South Africa
The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has been tasked by president Jacob Zuma to investigate irregularities with regards to the conduct of former communications minister Dina Pule and her subordinates. The main thrust of the probe will be to dig into the well publicised, alleged corruption involving the 2012 ICT Indaba and other controversial spending by the Department of Communications.
Altium recently introduced a global programme of certification for instructors and users of its development tools. Certifications can be verified online through Altium’s website, giving credibility to the user’s knowledge of the software as well the certification centre’s compliance to the company’s global standards. EDA Technologies’ Nechan Naicker was recently in Germany to undergo assessment, and became one of the first five VAR instructors to be certified in the EMEA region. EDA Technologies has been offering technical training and seminars in South Africa since 1997 and has trained over 1000 persons on various technical subjects.
Samsung has continued its national rollout of solar powered Internet schools intended to immerse children in rural areas in a technology-rich environment from an early age. The latest beneficiaries on the growing list of these installations are Hans Kekana Secondary School in the community of Hammanskraal, and Refalletse Primary School in Orange Farm.
RS Components and Allied Electronics signed an agreement with ROHM Semiconductor as authorised global distribution partners of the electronic component vendor. The distributors hold a sizeable inventory of several hundred ROHM components, which includes discrete semiconductors, power management ICs, LEDs, display drivers, optical switches, video and audio processor circuits, and sensor devices. These devices are extensively deployed in a wide array of automotive, telecommunication, computer and consumer applications.
Overseas
Business
Sierra Wireless recently celebrated the major milestone of shipping its 100 millionth connected device, spanning more than 80 networks worldwide since it developed the world’s first embedded cellular module in 1997. The company is ranked number one in the world (by ABI Research) in machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular embedded modules, and has a comprehensive portfolio of wireless M2M devices including 2G, 3G and 4G modules and gateways.
u-blox announced revenue for the first half of 2014 of CHF 121,6 million, constituting a 15,7% increase over the first half year of 2013. Net profit grew 18,4% year-on-year to CHF 14,4 million. Revenue growth of 7,6% in the EMEA region was buoyed by the company’s recent deal with South Africa’s Ctrack, a leading provider of fleet management and vehicle tracking solutions. The number of employees worldwide increased some 21,1% in this period, to reach 550.
Industry
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $28,1 billion for the month of July 2014, the industry’s highest ever monthly sales total and an increase of 9,9% over July 2013 as well as being 2,4% higher than the June 2014 total. Regionally, sales in the Americas increased by 8,1% compared to last July, while Europe posted its strongest year-over-year growth since October 2010, with14,9%.
A consortium of 15 leading telecommunications operators, vendors, research centres and academic institutions have launched MiWaveS (millimetre-wave small cell access and backhauling), a European collaborative project whose goal is to develop key radio technologies to provide multi-Gbps data rates to future 5th-generation cellular mobile networks users. The project will last for three years, with 5G technologies expected to hit the market in 2020.
Europe’s long gestating eCall initiative faces a two-year delay to its deployment, following slow uptake by the European Parliament. The deadline for implementation of the system, which would automate communication between motor vehicles and emergency services in the event of a road accident, has been pushed back from the end of 2015 to the 2017-18 window.
Siyabonga Cwele, minister of telecommunications and postal services, has committed to an end of March 2015 deadline to finalise his department’s policy on high-demand radio spectrum allocation, through cooperation with communications regulator Icasa.
Technology
Imagination, the owner of MIPS intellectual property, has developed a 64-bit CPU core based on the latest MIPS64 architecture supported by Android L. In addition to energy saving advancements, the I6400 features hardware multi-threading technology that supports up to four hardware threads per core, and is optimised to support multiple independent security contexts and execution domains.
ARM has unveiled a new 32-bit Cortex-M processor that delivers double the compute and DSP capability of today’s most powerful ARM-based MCUs. The ARM Cortex-M7 is targeted at high-end embedded applications used in next-generation vehicles, connected devices, and smart homes and factories. Early licensees of the technology include Atmel, Freescale and STMicroelectronics.
Rice University researchers have created a CMOS-compatible, biomimetic colour photodetector that directly responds to red, green and blue light in much the same way the human eye does. To capture colour images, photodetector makers must add colour filters that can separate a scene into red, green and blue components. This is commonly done off-chip using techniques which degrade under exposure to sunlight and can also be difficult to align with imaging sensors. The new method developed at Rice integrates light amplifiers and colour filters directly into pixels.
One year ago, Freescale Semiconductor secretly launched an internal incubation programme for its engineers to develop their ideas into ‘the next big thing.’ The company has now publicly taken the wraps off the Freescale Discovery Lab, whose primary goal is to nurture high-risk, high-reward offshoots of existing technologies or techniques. Since its opening, over 200 ideas have been submitted, and more than 20 employees are currently working on nine projects – two of which will be announced later this year as becoming possible Freescale products.
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