC) and direct memory access controller (DMAC).
Oki Semiconductor has announced a new codec chip line designed to reduce the costs of cordless phones, handsets. The ML7029 codec chip utilises a single-rail, adaptive-differential pulse-code modulation (ADPCM) technology that is claimed to boost the voice quality in portable phones and wireless local loop products. The device is designed around a proprietary DSP technology. The chip utilises 8 bit registers on-board to control external speaker gain and internal tone attenuation, and has a power consumption of only 18 mW. Oki says the device has quicker sampling rates to reproduce analog voice signals up to 21 kHz.
National Semiconductor has enhanced its online engineering tool. The Webench 2.0 system includes a phase-locked loop (PLL) simulator, an enhanced power simulation tool, and a one-of-a-kind thermal analysis system for evaluating board designs with 'virtual prototyping' capabilities, according to the company. The system will help speed development of products by chip customers, as well as enable designers to fine-tune the performance of products.
Silicon Storage Technology (SST) has entered the serial-based flash-memory chip market with a line of serial peripheral interface (SPI) chips. Designed for low-power applications, the family includes three models: the SST45VF512, a 512 Kb device; the SST45VF010, a 1 Mb part, and the SST45VF020, a 2 Mb IC. The devices use a three-wire interface and are suited for small foot-print applications in the automotive, consumer, industrial, and other sectors.
Intel has announced a new flash memory product family designed for use in low-power applications. The Intel 1,8 V wireless flash memory line is offered in 32, 64, and 128 Mb densities, and power consumption of the line is claimed to be 60% lower than competitive offerings. The flash product is the newest addition to Intel's growing wireless product portfolio and complements the recently-introduced Intel Personal Internet Client Architecture - a framework designed to accelerate the development of Internet applications and wireless devices. The chip's flexible architecture allows a device to read from one partition while writing to or erasing another partition. A programming algorithm is built into the flash chip, thereby saving costs for OEMs, said Intel.
Texas Instruments' Burr-Brown operation has introduced a six-channel, simultaneous-sampling analog-to-digital converter that it claims operates at a 500 kHz sampling rate. The ADS7864 features a parallel interface with six FIFO registers. The output data for each channel is available as a 16 bit word (address and data). The ADC interfaces directly to TI's TMS320C5000 DSP processors for motor control and power monitoring applications requiring 12 bit resolution.
Claimed to be a first in the automotive electronics industry, Motorola has unveiled an embedded processor that includes 1 MB of flash EEPROM memory. The MPC565 has been designed specifically for the harsh automotive environment which requires a very rugged memory and processor technology. The device offers the high performance of a 56 MHz PowerPC core with advanced peripheral features with 1 MB flash all integrated on one chip.
Matsushita claims to have developed a new form of surround-sound headphones that overcome the lack of realism usually found with conventional designs. A working model of the Hypersurround system was shown at CEATEC in Tokyo that replicates the sound of a 5.1-channel surround-sound system on headphones. In this system the speakers are moved away from direct contact with the ears (the company refers to them as 'Nearphones'). Signal processing is applied that simulates how wavefronts of sound waves from the six speakers in a 5.1 system would arrive, as well as compensates for the masking effects caused by the listener's head, said Matsushita.
Microsoft has introduced its newest software for in-car computing devices. The third version of its Windows CE for automotive software could be used to control a variety of devices - from a simple, push-button cellular service system up to an in-dash computer that also controls video entertainment systems for passengers, said Microsoft.
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