Southern Africa
Netstar, currently South Africa's and Africa's market leader in vehicle tracking and recovery company Netstar, has signed a multimillion rand licence agreement to expand its operation to Malaysia. Netstar, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Altech, has already expanded its franchise operations in southern Africa to Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland during the past two years. Following negotiations with Malaysia's largest vehicle manufacturer Proton, says Altech CEO Craig Venter, a licence agreement for a Netstar operation in Malaysia was signed where Proton will be a senior partner. However, he added that Altech's intellectual property rights have been protected under the agreement and the group will remain the sole owner of the investment. Netstar has already geared itself to develop and manufacture a complete Netstar infrastructure, mirroring the SA operation, for export and installation in Malaysia within the next four months.
Prompt Technologies has been appointed sole agency for Gage, a Tektronix Technology Company, making it the exclusive distributor for Gage's range of PC-based oscilloscopes, high-speed digital input/output systems and PC-based oscilloscope software.
State-owned signal distribution organisation, Sentech, will demonstrate the Public Safety Radio Communications Service (PSRCS) at the PMRA Exhibition to be held at the Kyalami Exhibition Centre. Sentech and the Department of Communications held a workshop in May that was attended by most of the emergency services operators in the country. From this workgroup Sentech says it became apparent that it was essential for all players in the emergency services field to become involved in the PSRCS project. It sees the project as a vital instrument in ensuring that the future requirements of the country, in terms of emergency communications, will be catered for using the latest available digital technology.
The Alberton area of Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council has upgraded its existing Cashpower2000 electricity prepayment solution from Energy Measurements to accommodate a stepped tariff electricity fee structure.
Overseas
Business
Micron Technology has posted a net loss of $576m on shrinking sales of just $480,3m for the company's fiscal fourth quarter. Affected by the weak DRAM markets, revenues plunged 40% sequentially from $802,3m in the prior fiscal quarter, and sales were 79% lower than a year ago.
SanDisk has cut its revenue forecast for the third quarter and said it now expects third-quarter revenues to sequentially fall 35% from $88m in the prior quarter instead of being flat with Q2. SanDisk said its product gross margins will be substantially lower than previously projected due to the erosion of memory prices and lower unit volumes.
Microchip Technology has reaffirmed prior guidance of net sales for the current quarter of approximately $136 to $141m. It expects revenues to sequentially decline 2% or rise 1,5% from $138,9m in the prior fiscal quarter. Said Steve Sanghi, Microchip President and CEO: "We believe that the rate of decline in distributor inventories observed at this stage should allow Microchip's channel inventory to be at or close to targeted levels by the end of the quarter. We are anticipating sequential revenue growth in our microcontroller and analog product lines this quarter, evidencing the strong positioning of our proprietary products. The overall design-win activity and attach-rate strategy for our proprietary products continues to be positive. Our expected results should be influenced by our diversified customer, geographical and application base of demand." Gross margins for the second quarter are projected to be approximately 50%, he said.
Companies
Philips Semiconductors has announced it is selling its CDMA handset reference design operation to Holley Communications Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Holley Group, of The People's Republic of China, for an undiclosed amount. Holley intends to continue to develop the CDMA handset market based on the turnkey solution it acquired, while Philips Semiconductors will provide key silicon components to Holley and Holley-supported prospective customers.
Jumptec Industrielle Computertechnik has purchased the remaining 49% stake in Inside Technology A/S, giving it 100% holding in the Danish embedded computer solutions provider.
Intel has formed a new operation - the Corporate Technology Group - to guide the company's R&D, technology, and product efforts. The new corporate-level group will be headed by former Chief Technology Officer of the Intel Architecture Group, Patrick Gelsinger. He becomes Intel's chief technology officer, making him the first CTO in the company's 33-year history, and will report directly to Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett.
LSI Logic has licensed its organic laminate flip-chip ball-grid array (FPBGA) packaging technology to Siliconware Precision Industries, a Taiwanese contract assembly house. The agreement covers LSI Logic's FPBGA-4L (four layer), FPBGA-HP (high performance) and flxI/O flip chip packages.
Wolfson Microelectronics, Edinburgh, has formed an alliance with Sanyo Electric for product development, marketing, manufacturing and investment. Sanyo will market Wolfson's products in Japan, and Wolfson will have access to Sanyo's DSP technology and fabs. Sanyo in turn will have access to Wolfson's mixed-signal technology.
Actel and Faraday Technology, a leading turnkey ASIC service provider, said they will provide a low-risk, cost-effective conversion path from current and future generations of Actel's single-chip, flash-based ProASIC field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to standard cell application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), using a standard cell CMOS process. Unlike a masked-programmable logic device (MPLD) or conventional gate array migration process, standard cell ASICs offer significantly higher densities and much reduced costs. Actel says that by choosing to convert from FPGAs to ASICs, designers avoid the hidden pitfalls of gate array development and production, avoiding lost market opportunity and higher development costs.
Hitachi is joining Cypress, IDT, Micron, NEC, and Samsung in joint development of Quad Data Rate (QDR) SRAM devices for high-performance communications applications. QDR static RAMs have two ports, which independently run at twice the rate of conventional synchronous memories. According to the companies, the technology can more than double SRAM device efficiency per pin.
Atmel has announced it will join Multilink Technology and GaAs foundry supplier United Monolithic Semiconductors in a new R&D centre at the University of Ulm, Germany, to develop ICs with analog functions for wireless and high-speed opto-electronics systems. The 'Competence Center on Integrated Circuits in Communications' will use Atmel's silicon and silicon-germanium (SiGe) technology and UMS's gallium-arsenide (GaAs) process technology to develop devices such as high linearity amplifiers for cellphones and frontend ICs for high-end, 40 GHz long-haul fibre-optic communications operating.
Actel and Ipsil have announced that Ipsil will implement its IPMicro8932 chip, an enhanced transmission-control protocol (TCP) controller with a 10Base-T Ethernet interface, within Actel's single-chip eX family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The IPMicro8932 network controller is designed to network-enable a wide range of telecommunications, industrial and networking applications including intelligent panels and cables, sensors for remote monitoring and diagnostics, network routers and gateways.
Altera has announced a partnership with the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group at Virginia Polytechnic Institute to develop advanced wireless communications technology for manufacturers, government agencies, and consumer service providers. Under the partnership, Altera said it hopes to have programmable chips designed into next-generation wireless systems, which will include wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) transceivers, software-defined radio systems, and smart antennae.
Stanford Microdevices is changing its name to Sirenza Microdevices following a lawsuit by Stanford University. The transition to the new name is expected to be complete by 31 January 2002.
Industry
The impact of the recent terrorist attacks in the US, and slowdown in consumer spending has affected the overall electronics marketplace reports iSuppli's Market Intelligence Services. The group significantly lowered its forecasts for semiconductor industry revenues for the coming quarters. According to Greg Sheppard, Vice President, iSuppli: "Decreasing consumer spending and lower projections for IT investments by enterprises will significantly reduce semiconductor revenues below our recent forecasts for the next few quarters. The market will still experience a small gain in the fourth quarter of 2001 thanks to traditional seasonal factors, but overall revenues for 2001 will decline by 30,9 %, down 2,6% from the 28,3 % levels we were forecasting just two weeks ago." The worldwide market for ASICs will fare better than the overall semiconductor industry in 2001, but will not enjoy the full benefits of the coming recovery. The report says ASIC revenues will decline by 22% in 2001, compared to a 28% decrease in overall semiconductor revenue for the year. Beyond 2001, iSuppli forecasts a slower rebound for ASIC revenues than for the semiconductor market as a whole.
Advanced Micro Devices is cutting 2300 jobs and closing Fabs 14 and 15, two semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities in Austin, Texas that primarily serve AMD's foundry operations to cut costs and strengthen its core business. These changes will result in the reduction of approximately 2300 positions, or approximately 15% of its worldwide workforce, by the end of the second quarter of 2002. Approximately 1000 of these positions are associated with closing the fabs in Austin. The balance of the reductions will result from realigning and restructuring back-end activities in Penang, Malaysia. "These actions will allow us to reduce costs without impairing our new product development activities in pursuit of long-term growth opportunities. We will focus our organisation around our two most promising opportunities - flash memory devices and PC processors," said W.J. Sanders III, Chairman and CEO.
Mitsubishi Electric announced it will cut another 1000 jobs from its semiconductor division on top of the 1000 job losses it recently announced. Mitsubishi Electric as a whole cut its projected consolidated operating profit for the fiscal year ending March 2002 from $1,2 bn to $254m.
While the worldwide semiconductor market is expected to decline 26% in 2001, the worldwide automotive semiconductor market is forecast to grow 7% this year, according to Dataquest. Much of this growth will come from developments that enhance the driving experience - such as telematics and realtime driver information systems - as well as in-car multimedia terminals for game consoles, Internet access, and realtime travel guides and directions. According to Dataquest's most recent ranking of automotive chip suppliers, Motorola remained No. 1 in 2000 with 10,8% market share. Motorola's automotive chip sales grew 8,5% last year. STMicroelectronics became the third largest automotive semiconductor supplier in 2000 with a 44,6% growth in sales. ST's market share was at 6,2% in 2000 vs 5,3% in 1999. NEC in Japan maintained its No. 2 ranking last year with an 18,1% increase while its share was 6,4% in 2000 compared to 6,7% in 1999. Further down the list were Infineon Technologies, followed by Philips.
Royal Philips Electronics said it expects semiconductor revenues to sequentially drop 17-18% in the third quarter from 1,13 bn euros in Q2 due to the industry's downturn. At a September analyst meeting in Amsterdam, senior management of Philips Semiconductors presented actions that have been taken to manage the global semiconductor industry downturn, and explained that the division is well positioned when the industry would turn around. "We have established leading positions with significant market share in almost all our businesses covering communication, automotive, industrial, computing and consumer electronics," said Scott McGregor, CEO of Philips Semiconductors. "While as an industry we have witnessed the most significant downturn in history, we have improved our product portfolio and we have established leading positions in the high growth areas of wireless communications, connectivity, and identification." Philips will take charges for restructuring and headcount reduction costs in the third and fourth quarters of 20m and 90m Euros, respectively, as it reduces costs and rationalises capacity, said the company. The impact of the events in the United States on Philips Semiconductors' business was too early to assess at the time, it said.
Infineon Technologies has reported on its first success of its 'Impact' cost reduction program. Within the next 12 months, Infineon plans to save over Euro 1 billion. It says that after only two months it has begun to realise significant savings in the Purchasing and Logistics areas and claims that expenses in information technology have already been reduced by one third. In addition, Infineon reduced its planned capital expenditures for the coming fiscal year by almost Euro 600m, with the goal of cutting the existing budget of Euro 1,5 bn in half. As previously announced, Infineon is reducing the worldwide workforce by about 5000 employees and expects that, by the end of calendar year 2001, will have shed approximately 2400 jobs - of which about 1900 are outside Germany and 500 inside Germany. The former chip unit of Siemens raised Euro 1,5 bn in capital during July, and received an additional Euro 700m from the sale of its infrared products division and its stake in Osram Opto Semiconductors.
Strategy Analytics predicts that worldwide cellular phone sales will grow by only 8% in 2001, reaching 440 million units. It claims the slow growth is a result of low replacement sales in handset markets. However, the research group said it expects that there will be a rebound in shipments after 2001, with 20% annual unit growth in the next four-to-five years - to beyond the 1 billion mark in 2006.
Despite optimistic predictions and the ability to offer up to 24 separate voice channels and high-speed Internet access over a single DSL line, Voice over DSL (VoDSL) deployment remains miniscule. So says In-Stat Group who reports that that even though the technology has been viewed as ideal for offering competitive local service to small businesses and multiline residential markets, the market for VoDSL gateways totalled $51m in 2000, due largely to high provisioning costs and the lack of effective local competition. It believes that there are too many VoDSL Gateway equipment suppliers for the size of the market and as a result equipment suppliers are moving to diversify their product portfolios.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has modified its type-approval process rules to ease software-defined radio (SDR) development and deployment. SDRs can be reprogrammed to transmit and receive on multiple frequencies in different transmission formats, which required all 'transmitters' to get approval.
Hewlett-Packard and Intel have announced that 40 universities worldwide will receive HP servers and workstations based on the Intel Itanium processor as part of HP and Intel's 'Itanium-based Systems Grant program'. The universities plan to use the Itanium-based systems for research in areas ranging from bio-informatics and neural networks, to compilers and cluster computing, to computational science and scientific data mining. HP and Intel awarded grants to universities in the United States, Canada, Asia Pacific, and Europe.
Taiwan's National Science Council has decided on a location for Taiwan's third science park. It will be near the coastal city of Taichung, and will be the smallest of the island's parks. The other two science parks are called Hsinchu and Tainan.
Pilot production has started at China's first 8-inch foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), headquartered in Shanghai. Products will range from specialty DRAMs to high-speed and low-power logic ICs. Mixed-signal RF CMOS and a silicon-germanium BiCMOS process are planned by 2002 year end.
The fifth international telecommunications exhibition and forum for the Americas region, ITU Telecom Americas 2003, will be hosted by the Government of the Argentine Republic and held in Buenos Aires, from 25 to 28 February 2003, at La Rural.
Technology
Start-up FlexICs says it plans to begin shipping samples of the world's first semiconductors fabricated on six-inch plastic substrates. Calling itself the world's first and only 'semiconductor-on-plastics foundry' the Californian company has developed an ultra-low temperature semiconductor process to fabricate ICs on conventional plastic. The technology is capable of producing polysilicon thin-filmtransistors (TFTs) on six-inch plastic substrates, which are processed at temperatures less than 100°C. It expects to use the technology to enable the development of plastics-based, lightweight displays, which could be integrated with LCD driver ICs, memories, or other chips on the substrate.
Toshiba claims to be the first to introduce a 64 Mb pseudo-SRAM memory series (PSRAM), which is aimed at memory applications in next-generation wireless and portable systems. The 48-ball fine-pitch ball grid-array devices are both configured 4-Mb-by-16 and support 80 or 85-nanosecond access times. Toshiba says they bridge the gap between conventional SRAMs and DRAM memories - containing the most desirable features of both types of architectures.
Intel has rolled out its fastest Xeon microprocessor to date - a 2 GHz chip for dual-processor workstations and other system products. Code-named 'Foster,' the 0,18 µm chip is based on Pentium 4 architecture. It includes Intel's NetBurst architecture and 256 KB of Level 2 cache memory.
Hitachi and Elpida Memory have announced a 'low-voltage high-speed sense amplifier circuit technology' which they claim reduces power consumption to a third of the level of current DRAMs. The technology overcomes loss in operational speed caused by signal amplification delay which occurs when DRAM voltage is decreased. It achieves the same operation speed on only 1 V as for the current 1,8 V. This result is expected to provide key technology in the next generation multigigabit DRAM where 1 V voltage is required.
Taiwan's Winbond Electronics has announced a hardware-monitoring IC that has speed functionality and compliance to the new Alert Standard Forum (ASF) specification for Internet Protocol (IP) capable systems. The W83791D provides speech output with an integrated programmable speech synthesizer and external flash memory, which stores voice data. The system-monitoring device can detect system voltages, measure temperatures, and alert users of 'security events'. The company says the W83791D device simultaneously monitors 10 voltage inputs, three fan speed inputs, three remote temperatures, and chassis intrusions or security events.
Samsung Electronics has developed what it claims is the industry's first 576 Mb Rambus DRAM. The new memory is based on 0,12 µm processes and operates at 1,066 GHz frequencies - about eight times faster than today's PC133 synchronous DRAMs.
Canadian start-up IceFyre Semiconductor says it plans to introduce the industry's first single-chip modem solution for 5 GHz wireless LANs using a proprietary architecture of three signal-computational engines to simplify waveform processing and lower power consumption. According to the company the single-chip approach to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modems helps reduce power consumption by four times compared to existing designs. The architecture can handle 54 Mbps and 100 meter links, it claims.
LSI Logic has developed an integrated tuner chip for cable modems. The DPS7000 Hi-IQ integrates all the critical RF elements for cable-based telephony and broadband access applications in a 64-pin TQFP package.
Intel has announced its third-generation, flash memory products, including what the company claims is the world's first 256 Mb, NOR-based chip. Intel claims the new 3 V Synchronous StrataFlash series is four times faster than competitive flash memories in the market. The multibit cell memory architecture chips will be offered at densities of 64, 128, and 256 Mb.
UK start-up Applied Dataflow Research (ADR), has created a processor architecture it claims can be scaled up into parallel processing systems that are easier to use and more efficient than existing architectures.
IC Insights remains optimistic about the future of the electronics and IC industries
Following the tragic events in the US IC Insights says it received numerous calls regarding its opinion on both the near-term and long-term future of the IC industry. Its expectations for the future of the electronics and IC industries begins with assumptions of macro economic conditions:
Near-term world GDP: There is little doubt that the tragic events have harmed the economies of many countries. Before the attack, 2001 worldwide GDP was likely to show about 2,4% growth, right on the edge of a worldwide recession. It now appears that the 2001 worldwide GDP growth rate will drop to 1,8-2,0%, fully within the range of a worldwide recession.
Long-term world GDP: IC Insights believes that the worldwide economy may show strong growth in 2002, especially in the second half of the year. While the exact timing of a strong worldwide economic rebound is unclear, IC Insights believes that there is a good chance it will begin in mid-2002. Worldwide GDP could be expanding at a 4,0% or greater growth rate in the second half of 2002. The US Federal Reserve slashed interest rates by a half-point on 17 September (its eighth cut in 2001) and may cut interest rates further. The European Union, UK, and Japan also cut interest rates during the week of 17 September. IC Insights believes that this coordinated financial stimulus put forth by so many economically important regions will lay the foundation for an economic rebound in 2002. One result of the tragedy has been the denouncement by almost every country in the world of the terrorist attacks. Thus, about 99% of the world's countries have agreed on an issue. This alone could be an historical first. The long-term positive of so many politically diverse countries finding some 'common ground' may be an increase in cross-border trade and business.
Near-term electronic system sales: Prior to the attack, IC Insights forecast that 2001 worldwide electronic system sales would decline 4%. It now expects worldwide system sales to decline 6% in 2001. While there has been a surge in cellphone sales in the US since the attack, it believes that short-term sales increases in selected electronic system segments will not be enough to offset the overall economic weakness expected in the fourth quarter.
Long-term electronic system sales: The future will depend heavily upon electronic systems. This was true before last week's attack and it may be even more true now. There is likely to be a surge in electronic 'security' systems such as smartcard identification, government/military surveillance equipment, fingerprint recognition, etc. There may also be a large increase in computer usage and information data storage from intelligence gathering operations. Teleconferencing may finally become more prevalent than it has been in the past. Cellphones may now be considered as much a personal safety device as a telecoms system, expanding its adoption rate throughout society. In total, the world will become increasingly dependent upon electronic systems.
Near-term IC sales: As mentioned in its September McClean Report Update, the worldwide IC market in 3Q01 is expected to decline by about 15% from 2Q01. Although the uncertainty of the worldwide economy is extremely high entering 4Q01, IC Insights has assumed the IC market in 4Q01 will be flat with 3Q01. Using these assumptions, the annual worldwide IC market would register a 34% decline in 2001, to about $117 bn.
Long-term IC sales: As mentioned previously, IC Insights expects a significant rebound in worldwide economic growth and electronic system sales to begin in mid-2002. This in turn should fuel a surge in IC sales. IC Insights believes that sequential IC market growth in both 3Q02 and 4Q02 could be 10% or greater. It should be remembered that there will be no significant IC inventory overhang hindering growth next year. The range for 2002 IC industry growth is expected to be 10-20%. Presently, IC Insights' forecast for a 14% increase in the 2002 IC market is still in place.
Summary
Governments worldwide are focused on implementing policies that will eventually spur economic growth in their regions. Such policies typically have a significant lag-time before results are evident. Moreover, there is no precise formula outlining how much economic stimulus is enough. Thus, IC Insights believes that the foundation is currently being laid that will create an environment in which worldwide economic growth is likely to significantly exceed current expectations within the next 12 months. While many electronic system purchases may be delayed in 4Q01, the important point to be made is that they will be delayed, not abandoned. Many companies and consumers worldwide will begin to upgrade and purchase new electronic systems at some point during 2002. Historically, 'pent-up' demand has always been a good precursor to strong cyclical upturns. IC Insights believes that the future is very bright for electronic system sales and the IC market. Worldwide GDP growth, electronic system sales, and the IC market are each very cyclical in nature - the events of September have not changed this.
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