South Africa
• The CEO of Denel Land Systems (DLS), Stephan Burger, has resigned after a 36 year career at the state-owned defence conglomerate. He will be replaced in an acting capacity by Ismail Dockrat, head of the organisation’s maritime division. Burger moved through various leadership positions until he was appointed CEO in 2004, since which time he grew the DLS division’s turnover from R280 million to R3 billion.
• The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has warned the public about a scam aimed at exploiting young people by promising them unfounded job placements at the organisation. Apparently two individuals calling themselves Stephen and Sherinne have been setting up fake interviews with job-seeking young ladies, only to demand sex from them in order to secure the job. In a public statement, the CSIR urged candidates to be extra cautious when approached through social media platforms, and confirmed that any meeting pertaining to its legitimate recruitment process will take place at the CSIR’s offices.
• Electrocomp has been appointed as the local distributor for Coilmaster Electronics and Schaffner. Coilmaster is a professional supplier of magnetic components including high-performance power inductors, high-current inductors, power chokes, common mode chokes, chip inductors, LAN magnetics and custom designed parts to customer specifications. Schaffner is an international leader in the fields of electromagnetic compatibility, power quality and power magnetics, with component solutions for efficient and reliable use of electric energy.
Overseas
Business
• Full-year 2017 consolidated net sales for Renesas Electronics were 781,5 billion yen (about $7,35 billion), up 22,3% year-on-year. On a year-on-year basis, semiconductor sales increased by 23,4%, marking a successful end to a year that saw the company integrate Intersil into the fold, and recover from the impacts of the Kumamoto earthquake that occurred the year before. Automotive sales increased by 13,8% year-on-year, while industrial and broad-based sales increased by 15,7% and 12,9%, respectively.
• Bloomberg reported that inside sources at Apple have said the company is planning to stop using Intel processors in its Mac computers from as early as 2020. Such a move has long been rumoured, and forms part of Apple’s larger strategy of in-housing processor production to its own ARM-based technology. The (unconfirmed) news immediately damaged Intel’s finances, sending its share price falling by more than 6% on 2 April, the day the news broke.
Companies
• Würth Elektronik eiSos has joined STMicroelectronics’ partner programme – an initiative aimed at speeding customer development efforts by identifying and highlighting companies with complementary products and services. Würth’s customers can now use the ST programme to find the products and services they need for their operations. It includes, for example, storage chokes and filters included as components in ST reference designs which have been fully tested and can be used directly in other projects.
Industry
• The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $36,8 billion for the month of February 2018, an increase of 21,0% compared to the February 2017 total, but 2,2% lower than the January 2018 total as befits typical seasonal market trends. Year-to-year sales increased significantly across all regions: the Americas (37,7%), Europe (21,7%), China (16,4%), Asia Pacific/All Other (16,2%) and Japan (15,5%).
• Combined sales for optoelectronics, sensors and actuators, and discrete semiconductors (known collectively as O-S-D) increased 11% in 2017 – more than 1,5 times the average annual growth rate in the past 20 years – to reach an eighth consecutive record-high level of $75,3 billion, according to IC Insights. Total O-S-D sales growth is expected to ease back in 2018 but still rise by an above average rate of 8% in 2018 to $81,1 billion. In 2017, optoelectronics sales recovered from a rare decline of 4% in 2016, rising 9% to $36,9 billion, while the sensors/actuators market segment registered its second year in a row of 16% growth with revenues climbing to $13,8 billion, and discretes strengthened significantly, increasing 12% to $24,6 billion.
Technology
• FPGA maker, Xilinx, has unveiled a new product category called Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP), which it is hailing as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘far beyond the capabilities of an FPGA’. An ACAP has – at its core – a new generation of FPGA fabric with distributed memory and hardware-programmable DSP blocks, a multicore SoC, and one or more software programmable yet hardware adaptable compute engines, all connected through a network on chip (NoC). The technology has been under development for four years at an accumulated R&D investment of over $1 billion, and the first product family, codenamed Everest, will tape out later this year.
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