Southern Africa
Alstom has set up a new business to capitalise on its market-leading position in substation automation and realtime energy information systems and to focus on the growing market for digital equipment in energy networks. Alstom says its move to create the new energy automation and information business within the company's transmission and distribution sector (T&D) from two existing businesses - Protection & Control, and Energy Management & Markets - addresses the customer's desire for fully integrated energy management networks. According to the company, network operators and owners have been 'digitalising' their infrastructures by installing energy information and automation equipment to better respond to the new needs created by deregulation of the energy industry. This move brings together the Protection & Control range of relay protection, control and measurement systems and equipment with the Energy Management & Markets range of scada systems, energy management software, market management solutions, data communication products, and application services.
Grintek and Saab of Sweden have announced the formation of a new division under Grintron, their jointly-owned defence electronics company, which will have its head office at Grintek Park, within the Highveld Technopark in Centurion. The new division, called Logtronics, will focus on logistic engineering services and the maintenance and logistic support of electronic systems and components, including depot-level servicing and repair. According to the companies this service is not limited to systems and products produced by Grintek and Saab but will serve as a regional repair and maintenance centre for all aviation and defence-related products, particularly where the manufacturers are not situated in South Africa. The establishment of Logtronics follows a two-year study in conjunction with the South African Air Force, Saab, and BAE Systems to find a cost-effective and affordable solution for spare parts provisioning, repair and maintenance of the new systems being acquired under the SANDF's strategic defence procurement packages, said the companies.
IST Telecom has been awarded a R6 million contract to supply its UMC 1000 access multiplexers to Rodcor International for the roll-out of a new optical fibre-based telephone network in Swaziland. IST is already one of the major suppliers of multiplexer equipment - which enables operators to enhance their access networks by using optic fibre to extend telephone exchanges to remote sites - to Telkom.
Spescom DataVoice has been accredited as a Motorola Dimetra system application partner. Spescom is the first South African partner for Motorola's Tetra solutions, a leading secure radio transmission voice and data communications system. According to Andrew Condon, Spescom DataVoice commercial manager, achieving this appointment was not a simple process. "The Tetra system is based on highly sophisticated radio communications which link to IP-based networks and only companies with advanced abilities in these areas are considered for this accreditation." Motorola's Tetra system is successfully in use for monitoring and managing radio communications for safety services in many countries.
Microsoft South Africa has announced the appointment of Gordon Frazer as managing director at Microsoft South Africa with immediate effect. Mark Hill, outgoing managing director of sub-Saharan Africa region, will be taking on a position with Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, USA.
Cirtech Electronics has appointed George Mendonidis to oversee its sales and marketing in the Gauteng region. See Cirtech Electronics now also offers hybrids.
Overseas
Business
ON Semiconductor has announced that it currently expects to exceed its most recent guidance for revenue and gross margin for the second quarter ending 28 June, 2002. It also expects to increase its cash position as of the end of the second quarter. The chipmaker said that as broad-based demand continues to strengthen, especially from its leading power management and analog product families, revenues for the quarter are currently expected to be in the range of $275m to $280m as compared to its previous guidance of $270m to $275m.
Companies
TriQuint Semiconductor has announced that it has completed two separate acquisitions with Infineon Technologies and IBM's Microelectronics Division. TriQuint has purchased Infineon's gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor business as well as certain assets of IBM's wireless phone chip set business.
Agere Systems has announced it has sold its analog line-card chip business to Legerity for $70m in cash.
Infineon Technologies and power supply manufacturer Delta Electronics, have signed an agreement for the licensing and transfer of Infineon's transfer mould packaging technology (also referred to as MegaDIP) to Cyntec, a subsidiary of Delta Electronics. Under the terms of the agreement, Infineon will also supply at least 50% of the power semiconductors needed by Cyntec to be incorporated into products manufactured using this technology.
Japan's Advantest has formed a new US test and measurement subsidiary called Advantest America Measuring Solutions (AAM). A new subsidiary of Advantest America, it will serve as headquarters for sales and marketing of Advantest's electronic measuring instruments in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Infineon Technologies and Micron Technology have announced a major deal to collaborate in the development of a new family of low-power pseudo SRAMs for wireless applications. The new technology, dubbed CellularRAM, is based on a single-transistor DRAM cell, versus a six-transistor (6T) SRAM cell. The DRAM structure results in a memory cell that is only one-tenth the size of a 6T SRAM, according to the companies. CellularRAM is also a drop-in replacement for the asynchronous low-power SRAM typically used in today's cellphone designs.
Tel-Tron Technologies has selected Atmel's AT86RF401U, claimed to be the industry's first monolithic microcomputer and RF transmitter, for its line of wireless supervision devices. Tel-Tron Technologies, markets a range of wireless supervision transmitters that can initiate calls for help from senior residents living in apartments. The device integrates an 8-bit AVR microcontroller and a PLL-based RF transmitter on the same silicon chip.
Industries
Chip sales grew 2,8% in May, says the SIA in its latest Global Sales Report. Sales totalled $11,37 bn for the month, with broad-based growth shown in all product sectors except for computation, it said. George Scalise, SIA president, stated: "We expect the industry to close the second quarter with growth of 4,7%. While the computation sector is down, all other sectors including wireless and consumer continue to thrive. This increase drove the sales of such products as Flash, digital signal processors, application specific products and analog." The increase was attributed to the Asia/Pacific market, especially China, said the SIA.
Motorola has announced it plans to further reduce its workforce by approximately 7000 positions worldwide. These reductions will impact all business segments and corporate headquarters operations it said. Motorola also reaffirmed its earlier guidance for the second quarter of 2002 and the full year and is confident sales for the quarter will meet or slightly exceed $6,4 bn.
Nothing short of radical reform of telecom regulation can salvage the floundering efforts toward achieving the widespread proliferation of broadband access technologies across the world, believes Gartner Dataquest. National regulatory agencies (NRAs) need to ensure the best possible growth of telecoms services by finding the right balance between incentives, requirements, competition and monopolies, states Dataquest in its Spotlight research news report. Says, Jean-Claude Delcroix, research director for Gartner: "The emphasis on having many competitors rather than strong competition has been the root of the problem in many countries, particularly in the US and in the EU. Many small players who were encouraged by national telecom regulators to launch into a highly capital-intensive service environment simply could not counter the market presence of strong incumbent players." According to Dataquest, the business of building networks is quite different from that of providing services and applications. The first calls for sustained investment over a period of time and will only provide long-term returns; while the other is governed by user need and requires relatively minimal investment and flexibility. Regulators should, in some cases, facilitate the separation of the network ownership business from the service provision and provide the right incentives in the right contexts, recommends Dataquest.
Web-Feet Research has released its latest Non-Volatile Memory Technologies Roadmap study that forecasts the design and manufacturing economics for nonvolatile memory technologies. One of its conclusions is that the next overriding objective of the semiconductor memory industry will be to create the 'application agnostic' memory, in a bid to significantly reduce costs of systems. At the same time, this objective will help to consolidate the increasingly fragmented memory market. It says that the R&D efforts to date indicate that this objective might not be met however, but it is expected that there will be less, rather than more technology variations that will satisfy a higher diversity of market needs. A second conclusion is that the NV memory market will fragment into two main categories: a high performance, medium density, higher priced segment for work memory applications; and a medium performance, high density, low priced segment for secondary and external storage. Providing that the PFRAM (polymer ferroelectric RAM) technology yields the expected results there will be a third low performance, very high density, extremely low priced segment for external solid state storage applications.
Analysts and industry observers have indicated that there could be more bad news for the slumping communications industry following WorldCom's revelations about massive accounting fraud. The telecommunication giant's woes could have a ripple effect in the industry, especially among equipment and semiconductor manufacturers, according to reports.
The worldwide e-commerce applications market is expected to reach almost $17 bn by 2006, more than tripling what it posted last year, according to IDC. The demand for high-performance applications, a growing emphasis on verticalised solutions, and Web services will form the basis of a unified commerce concept and be the primary contributors to the growth of this market, says IDC. Unified commerce will become an important factor because a growing number of companies are using their e-commerce sites as the best and most efficient way to capture and consolidate data from customers and suppliers, says IDC.
The personal computer industry has surpassed a historical milestone, as the one billionth PC was shipped in April this year, revealed Gartner Dataquest. While it has taken the PC industry approximately 25 years to reach this billion mark, Dataquest forecasts that the industry will ship the two billionth PC in 2008.
The High Definition Multimedia Interface Founders has announced the first specification of a new standard defining a high definition multimedia digital interface for consumer electronics. The HDMI draft specification v 0.9 (available at www.hdmi.org) provides manufacturers interested in developing HDMI-capable products with detailed information on implementing HDMI functionality, including: integrating audio by using auxiliary packetised data transfer technology; designing the 15 mm, 19-pin HDMI interface for CE devices and incorporating high-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). The HDMI founders are Hitachi, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Philips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson Multimedia and Toshiba.
Dutch company ASML, a leading provider of advanced technology systems for the semiconductor industry, has announced the grand opening of a new, $72m training centre in Tempe, Arizona, in a move to expand its US presence. The new North American Training Center will educate customers and employees on the latest developments and techniques in manufacturing semiconductors.
Clare, an IXYS company, has entered the foundry business, announcing the availability of 125 mm Si wafer foundry services, with advanced processing for HVIC, MEMS and SOI (silicon-on-insulator) based products. Clare is offering 330 V BCDMOS SOI-based HVIC process technology, fabrication of micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) elements and thick film SOI wafers. Clare's expertise in high voltage processing and experience with several foundry customers has enabled it to make these foundry services commercially available, it said.
VIA Technologies has announced its support for HyperTransport technology, a next generation I/O chip interconnection, by joining the HyperTransport Technology Consortium. HyperTransport is a high-speed, scalable, low pin count interconnect suitable for a complete range of applications from PC systems to games consoles and mobile devices.
Infineon has announced that it has produced 2 billion chip card modules. The German chipmaker has developed and produced ICs and modules for chip card applications in Regensburg-Burgweinting for ten years now. Infineon said its one-billionth module was produced in 1999, and now the second billion milestone has been reached after just another 30 months.
Technology
Actel has launched what it claims is the industry's fastest FPGA solution. The Axcelerator family is built upon the company's new AX architecture and scalable platform. AX architecture eliminates the performance bottleneck created when FPGAs with traditionally slow internal core architectures are used in high-speed communications and bridging applications says Actel. Based on a 0,15 mm antifuse process, the five-member Axcelerator family includes devices ranging in density from 125 000 to 2 million system gates, and is claimed to deliver over 500 MHz internal operation and up to 100% resource utilisation.
XtremeSpectrum has unveiled its first chip set for the ultrawideband (UWB) wireless market that complies with the Federal Communications Commission's rules for unlicensed usage. The Trinity chipset achieves 100 Mbps data rates and consumes less than 200 mW of power.
Texas Instruments has released its latest Digital Light Processing (DLP) display controllers that use high-speed RDRAM memory technology. RDRAM boosts the memory performance allowing a single-chip memory buffer with 1,6 GBps of bandwidth.
Scientists claim to have created a single-atom transistor by wedging a 'designer' molecule between two gold electrodes to create a circuit. The Cornell University researchers were able to start and stop the flow of electrical current by adjusting the voltage near the bridging molecule, and thus able to control the transfer of electrons across the cobalt atom (dark blue) - a transistor action. The molecule is a cobalt atom surrounded by carbon and hydrogen atoms and held in place on either side by 'handles' made of pyridine, a benzene relative. These handles are attached to sulphur atoms (red), which bond the molecule to the gold electrodes. Although the single-atom transistor demonstrates the potential for shrinking the size of components, one of a number of problems yet to be solved however, is 'gain', the ability to amplify a small signal.
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