Overseas
Companies
ST-Ericsson announced the signature of a definitive agreement to sell the assets and intellectual property rights associated with its mobile connectivity GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) business to Intel. The deal will reduce ST-Ericsson’s cash needs by approximately $90 million and will see a team of 130 industry veterans located in Daventry (UK), Bangalore (India) and Singapore joining Intel.
Juki, Sony and Sony EMCS have concluded a formal agreement to integrate their SMT equipment and related businesses under Juki Automation Systems, which is planned to be established by Juki on 1 August 2013, as a joint venture company. It is planned that Juki will hold a capital contribution ratio of about 81% in the joint venture company, while Sony EMCS will hold about 19%.
Peregrine Semiconductor has signed a collaborative agreement with Murata on a multi-sourcing arrangement for RF switches based on Peregrine’s proprietary UltraCMOS technology. Under the agreement, Murata agrees to source a majority of its RF switching requirements from Peregrine in exchange for being granted a licence to purchase or manufacture RF CMOS switches utilising Peregrine’s technology and intellectual property (IP).
Silicon Labs is poised to acquire Energy Micro, a late-stage privately held company offering low-power 32-bit microcontrollers and multi-protocol wireless RF solutions based on the ARM Cortex-M architecture. Although the companies did not reveal the purchase price, the deal is rumoured to be worth $115 million in cash up front with an additional $55 million upon certain conditions being met.
Microchip Technology, through its Silicon Storage Technology subsidiary, will acquire Novocell Semiconductor, a supplier of non-volatile-memory (NVM) intellectual property (IP) solutions. At the time of writing, the transaction (the terms of which were not disclosed) was expected to close in early June 2013.
Industry
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $23,62 billion for the month of April 2013, a 0,6% increase from the previous month but down slightly from the April 2012 total of $24,06 billion. The SIA further projects that sales will reach $297,8 billion in 2013, a 2,1% increase from the 2012 sales total, and predicts 5,1% growth globally for 2014 and 3,8% growth for 2015.
LTE-capable networks will continue to mushroom around the globe through 2018, according to ABI Research. In particular, frequency-division duplex (FDD) networks will see their population coverage expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 33% between 2012 and 2018 to hit 57%. Time-division duplex (TDD) networks will gain ground at a more rapid rate of 43% during this period but will only reach 52% population coverage due to fewer licensed markets currently. Concerning spectrum, about three quarters of recent and upcoming auctions grant the rights to deploy 4G networks. Of these, 29% involve 2600 MHz, 25% 800 MHz and 22% 1800 MHz, making these three bands the most popular.
Demand for flexible displays is set to undergo massive growth during the next seven years, with a broad variety of applications – ranging from smartphones to giant screens mounted on buildings – driving a nearly 250 times expansion in shipments from 2013 through 2020. Global shipments of flexible displays are projected to soar to 792 million units in 2020, up from 3,2 million in 2013, according to a new IHS report. Market revenue will rise to $41,3 billion, up from just $100 000 during the same period.
IMS Research is predicting strong growth for the power measurement hardware market, with global revenues amounting to more than $4,2 billion cumulatively over the next five years. Factors driving this growth will include increased electricity use, energy efficiency initiatives, government mandates, more knowledge among building professionals on the benefits of submetering and the increased adoption of system-level control schemes – including building automation and energy-management systems. Submeters accounted for 65% of global metering revenues in 2012 and are forecast to grow faster than meters with power quality.
Technology
Scientists have developed a technique to enable light beams to travel four times as far down an optical fibre than is possible under normal conditions. The solution is based on a concept similar to that used in noise-cancelling headphones, to transmit a pair of light beams instead of just one, with each beam a mirror image of the other. These beams are then recombined at the receiving end to cancel out optical noise. The technique has been demonstrated to successfully transmit signals at 400 Gbps over a distance of 12 800 km.
Altera will next year start rolling out FPGAs based on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process and TSMC’s 20 nm process. The 14 nm-based Stratix 10 FPGAs and SOCs will feature more than four million logic elements (LEs) on a single die, 56 Gbps transceivers and more than 10-TeraFLOPs single-precision digital signal processing. The 20 nm-based Arria 10 devices will pack a 1,5 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and 28 Gbps transceivers.
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