Poor old Tsinghua has had another investment bid rejected – this time by the Taiwan assembly house SPIL (Siliconware Precision Industries). Tsinghua had offered to buy 25% of SPIL for $600 million. The sale to Tsinghua would have thwarted a bid by fellow Taiwanese assembly company ASE to take over SPIL. The Taiwan Fair Trade ...
After Micron bought Elpida it was expected that the memory industry would consolidate around four players Samsung, Micron, Toshiba/SanDisk and Hynix. But, according to Bernstein analyst Mark Newman, Samsung’s strategy is to expand its shares of the DRAM and NAND markets from its current 40% to 50% each. This will hit competitors Hynix and Micron ...
Another semiconductor company is using crowd-funding to find the investment needed to bring a product to production and into the commercial market. Lime Microsystems has started a crowd-funding campaign to bring their LimeSDR software defined radio platform into full-scale production. The company is hoping to raise $500,000 to fund the final stages of development and ...
Crowd funding changing the game for chip firms
Amazon had Q1 sales of $29 billion for a profit of $513 million. Its cloud service had revenues of $2.57 billion representing about 30% of the cloud services market leaving cloud rivals Google and Microsoft trailing. The cloud business had profits of $604 million in Q1. It delivers 56% of the operating income at Amazon ...
There was an interesting question at the ST results meeting earlier this week: “There was recently a Bloomberg report regarding the contract of the CEO,” asked an analyst, “if – I think your contract is expiring somewhere in May – and there were rumors – STM a new CEO. Any comments there or did I ...
Cypress Semiconductor has agreed to acquire Broadcom’s wireless product business aimed at internet of things markets in an all-cash transaction valued at $550m. This means Cypress will acquire Broadcom’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee IoT product lines and intellectual property, along with its WICED brand and developer ecosystem. The IoT business employs approximately 430 people and generated $189m in ...
Cypress to aqcuire Broadcom’s IoT wireless business
Apple’s seemingly relentless march to ever increasing sales has halted according to its latest quarterly figures. It’s fiscal 2016 second quarter (ending March 26) saw a 14% drop in quarterly sales of $50.56bn, down from $58bn last year. This represents the first fall in sales since 2003. Apple’s quarterly profits fell 22% from $13.5bn to $10.5bn. In ...
Apple passes its peak in latest quarterly results
Many electronics companies have won Queen’s Awards, for innovation, international trade and sustainable development. Sorry if we missed you out The list is long and sometimes hard to interpret. To be added, please comment below. East region Argon Design, Cambridge, innovation: Verification of video decoders for high definition (HD 4K) video. Specialised Imaging, Hertfordshire, innovation: Kirana, an ...
Electronics firms win Queen’s Awards
24 years ago a company set up to make a roll-up OLED screen. Two private equity firms, Hilman and Kelso, in vested $133 million. Intel and others put in VC money. Philips and Uniax bought licences. Twelve years after founding, in 2004, it had an IPO on the NASDAQ which valued the company at $230 ...
Fable: The Company Which Took Too Long
I didn’t realise that together sodium and potassium make low-melting point alloys. And that they have been used to cool all sorts of things, including spacecraft, atomic reactors and even PCs – the latter in the form of the LMX Superleggera heatsink assembly from Danamics, which looks to have gone bust. And, according to the ever-delightful Wikipedia, ...
US researchers have used under-cooled liquid metal – liquid below its freezing point – for soldering wires together at room-temperature. The project started in Iowa State University as a search for a way to stop liquid metal from returning to a solid below the metal’s melting point. Lead by Martin Thuo (below), the research team ...
Room temperature solder uses an odd state of matter
AWS Electronics has added a high voltage production capability to its plant in Newcastle Under Lyme. The electronics manufacturing services company, which is investing £30k in the facility, now has a manufacturing space purely for work that requires up to 50kV; high currents of up to 180A can also be accommodated. The most likely customers for the high voltage ...
Manufacturer invests in specialist high voltage production
Cambridge IC has won the Queen’s Award for International Trade for growth in international sales over the last three years, which have increased by 120%. The firm makes ICs for inductive angle and position sensing. “We are delighted and honoured to receive this award in recognition of our overseas sales,” said founder and director David ...
CambridgeIC wins Queen’s Award
The semiconductor industry is beginning to accept that Q2 will be a good quarter. ST sees a possible 5.5% revenue increase in Q2 and UMC has forecast a 5% increase. According to Digitimes UMC sees utilisation riding to 87/89% in Q2 from 82% in Q1, and ASPs rise 1-2%. “Looking into second-quarter 2016, new product ...
How many people ever get to say: “Revenue for the quarter was $50.6 billion, which was within our guidance range.” The CEOs of a handful of oil companies, the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Samsung, Toyota and, until recently, VW and Warren Buffett – and that’s about it. But these particular words reflectd disappointment – Q1 2015 ...
Cyntech Components is offering a range of microswitches that are fully dust-tight and water-sealed. Designed to meet more demanding industrial applications, the Microprecision microswitches are available in various configurations to meet IEC/EN 60529 ingress protection levels of IP67 and IP68, and work over -40 to +125°C and more. “Microprecision has it covered with a range of microswitches ...
Wolfspeed – Cree’s silicon carbide power transistor division – is to reveal just how small it can make a 20kW dc-dc converter at PCIM in Nurnberg. Alongside this will be an all-SiC 62mm half-bridge power module and gate driver combination (see below) with three-phase evaluation kit, and an on-line simulation tool for SiC power supplies called ...
PCIM: Wolfspeed to show 20kW SiC dc-dc converter
US researchers have stretched the operating life of aqueous zinc-manganese oxide batteries to over 5,000 cycles. The result is a rechargeable battery that cost only as much as a car battery but store more energy, according to the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is grooming the technology for matching renewable energy sources to power ...
Old battery tech gets new life
Infineon has created an integrated circuit specifically for adding isolated 0-10V dc control to LED drivers. Called CDM10V, the chip comes in a tiny 6 pin SOT package. It can be used to transmit analogue voltage based signals from a 0-10 V dimmer or potentiometer to the dimming or PWM input of a lighting controller ...
Apple drove the entire foundry sales increase at TSMC in 2015, says IC Insights. Without Apple, TSMC’s 2015 foundry sales would have dropped by 2% as compared to a 6% increase. The top 13 IC foundries (pure-play and IDM) by foundry sales in 2015 were as follows: TSMC, by far, was the leader in foundry ...
Dyson has used its considerable motor and air-flow expertise to develop a hair dryer. Instead of the usual arrangement, the high-speed motor and fan are in the handle, and what would normally be the body of the dryer is now am annular nozzle with a hole right through the middle – much like the firm’s ...
Dyson aims motor expertise at hair drying
NI has introduced its first digital multimeter in the PXI Express modular test format. It is a 7½-digit DMM and 1.8MS/s isolated digitiser. The PXIe-4081 has 15ppm accuracy for DC voltage measurements up to two years after calibration. It is capable of voltage measurements from nanovolts to one kilovolt and resistance measurements from microohms to ...
NI offers DMM in PXI Express slot
Austria-based analogue semiconductor manufacturer, ams has announced that a US District Judge has awarded its US subsidiary, ams-TAOS damages of $77m from Intersil, including $10m in exemplary damages. The decision comes after jurors in the federal Eastern District of Texas found in favour of ams-TAOS on all claims against Intersil for misappropriation of ams-TAOS’ trade ...
ams wins US trade secret and patent infringement ruling
Mouser Electronics has taken on a another Arduino embedded computing board line. A distribution deal with Alorium Technology will see Mouser offering an Arduino-compatible board with a difference, it adds hardware acceleration of an FPGA. The XLR8 development board’s main processor is also different for an Arduino board. The ATmega328-compatible microcontroller core is implemented in the ...
You can buy FPGA accelerated Arduino board at Mouser
Photovoltaic (PV) module efficiencies of 27% for solar energy generation is the claim of Swedish advanced materials start-up Sol Voltaics using its nanowire technology. Solar power system developers have looked at using nanowires to improve conversion efficiency, but they are notoriously difficult to align due to their high aspect ratios and material characteristics. What Sol ...
Sol Voltaics claims solar cell efficiency breakthrough with nanowires
Ampleon, the Netherlands-based power semiconductor firm, has introduced an RF power transistor designed for DVB-T UHF asymmetrical wideband Doherty amplifier applications. The company claims the RF device which is fabricated in a high voltage LDMOS process has greater than 50% power efficiency and the average DVB-T power output is 150W from a single transistor for ...
Ampleon claims RF transistor lifts efficiency to next level
This month Infineon starts volume production of an LED lighting interface IC which allows designers to replace many of the discrete components used in conventional dimming schemes with a single device. Thus, it can reduce the component count and PCB space needed for dimming circuitry in LED lighting applications by up to 70%. Infineon claims ...
Infineon starts production of LED lighting interface IC
Silage, the configurable mixed signal specialist, has announced an expansion of its pFET integrated power controller portfolio with of self-powered, 1.6 mm2, single-channel and dual-channel controllers with reverse-current protection. Designed for all high-side, 1.5 V to 5.5 V power rail applications, these new pFET power controllers achieve an ultra-stable 23 mΩ RDSON over temperature. Using ...
Silego adds to pFET controllers
ST had Q1 revenues of $1.6 billion for net loss of $41 million, an operating loss of $31 million and a decline in its net financial position (cash minus debt) down to $439 million from $494 million in Q4. Cash dividends worth $88 million were paid out to shareholders. “While revenues declined sequentially by 3.3% ...
ST makes $41m loss pays $88m dividend
Thanks to the MIT Technology Review for this one – the 10 emerging technologies which had the most significant breakthroughs last year or which are on the verge of them: Immune Engineering Precise Gene Editing In Plants Conversational Interfaces Re-Usable Rockets Robots that teach eachother DNA App Store SolarCity’s Gigafactory Slack Tesla Autopilot Power from ...
Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2016
Japanese researchers have taken a step which might lead to flexible thin-film heat flow sensors – sensors that can be built into a heat path. Heat flow, analogous to current flow, is generally inferred by measuring temperatures at two points either side of a known thermal resistance. The alternative, measuring heat flow directly, involves placing ...
Flexible film measures heat flow directly
Here’s trouble: a hovering, tracking drone with a 13MP forward-looking camera and a 3MP downward-looking camera. Beijing start-up Zero Zero Robotics has raised $25 million to mass-manufacture a drone called The Hover Camera. It can hover or follow someone, or something, around. Zero Zero’s founders are two Stanford PhD graduates who raised an initial $1.7 ...
LED Engin will demonstrate its LuxiTune linear dynamic light engine at LightFair, claimed to be the world’s first Bluetooth low energy mesh-controlled tuneable white solution for linear luminaires. … what a list of caveats. End users can wirelessly configure, control and manage the luminaires. Installed in a 100 x 100mm 4foot fixture, the linear light ...
Lightfair: Led Engin gets Bluetooth mesh control
Thanks to Josh, a keen cyclist for highlighting this one, the Haiku – a gesture controlled bike assistant. Putting aside concerns over anything that distracts a cyclist – whether hands free or not – the device may be of interest if you’re of the pedalling persuasion… It’s primarily aimed at urban cyclists, and offers turn-by-turn ...
Gestures control the Haiku cycling assistant
Excelera of Barcelona is a start-up aiming to bring new capabilities to sensor systems Excelera has a chip it calls a Universal Frequency-to-Digital Converter-1 (UFDC-1) – a fully digital CMOS IC, capable of measuring frequency, period, ratio, duty-cycle, and phase shift in 16 different modes, with a relative error ranging from 0.001 to 1%. “We ...
Excelera enhances sensor systems
How are component suppliers responding to the needs of high reliability markets such as the oil and gas or rail sectors? Roger Tall gives a few pointers. In the oil and gas and rail industries the need to ensure high reliability is an everyday design challenge but now more is being demanded from these systems ...
High reliability has a role on trains and oil rigs
Design done, PCB laid-out and components are sourced, but the biggest challenge is yet to come getting it manufactured. David Marrakchi describes the pitfalls to avoid You just completed your last design review, got that needed approval signature, and the finish line has never been closer, or so you think. Even after your components are ...
The “Hateful Five” of PCB manufacturing
We are very pleased to highlight the initial sponsors for the Elektra Awards 2016. Celebrating product innovation and business success in the industry – and now in their 14th Year – the Elektra Awards are recognised as the best promotional platform to celebrate the achievements of individuals and companies across the electronics industry. And a big ...
Elektra Awards 2016 gather momentum
Mouser Electronics has added the product line of IEI Technology, part of the Intel internet of things solutions alliance. The IEI Technology embedded computer boards available from Mouser Electronics include the WAFER-BT single-board computer in the PICO-ITX form factor and supports an on-board Celeron system-on-chip (SoC) with DDR3L; VGA, LVDS, and iDP connectors. The HYPER-BT ...
Mouser adds Intel IoT partner IEI Technology
Lattice semiconductor has added to its MachXO3 family of FPGAs with the addition of the MachXO3L-9400 and MachXO3LF-9400 devices available in multiple packages. The new devices offer expanded I/O and logic support for control PLD applications, while increased on-chip memory improves picture clarity for low cost video bridging in large monitor applications, says Lattice. Features ...
FPGAs get Hitless I/O for in-system hardware upgrade
One for Gadget Masters to note – the Raspberry Pi camera modules have been upgraded, for 8-megapixel resolution imaging (they were 5-megapixel). There’s also a Sony IMX219PQ CMOS image sensor in a fixed-focus module, which enables the board to capture 3280 x 2464 pixel static images. Otherwise, the new version cameras have the same video capability ...
Raspberry Pi camera modules offer home security with 8-megapixel resolution
Socionext, the SoC jv of Fujitsu and Panasonic, has joined with FotoNation to deliver Electronic Image Stabilisation (EIS) that delivers video stability for ‘on-the-move’ video devices, including drones, action cameras, and wearables. This EIS solution delivers an energy-efficient, GPU-free chipset that can process HD and 4K-ready video at up to 60 frames-per-second, enabling video that ...
Your correspondent A. R. Hobden, who alleges that “there is now a large section of the population unable to receive medium -wave transmissions which the local stations are intending using during daylight hours,” need not worry, for pocket medium-wave receivers will soon be as common as wrist watches.” So, 55 years ago started a letter ...
Pocket Radios Will Soon be As Common As Wrist-Watches
US President Barack Obama was given a demonstration of German IoT technology for smart factories when he visited the the Hannover Messe exhibition with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. President Obama and Chancellor Merkel were given a taste of Industrie 4.0 by Harting on its stand at the exhibition. They saw the Rinspeed “Etos” car, in ...
Raspberry Pi gets a analogue audio amplifier for driving stereo headphones. The 503HTA, Hybrid Tube AMP/DAC is a small Hat size raspberry pi add-on developed by Pi 2 Design. It connects to the PI I2S port and its Burr-Brown PCM5102A DAC drives a single 12AU7 tube gain stage with solid state Class-A output. It is ...
Raspberry Pi goes Hi-Fi with audio valve amp
A new data storage system uses single atoms as computer bits, and could hold the contents of the US Library of Congress in a cube just 100 micrometres across – little more than a speck of dust. Researchers have been trying for years to develop data storage using single atoms as bits – the 1s ...
Atomic memory bids to store US Library of Congress in a dust speck
There’s a kind of a worry going around that productivity has declined and the intriguing thing about it is that no one knows why. UK productivity, the value of the output produced per hour worked – rose at 2.2% a year for decades before the recession. Since the recession the growth rate has been 0.5%. ...
Productivity Gains Run Out Of Steam
Two camera add-ons for the Raspberry Pi 3 now offer 8megapixel resolution. An integrated image sensor also enables the computer board to capture 3280 x 2464 pixel static images. The Raspberry Pi Camera v2 and Raspberry Pi NoIR Camera v2 modules which measure 25mm x 35mm x9mm are available from element14. The v2 cameras have ...
Raspberry Pi gets 8Mpixel camera module
VersaSense’s MicroPnP IoT platform, based on Linear Tech’s SmartMesh IP embedded networking, delivers low-cost, zero-configuration wireless sensing and actuation. MicroPnP is an IoT hardware and software platform that reduces the total cost of ownership for sensing and control systems. It delivers: Plug-and-play identification of sensors and actuators at 10 million times lower power than USB. ...
VersaSense’s IoT platform uses LTC SmartMesh networking IP
Edinburgh-based photonics start-up company Optoscribe has secured £1.2m in venture capital investment to fund its manufacturing plans. Optoscribe was founded in 2010 as a spin out business from Heriot Watt University, and has developed 3D photonic components for use inside communications systems in the datacoms, telecoms and mobile phone markets. The company plans to produce ...
Scottish photonics start-up gets £1.2m funding
Imagine having a smartphone app that would both warn you of impending rain AND alert you to the whereabouts of the brolly you are going to need.
Oombrella bids to be a smarter brolly
AMD has licensed x86 technology to China. Under a deal with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co (THATIC), AMD will set up a joint venture company to make x86-based processors for servers made and sold in China. In return, AMD gets a licensing fee of $293 million plus royalties of which it has already had ...
Could drones really be a big deal? Well Intel and Qualcomm certainly seem to think so and a report from Business mIntelligenceg forecasts 19% CAGR for the drone market between 2015 and 2020 with some hefty numbers. They’re talking about a $9 billion market this year. In the US, BI believes that the law will ...
Are Drones Goiing To Be A Big Deal?
Ricoh has introduced its first LED lighting chip – apart from the camera/phone LED controller it makes. R1580 is a dc-fed constant-current LED driver controller that needs on mosfet and a handful of passives to make a driver. The novel bit is that it is either a fixed output device, programmable by a resistor, or ...
Ricoh gets into no-flicker LED lighting chips
UltraSoC, the provider of semiconductor IP for on-chip analytics, performance optimization and hardware-based security, has been named by Mishcon de Reya and City AM, in the 2016 Leap 100 list of companies to watch. Now in its second year, the Leap 100 provides a guide to the UK’s most exciting, fast-growth companies. Businesses are selected ...
When, in 1993, Shuji Nakamura invented the blue LED, for which he won the 2014 Nobel Prize for physics, his first thought was to show it to the greatest name in the Japanese semiconductor industry who had pioneered LEDs in the country, Jun’ichi Nichizawa. Nichizawa had tried to develop a blue LED ten years before ...
Recom has introduced two 2W dc-dc converter series designed to power SiC mosfets. “One of the challenges of driving SiC mosfets is the high frequency and high voltage at which they are switched,” said Recom. “High potentials between the control and power side of an application can wear down isolation barriers, eventually causing them to fail.” ...
dc-dc converters power SiC output stages
UWB rides again with an interesting application in time-of-flight measurement enabled by the Sofia-Antipolis RF packaging specialist, Insight-SIP, which is celebrating its 10th birthday today with a party for 100 people in the South of France. UWB is a relatively new departure for Insight-SIP which has based most of its product portfolio on Bluetooth LE ...
UWB rides again in Insight-SIP module
There seem to be two probable birthplaces on this planet for the driverless car – Munich and California. So confronted by the cream of the mighty German car industry in Munich this week I thought it appropriate to ask a thorny Q. Who, I asked, would pay for two pre-requisites for driverless cars: mapping the ...
Applied Micro’s new server SoC X-Gene 3 has 32 ARMv8-compatible CPU cores in a single socket to deliver performance competitive with mainstream high-end Xeon E5/ E7 processors in a similar TDP envelope. With eight DDR4 memory channels, X‑Gene 3 beats Xeon E5 in memory bandwidth, making it suited to hyperscale workloads, such as in-memory databases, ...
X-Gene 3 delivers heavy-lifting server performance
SEMI’s March book-to-Bill ratio was 1.15 – up on February’s 1.05. March bookings were $1.38 billion – 9.4% higher than February’s $1.26 billion, but 0.9% lower than the March 2015 order level of $1.39 billion. March billings were $1.20 billion – 0.5% lower than in February, and 5.3% lower than the March 2015 billings level ...
China is looking for self-sufficiency in ICs but lacks a fundamental pre-requisite for growing a chip industry. “China is not encouraging freedom of thought and that’s something you need if you want innovation,” Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, told this week’s GSA European Executive Forum in Munich. China has a $23 billion government fund ...
GSA Forum: China lacks pre-requisite for semiconductor success
Predictably, the IoT was not neglected at this week’s GSA European Executive Forum in Munich. Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, summed up the industry’s dilemma with IoT: “We haven’t yet got into whatever the IoT is going to generate,” he told the conference. Udo-Martin Gomez, CTO of Bosch Sensortec, said that Bosch has set ...
GSA Forum: IoT an aspiration more than a business.
Today we are amazed that Apple takes 92% of the mobile phone industry’s profits but this scale of domination of an industry is not unprecedented. Back in the 1920s there was an industry, the lighting industry, which employed half a million people in the USA. The component on which this industry was built was the ...
ARM has bumped up its R&D budget by 42% as it pushes into markets beyond mobile. Asked what it would be spent on, ARM evp Pete Hutton told EW: “Networking, IoT, servers and hiring a lot of engineers – a lot is being spent on software, benchmarking – all the boring plumbing.” With Qualcomm, AMD, ...
Rohde & Schwarz has secured the contract with Swansea University to equip the College of Engineering’s electronic teaching laboratories on the Bay Campus. The company has equipped 66 workstations in three labs with oscilloscopes, digital multimeters, power supplies and function generators. The contract was awarded following a European tender process. The total value of test ...
Rohde & Schwarz forms skills partnership with Swansea University
I was amazed and horrified when I heard racing cyclists have been cheating by using electric motors to boost their performance. My first thought was, where can you hide an electric motor on a racing bicycle? I was prepared to be technologically amazed – I thought maybe someone had fitted the whole motor into a bicycle bottom ...
Cyclists cheat with electric motors
China is looking for self-sufficiency in ICs but lacks a fundamental pre-requisite for growing a chip industry. “China is not encouraging freedom of thought and that’s something you need if you want innovation,” Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, told this week’s GSA European Executive Forum in Munich. China has a $23 billion government fund ...
China Lacks Basic Requirement For IC Industry
"A small version of the graphic will be placed in the top corner of all presentation materials developed by the project."
Your space mission: Design a logo for NASA to represent In-Space Manufacturing
In what looks like a breakthrough in wearable technology Fraunhofer ISC in Germany has developed a transparent sensor material which can be printed onto textiles. The material will be presented on IDTechEX Europe at booth F16 in the Estrel Berlin on 27 and 28 April 2016. The new sensor technology will be incorporated into a ...
Transparent movement sensor printed into clothing
The European Commission has formally charged Google with breaking competition rules over its Android mobile operating system. It is accused of abusing it’s dominant position in Android, forcing manufacturers to favour its own revenue streams. You can read the full EU statement online: “A competitive mobile Internet sector is increasingly important for consumers and businesses in ...
European Commission aims Android antitrust charges at Google
Avery Dennison, provider of RFID technology to the retail clothing sector has teamed with IoT data systems firm Evrythng to connect 10 billion clothing and footwear products for major brands to cloud-based product ID and tracking services. See report in Packaging News. The IoT deployment will use Evrythng’s Janela platform to provide digital identity and ...
Billions of trainers tagged in “biggest” IoT deployment
DLI, part of Knowles, has introduced 10dB and 20dB directional couplers for C, X and Ku bands. Made using thin-film high-permittivity temperature-stable materials , they are intended for commercial, military and space microwave applications. “The four port couplers are excellent for high frequency signal monitoring applications where board space is a premium and quality power ...
Directional couplers for C X and Ku bands
The European Commission has now formally charged Google with breaking competition rules over its Android mobile operating system.
EU charges Google with Android antitrust violations
Researchers at the University of Georgia and at Ben-Gurion University in Israel claim to have demonstrated how nanoscale electronic components can be made from single DNA molecules. According to the study’s lead author, Bingqian Xu, an associate professor in the UGA College of Engineering: “For 50 years, we have been able to place more and ...
US researchers make ‘smallest’ diode from DNA molecules
Intel is restructuring – away from PC processors and towards server and mobile chips. “The data centre and IoT businesses are Intel’s primary growth engines, with memory and FPGAs accelerating these opportunities,” said the firm. Electronics Weekly looked into likely Intel job cuts two days ago These changes will result 12,000 employees losing their jobs ~11% ...
Intel confirms 12,000 job cuts and restructuring
The best crack on the opening day of the GSA Executive Forum yesterday was Aart de Geus’ reference to ‘Immensely Optimistic Thinking’ a.k.a. the IoT. de Geus, founder and Co-CEO of Synopsys, pointed out that the typical IoT products used tiny amounts of silicon and said “it is difficult to see how it will fill ...
The conventional view is that the semiconductor industry is consolidating, but Wally Rhines CEO of Mentor Graphics, told the GSA Forum in Munich this morning that it is not consolidating despite the M&A frenzy of 2015. “Traditionally we’re a de-consolidating industry”, Rhines told the Forum. Rhines pointed out that in 1972 the company with the ...
Consolidation? What Consolidation?
GSA Forum: The conventional view is that the semiconductor industry is consolidating, but Wally Rhines CEO of Mentor Graphics, told the GSA Forum in Munich this morning that it is not consolidating despite the M&A frenzy of 2015. “Traditionally we’re a de-consolidating industry”, Rhines told the Forum. Rhines pointed out that in 1972 the company ...
GSA Forum: Semiconductor industry is not consolidating – Rhines
UK researchers have created a bacterial fuel cell from low-cost materials that runs on urine. Its characteristics have turned out to be a little mysterious – more of this later. Justification for the low-cost claim comes from using carbon cloth for electrodes, and replacing platinum as a cathode catalyst with a nitrogen-doped aerogel made from ...
Low-cost fuel cell dines on urine
IQD have launched what they believe to be the world’s smallest 32.768kHz clock oscillator in a design that also delivers very low power. The device measures 1.6 x 1.2 x 0.7mm and comes in a hermetically sealed ceramic package. With a current consumption of 30µA and with a standby current of 3µA, the power clock ...
IQD makes smallest clock oscillator
Imagination Technologies, Microchip Technology and Digilent Havebannounced the Connected MCU Lab, a new course developed through the companies’ respective university programs. The semester-long curriculum, available to universities worldwide, is designed to be an introductory and first microcontroller (MCU) class taken by undergraduate electronic engineering and computer science students. It delivers a start to connected embedded ...
Imagination, Microchip, Digilent team up on university MCU course
Thanks to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) for this one – the top ten companies for PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents: USA 57,385 Japan 44,235 China 29,846. Germany 18,072 Korea 14,626 France 8476 UK 5313 Holland 4357 Switzerland 4280 Sweden 3850
Top 10 Countries For PCT Applications
The NXP Cup Challenge was a good event for the University of Sheffield. Not only did it win the first prize, but another of its teams came third. It was the UK leg of the challenge to build a “intelligent car”, with the competing students demonstrating skills in embedded software programming and basic circuit creation, as well ...
Sheffield University smart car scoops NXP Cup 2016
The fastest growing IC product of 2016 will be Cellphone Application MPUs and Signal Converstion (DACs, ADCs) devices, says IC Insights which will each grow at 10% this year. The market for 32-bit MCUs is forecast to increase 8% with “intelligent” cars the catalyst for much of this growth. Driver information systems and many of ...
Cellphone Apps Processors and Signal Conversion ICs to lead 2016 market
A group of developers in London at the NORD collective have designed the hardware and software to turn a Raspberry Pi into a platform for creative applications. They have dubbed it Tingbot and they are creating smartphone apps to allow users to design graphics, draw, connect to simple data feeds and other interactive apps. From ...
Raspberry Pi goes Tingbot app creative
UK tech industry will highlight the importance of robotics this summer with a nationwide programme of events for the first ever UK Robotics Week (25 June – 1 July 2016). Events will include open labs, schools and academic competitions and hackathons, and the build-up to UK Robotics Week will begin at the Imperial Festival 2016 ...
UK robotics to get summer showcase
Scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have succeeded in growing ultra-thin (2.5-nanometre) ferroelectric films based on hafnium oxide that could potentially be used to develop non-volatile memory elements called ferroelectric tunnel junctions. As demand for data storage increases researchers are trying to develop faster and more compact storage devices. The ideal ...
Russian scientists claim breakthrough in ferroelectric ‘universal’ memory
The whys and wherefores of AC-direct driving of LED lighting systems explained by Francois Mirand True to the history of other types of semiconductor products, LEDs offer better performance at a lower cost with every passing year. So much so, in fact, that the other elements of a conventional LED lighting fixture – the housing, ...
Why not direct AC drive your LED string?
The Lebanon it holding its first Raspberry Pi schools competition, with the aim of finding the next generation of tech entrepreneurs The competition will challenge school students from all backgrounds to invent something that utilises the Raspberry Pi to benefit Lebanon, according to the UK-Lebanon Tech Hub (see below). For example, an invention that might benefit education, ...
Lebanon’s first Raspberry Pi schools competition
Atmel’s China operation and Rockchip have joined ARM’s Global University Program Alliance. Chinese university students will gain access to a wider range of ARM-based hardware and software platforms, technologies and development tools. The first deliverables as part of this expansion will be an Atmel version of the ARM Education Kit for smart hardware design, and ...
Atmel and Rockchip join ARM’s China university programme
14 out of 33 IC product types are expected to show growth of better than 2% this year, says IC Insights. Fourteen product categories—topped by Cellphone Application Processors and Signal Conversion (analog) devices—are expected to exceed the 2% growth rate forecast for the total IC market this year. Another five product categories are expected to ...
14 IC product types to exceed or match market growth this year.
Winners have been announced of PA Consulting Group's fourth annual Raspberry Pi coding competition.
Picture Gallery: PA Consulting’s Raspberry Pi coding competition
Having been hunting around for a light-weight Windows machine, I have looked at all sorts of computers. One which didn’t meet my minimum spec (4G ram, 64G flash) was rather impressive just the same. The brilliant thing about the Asus EeeBook X205TA is that it weighs under 1kg (980g) despite having an 11.6″ screen. It ...
Hats off to Asus for super light cheap laptop
The other speculation du jour is the succession at ST. Although ST has not officially confirmed that the ST board is looking for a replacement for Carl Bozotti, the speculation that it is looking is all over the web. The French, of course, will want a Frenchman, and the Italians, of course, will want an ...
Welcome to another post in the series by Nick Locke, of Nicab Ltd, who has more than 15 years experience in the electronics manufacturing industry specialising in interconnection cable assembly. TE Connectivity have raised the bar with new contactless technology and the future takes one step closer. ARISO Contactless Connectivity reliably delivers power, data and signal over ...
Only Connect: On contactless technology
VersaSense, the industrial wireless sensor module supplier from Belgium, has developed a networking system based on Linear Technology’s SmartMesh IP embedded networking platform. Called MicroPnP, the low power wireless network will identify sensors and actuators using the SmartMesh protocol. The low power wireless technology is designed for very long “decade battery lifetime”, with real time ...
IoT sensor network runs for decades on single battery
The BBC micro:bit educational computing module is the focus of a Model Rocket Car design competition for schoolchildren. Microsoft is behind the technology education initiative and it has joined with the Bloodhound landspeed record Project, along with the British Army and Buckingham Palace to create ‘Race for the Line’, a competition designed to encourage pupils ...
Microsoft combines BBC micro:bit and Bloodhound in skills initiative
Enable the smooth upgrade of manufacturing test stations with NI LabVIEW and PXI
Upgrade your manufacturing test station
The number of 300mm wafer fabrication facilities in operation continues to grow and is expected to reach 100 this year, reports IC Insights. At the end of 2015, there were 95 production-class IC fabs utilizing 300mm wafers (there are numerous R&D IC fabs and a few high-volume fabs that make “non-IC” products such as CMOS ...
Number Of 300mm Fabs To Top 100
Imec and kerfless epitaxial wafer start-up, Crystal Solar have demonstrated a homojunction solar cell with a record 22.5% conversion efficiency said to pave the way to low-cost solar wafer commercialisation. The potentially disruptive wafer technology was used to fabricate a standard monocrystalline 156x156mm2 cell on 160um to 180um thick grown n-type wafer with built-in rear ...
Imec develops solar cell with 22.5% conversion efficiency
Thanks to our technology editor, and keen cyclist, Steve Buish for flagging this one – a project to build a bike power meter. Basically the idea is to prototype a low-cost affordable fitness power meter for cyclists (using “an ESP8266 WiFi module, 4 strain gauges in Wheatsone arrangement measured by HX711 24-bit instrumentation amplifier”). It ...
How to build your own bike power meter
Plessey has been awarded the Manufacturing Business Award 2016 for large businesses by the Plymouth Herald. The awards, now in their sixth year, were presented at a gala dinner at the Plymouth Pavilions. Paul Burton, Editor of the Herald, said; “If the success of the businesses shortlisted is anything to go by, the Plymouth’s future ...
Plessey wins Manufacturer of the Year award
The speculation du jour is, of course, over Intel’s rumoured job cuts. Why? And where will they fall? The speculation is all over the map. The most likely reason why is that the Q1 results being announced tomorrow are shitty and the job cuts are a way of diminishing the consequent fall in the share ...
Researchers at the University of Southampton claim to have developed a graphene-based sensor that can detect harmful air pollution in the home with very low power consumption. The sensor, which is the result of a collaboration with the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), detects individual CO2 molecules and volatile organic compound (VOC) ...
Graphene sensor could detect sick buildings
Osram Opto has cut led light output droop by optimising its epitaxial processes. At a current density of 3A/mm², quantum efficiency of the has been increased 7.5%. Under laboratory conditions and driven at 3A/mm2, 740 lm typical luminous flux was produced from QFN LED package (6,200K, Cx 0.319, Cy 0.323, single-chip LDxyz). At low current densities ...
Osram epitaxy boosts high power led efficiency
Fabless chip maker CambridgeIC has improved the accuracy and speed non-contact shaft sensing IC. It now delivers 5,000 position sample/s and 14 bits. Implemented in the CAM502 IC, it connects to resonant inductive sensors built from simple PCBs and measures the linear or angular position. In operation, two passive resonant LC circuits, mounted on a single ...
14bit inductive shaft encoder copes with misalignment
As one of Edinburgh Royal High School’s less distinguished students, Alexander Graham Bell resented education conducted under strict discipline and consisting of memorising facts by rote. Bell derided the system of “giving out a certain amount of work which must be carried through in a given space of time and putting the children into orderly ...
Education According To Mr Bell
Cambridge scientists are to design a architecture for superconducting spintronics computing, which could dramatically cut the energy costs of high-performance computing. Spintronics, which stores and processed data as the spin of electrons, in principle could save power compared with electronics because it avoids moving charge around. It is also potentially fast. “Given the energy-efficiency of ...
UK looks to lead superconducting spintronic computing
Green Hills Software is targeting the design of secure autonomous vehicles with its Integrity real-time operating system (RTOS) and Multivisor virtualisation software which now supports the Renesas’ R-Car H3 system-on-chip (SoC). The 64-bit secure virtualisation platform was partially developed with the specific capabilities of the R-Car H3 in mind. The platform meets the functional safety ...
Green Hills supports Renesas’ R-Car autonomous vehicle project
Google announced a new more secure version of its Eddystone beacon format to protect user privacy, called Eddystone-EID. Eddystone-EID protects user privacy in an app by broadcasting secure beacon signals, including website address URLs, using what’s termed a ‘rotating ephemeral identifier’. According to Google, this will allow manufacturers to manage access to beacons to avoid ...
Google increases IoT user privacy with Eddystone beacon
I heard about monarch butterflies on the radio this morning, and thought I would have a quick look at the paper to see what is going on. It transpires that the new bit is a straight-forward neural algorithm that takes two bits of information the butterfly already has – circadian time, and how far the sun ...
What is the Monarch butterfly thing?
ARM and UMC are to develop multiple physical IP platforms, enabling UMC customers to easily implement ARM®P Artisan physical IP into SoC designs and reduce time-to-market. The agreement spans applications in automotive, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile, from a 55ULP platform for IoT applications to a 14nm FinFET test chip for leading-edge mobile applications. ...
ARM and UMC tie up for physical IP
ARM and UMC are to develop multiple physical IP platforms, enabling UMC customers to easily implement ARM® Artisan physical IP into SoC designs and reduce time-to-market. The agreement spans applications in automotive, Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile, from a 55ULP platform for IoT applications to a 14nm FinFET test chip for leading-edge mobile applications. ...
ARM and UMC tie up for physical IP
As if we didn’t know it from the procession of Intel exitees, the new President brought in from Qualcomm for $25 million is kicking ass. “Over the last three months I have conducted numerous project reviews with our execution teams, and there is a clear trend that has emerged in these reviews – a lack ...
Kaspersky Lab has brought out a protection system for industrial infrastructure. “The cybersecurity of industrial systems and critical infrastructures is of vital importance,” says Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO of Kaspersky Labs, “an increasing number of such systems are using devices and channels that interact with the outside world. Sometimes they use equipment that was ...
Kaspersky system protects critical infrastructure
No nation has enough engineers to protect its infrastructure against cyberattacks.”, Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO of Kaspersky Labs, told a meeting in London yesterday. “We’re living at a time of growing numbers of attacks on infrastructure,” said Kaspersky, ‘ we have seen a case where petrol deliveries were heated above the temperature at which ...
Governments Must Regulate Against Cyberattacks, says Kaspersky
Movement in the hand and fingers of a paralysed man have been temporarily restored using a brain implant linked to electrodes on his forearm. The system has been developed by teams at not-for-profit research firm Battelle and the Wexner Medical Center of Ohio State University, and has been dubbed NeuroLife. Ian Burkhart is the subject. “He participates ...
Brain implant restores arm movement to paralysed hand
The organisers of Droidcon London – which is described as the largest Android developer conference in Europe – are calling for papers. The 2016 event runs at the Business Design Centre, in Angel, on October 27th and 28th 2016, which are a Thursday and Friday. The organisers write: We’re putting on two days of expert ...
Droidcon London 2016 opens Call for Papers
Embroidery with 100μm precision could create brain implants, or integrate electronics into clothing, claims a team from Ohio State University. “A revolution is happening in the textile industry,” said engineer Professor John Volakis. “We believe that functional textiles are an enabling technology for communications and sensing, and even medical applications like imaging and health monitoring.” ...
Embroidery makes wearable antennas
Cambridge Pixel has won the contract to supply radar acquisition hardware and scan conversion software to Cemtrol, the Californian manufacturer of rugged control and monitoring systems. Cemtrol is using Cambridge Pixel’s HPx-200e PCI Express (PCIe) radar input card and SPx software library to provide its Radar Display Console (RDC) with a radar acquisition and display capability. The console is designed for use ...
Cambridge radar specialist wins US contract for PCI Express system
Computer scientists at Columbia University and Google have demonstrating that geotagged posts on just two social media apps are enough to link accounts held by the same person – identifying individuals with a high degree of confidence. Location metadata is the key. “If you look unique in how you make phone calls, it is possible ...
Posting on just two phone apps can reveal your identify
It is about time we took a more look at the potential for autonomous vehicles and in particular the business opportunity this represents for the electronics industry. Obviously the concept of the driverless car has an image problem. With its echoes of shady military activities and the all too real fears about hacking and the ...
Is it time to take driverless cars seriously?
Researchers at Princeton University are predicting a state of matter in which current flows only through surface channels over an insulator. These channels are created through the action of the ‘hourglass fermion’, a theorised particle which arises due to a special property of the material. “The tuning of this property can sequentially create and destroy ...
Princeton suggests fermion transistor
It is time to enter the industry’s largest technology and business awards: the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2016. You could see your company’s technical and business achievements recognised and presented to an international audience at a Gala Dinner which takes place on 1 December 2016 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London. The ...
Elektra Industry Awards 2016 open for entries
Researchers at New York University are looking 25 years ahead to predicting the role artificial intelligence will play in living, learning and research. “Advanced cyber-learning environments that involve virtual reality and artificial intelligence innovations are becoming powerful tools that can facilitate the explorations and conversations needed to solve society’s challenges,” said NYU engineer Dr Winslow ...
Artificial intelligence will do the teaching in 2041
Coherent of Santa Clara has introduced a range of picosecond lasers for use in microelectronics, display and solar cell fabrication. HyperRapid NX product range includes 1064nm output models with pulse energies as high as 250μJ (10ps pulse typical at repetition rates up to 2MHz. “This enables high throughput processes, including enough power for the beam to ...
Picosecond laser for electronics production
Acquisitive Chinese investor Tsinghua Unigroup has bought 6% of Lattice. Lattice was rumoured as being a takeover target of Tsinghua earlier this year. Lattice’s shares rose 15.5% on news of the deal. The speculation is that Tsinghua wants Lattice for the same reason as Intel bought Altera, to.provide FPGA acceleration in server SoCs. The effect ...
Tsinghua buys stake in Lattice
Antenova, the Hatfield antenna specialist, has expanded its design and development facility in Taipei’s technology quarter Nei Hu District, Taiwan. This is in response to the increasing demand from customers for antennas for M2M and IoT applications. Antenova’s engineering resources cover the USA, Europe and Asia, with a specialist RF team in Taipei leading the ...
The two worst jobs in tech must be heading up Apple’s iWatch operation and heading up Intel’s IoT business. Not because these jobs are unrewarding, on the contrary they are generously rewarded, but because the holders of these jobs are on a hiding to nothing. Earlier this month it was announced that the vp in ...
The foundry market grew 4.4% in 2015 to $48.8 billion, says Gartner. “Foundry growth was only possible from the high wafer demand by Apple and the revenue conversion of a few integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) to foundries,” says Gartner’s Sam Wang. TSMC, grew 5.5% in 2015, driven by the success of 20 nm planar and ...
Foundry Grew 4.4%; GloFo No.2.
ST’s declining position in MEMS, once the jewel in its crown, sees no sign of ending. According to Yole Development, ST’s MEMS revenues have declined for three years running. For ST, which had been given the No.1 position in the MEMS industry because Pasquale Pistorio had invested in MEMS development several years ahead of the ...
ST’s MEMS Business Keeps On Declining
Cree has further up-graded its XP-G lighting LED, to version 3. XP-G3 delivers 31% more lumens and 8% higher lm/W that the XP-G2. “XP-G3 LED improves the lumen density, voltage characteristics and reliability of previous XP-G generations,” said Cree, claiming over 205 lm/W at 350mA and up to 863 lm at 2A will be available ...
Cree beats 200lm/W in lighting LED
BVM has announced the LV67-S mini-ITX format industrial grade embedded board which offers a 30% performance improvement over Intel Ivy Bridge processor-based modules. It sports an Intel 6th Generation Skylake i7/i5/i3 series and Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors, running under the Intel C236 chipset and mounted into a new format LGA 1151 socket. Two DDR4 DIMM ...
Mini-ITX Skylake board runs faster than Intel Ivy Bridge
Just to record – you can now find Android Studio 2.0 on Google’s stable release channel. It’s available as an update or separate download. Android Studio is Google’s official development environment for building Android apps, including such things as code analysis tools and emulators, as well as code editors. The headline features both involve saving ...
Google issues Android Studio 2.0 on the stable release channel
If start-ups were funded with common stock rather than preference shares the over-inflated valuations of start-ups – and the Unicorn phenomenon – would be a thing of the past, says Dutch Unicorn CEO Pieter van der Does. van der Does’ Unicorn is a payments company called Adven backed by Mark Zuckerberg with Uber among its ...
Preference Shares Creating Crazy Start-Up Valuations
An IoT gateway design kit is the result of a collaboration between Advantech, Intel and Microsoft. The pre-configured system is built around an Intel Celeron J1900 SoC and WES7E running Windows 7 Embedded with 4Gbyte memory and 500Gbyte HDD. The kit’s two two gateways have been verified through the Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT programme. The networking modules are the ...
IoT gateway is Microsoft Azure Certified
Touchscreen technology has revolutionised user interfaces across a number of markets. The introduction of the iPhone in the mid-2000s helped establish capacitive touchscreen technology as the leading form for consumer applications, but it is just one of a number of technologies, each with its own advantages for specific applications, writes Vince Light. As the rise of ...
Why you must be careful choosing the right touchscreen
Data from a new constellation of satellites will allow farmers to more precisely monitor land and sea to improve their farming businesses. The launch of the Sentinel satellites is part of the European Union’s Copernicus Earth observation programme. The six families of satellites provide data, free of charge, that could be used by farmers to predict the presence of disease ...
European satellites send free data for farmers to monitor crops
The Institution of Engineering and Technology is running a series of BBC micro:bit events around the UK to introduce the elecrocnis teaching initiative to teachers and parents of Year 7 school pupils. The first free event takes place on Saturday, 11 June 2016 from 10:00 to 15:30 at the Thales UK offcies in 1 Linthouse ...
Get to know the BBC micro:bit at free IET events
Synaptics is sampling a display driver IC which it says allows designers to customise their touchscreens adding borders of less than 4mm. The R63353 driver IC supports a range of resolutions from Full HD for smartphones, to lower resolution 320×320 formats targeting smartwatches. The device has auto contrast optimisation for balancing the light and dark ...
Synaptics touch display driver cuts borders to 4mm
Luxoft, which recently acquired auto CAD specialist Symtavision, is focussing on ADAS. The latest SymTA/S 3.8 release adds worst-case timing analysis for Ethernet communication in several flavors including AVB and time-triggered Ethernet, and also covers the ADAS software technology for both AUTOSAR and non-AUTOSAR operating systems, with timing analysis for partitioned and hierarchical schedulers (with ...
Thanks to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) for this one – the top ten companies for PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) patents: Huawei 3,898 Qualcomm 2,442 ZTE 2155 Samsung 1,683 Mitsubishi Electric 1,593 Ericsson 1481 LG 1457 Sony 1381 Philips 1378 HP 1310
To provide engineers with a greater breadth of IO options and also address demands to conserve board real estate, FTDI has announced new versions of its highly popular FT2232H and FT4232H devices. These configurable USB 2.0 Hi-Speed (supporting 480Mbit/s operation) ICs are now available in 56-pin VQFN packages, which complement the 64-pin LQFP package format. ...
FTDI USB 2.0 Chips Support 480Mbit/s.
Oh my word, I have become obsessed. I have been trying to buy a lightweight PC for two things: A little home project involving microcontroller programming and 3D printing – so MPLAB-X and DesignSpark Mechanical. Going to shows and conferences for my day job – where USB sticks full of data are common. For various ...
Five tablets that might just run MPLAB-X and DesignSpark
The HTC 10 - HTC has announced its own new flagship smartphone, supporting optical image stabilisation (OIS) in both cameras
Gadget Watch: HTC 10 smartphone snaps dual OIS
Lacroix Electronics has moved into the Top 10 European electronics subcontractors, according to Reed Electronics Research. The French manufacturer specialises in electronics subcontracting for the industrial, home automation, health, automobile, civil avionics and defence sectors. Its turnover in 2015 was €280m including intra-group sales. This represented a 21.7% increase on the previous year. Lacroix Electronics ...
Lacroix puts French manufacturing in the Top 10
Industry bellwether TSMC had a revenue bounce in March with sales of $2.26 billion which is 22.7% up on February’s sales of $1.86 billion. TSMC’s March revenue was pretty well flat with the $2.23 billion of March 2015. TSMC’s YTD revenues of $6.3 billion are 8.3% down on the Jan-March 2015 revenues of $6.9 billion. ...
