Electronics Weekly articles from April 2003

Electronics Weekly archives from April 2003

Comms training online.
April 2, 2003... Light Reading University (LRU) is offering online training courses which last a total of eight hours but which can be studied in 20 minute chunks over a six month period. The courses cover communications technologies and include:...

Transparent Engineering.
April 2, 2003... Copper lead-frame packaging featured in last week's Technology News was wrongly attributed to Transparent Designs. The company is actually Letchworth-based Transparent Engineering. Its website was correctly given as www.treng.biz

Rotating metal and magnets sucks heat in cool fridge.
April 2, 2003... A novel refrigeration device that cools by rotating gadolinium (Gd) powder through a magnetic field has been built by researchers in the US. Gadolinium is a magnetocaloric material - it heats up when placed in a magnetic field and cools...

Osram lights up future of Italian cars with LEDs.
April 2, 2003... Italian vehicle designer Pininfarina presented this at the Geneva Car Show. Behind the low-profile headlights are LEDs from Osram Opto Semiconductors. Coincidently, Osram has started sampling its long-awaited 1W LEDs. Called Golden...

Oxford goes digital.
April 2, 2003... The University of Oxford is offering five courses for digital circuit engineers on its Summer Engineering Programme, and this year has added an advanced course on high speed and distance design, writes PETER HOLLAND year is a course...

...while Imperial opts for analogue.
April 2, 2003... Imperial College is aiming to address the skills gap in analogue design in its programme, writes MERVYN JONES ods and tools used for circuit design modelling and characterisation. In November, Prof. Willy Sansen from KU Leuven will...

Teaching in tandem.
April 2, 2003... Sector Skills Council SEMTA has joined top disabled employer Remploy to provide courses to its 4,500 workers across England, writes MELANIE REYNOLDS technologies last month. It will act as project managers and provide access to courses by...

UKcompany creates hardware TCP/IP stack that runs in FPGA.
April 2, 2003... Bletchley Park firm 4Links has created a hardware TCP/IP stack that runs in an FPGA. Initially aimed at its SpaceWire communications protocol, the design could have applications in other areas, where a separate processor and software stack...

Scientists slice light into colours for WDM.
April 2, 2003... Southampton University researchers have applied a low-complexity method of producing the multiple colours of light used in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems applied to a highly non-linear type of fibre. This type of so-called...

Biochip the medicine to rejuvenate drug market.
April 2, 2003... The pharmaceutical industry is looking for the computer effect to tranform its drug industry. The biochip is it, writes DAVID MANNERS The siliconisation of the pharmaceutical industry is beginning. Its effect on the computer...

Network firms announce upgrades for broadband.
April 2, 2003... Richard Ball BT and Telewest have announced upgrades to their broadband services, with BT planning a 1Mbit/s ADSL service and Telewest moving to 2Mbit/s over cable. Ten per cent of Telewest's 300,000 broadband customers subscribe to...

Epitaxial firm gets orders from returning customers.
April 2, 2003... Harry Yeates IQE, the south Wales epitaxial wafer supplier, has received orders from optical communications customers that have been silent for the past 18 months. This part of the business could reach five per cent of sales during...

DSP forum to lecture on bus and FPGA use.
April 2, 2003... The UK DSP Forum's inaugural conference and exhibition, to be held next week in Swindon, will feature lectures on operating systems, bus switching and FPGAs. Richard Blackburn from OSE will explain why a real-time operating system is...

University puts geomatics unit out to work.
April 2, 2003... Newcastle University has opened a consultancy called the Geomatics Application Centre (GAC) which will offer the university's expertise in geomatics to businesses. GAC staff will run consultancy projects and provide specialised training in...

Infineon in biochip bid to aid drug development.
April 2, 2003... Infineon Technologies has entered the biochip market with a programme aimed at reducing drug development and test time, slashing the cost of DNA testing, and enabling individually tailored medication. With the drugs industry taking 12 to 15...

UK set-top start-up to sell Internet data security technology in cash-flow move.
April 2, 2003... Amino Communications, the Cambridge set-top box start-up, is looking to sell its 'network diversity' Internet data security technology, and expects to be cash-flow positive by the end of this year. "The network diversity technology is up...

Class 12 GPRS unavailable before year end, says Agere.
April 2, 2003... Class 12 GPRS mobile systems are not expected to be available before the end of the year, according to Agere Systems. "There are still restrictions on where you can go and test class 12, it's still not rolled out in the networks," said...

Intel blocking technique clocks processor remarking by resellers.
April 2, 2003... Richard Ball Overclocking processors could become a thing of the past if Intel decides to use a blocking technique it has patented. The firm's method uses a reference clock to compare to the system clock. The processor can be shut down...

Tempus takes a step back in time with high-tech clock fix.
April 2, 2003... Electronics firm Tempus Consulting is picking up business by providing high-tech controls for some of the UK's oldest clocks. In a recent project, the firm made the 1760 St Lawrence's Church clock in Lechlade accurate to within 1s/year. ...

February sees slip in worldwide chip sales.
April 2, 2003... Worldwide semiconductor sales dipped slightly in February from the month before. The US Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) said sales of $11.8bn were down 3.3 per cent on January, but up 18 per cent on February 2002. "The...

GSM group boss attacks US Congressman over Iraq talk.
April 2, 2003... Melanie Reynolds An attempt by a US Congressman to ensure a post-war Iraq is installed with America's CDMA comms technology rather than rival GSM has been condemned. "The right time to debate the technology will be when the real...

Optical chips see the light with hollow guides.
April 2, 2003... QinetiQ has developed hollow waveguides to connect components on optical chips. "The technology enables light to be guided directly from device to device across a large area," said QinetiQ. Optical chips tend to be substrates with...

Japanese chip merger forms world's third largest IC firm.
April 2, 2003... The third largest semiconductor company in the world was launched yesterday (April 1), made up of the merged semiconductor operations of Hitachi and Mitsubishi and called Renesas Technology. "One point of the merger is to get to the scale...

afdec figures.
April 9, 2003... Monthly data on the UK component distribution market, supplied by industry association Afdec. February 2003 book-to-bill ratios Semiconductors (industrial) 0.95 Passives 1.05 Electromechanical 1.01 Total 1.01 ...

Analogue hits back.
April 9, 2003... Programmable analogue devices have burst back on the scene in the form of shop door tag detectors and specialist audio equipment. So what does the future hold? Steve Bush talks to some of the companies involved Like running down a platform...

Will PCBs prosper?
April 9, 2003... The UK's PCB industry can survive and prosper in 2003, but only if firms adapt and change with value-added services and through strategic alliances in Asian countries. Time to get your strategy right, says Brian Haken As we entered 2003, I...

How do you attract venture capitalists?
April 9, 2003... In a special feature on start-ups, including an exclusive updated start-up map of the UK, Electronics Weekly contacted two venture capitalists and asked them how an entrepreneur should approach the problem of attracting funding The first...

UK low-cost solar cells use latest photovoltaic model.
April 9, 2003... Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University are developing electrodeposition techniques for low-cost solar cells to help take advantage of a new model explaining photovoltaic (PV) behaviour. Worldwide research into thin-film PV technology is...

Researchers unveil 700W/cm2 thermoelectric cooling device.
April 9, 2003... US researchers have demonstrated thin-film superlattice thermoelectric devices with cooling power densities of 700W/cm2. The scientists at Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina claim their device uses 40,000 times less material than...

Fujitsu walking robot gets its brains from reconfigurable neural network.
April 9, 2003... A neural network forms the brain of Fujitsu's latest walking robot, HOAP-2. Fujitsu Laboratories developed the dynamically reconfigurable neural network so the robot can learn movement and motor co-ordination, claimed the firm. HOAP-2...

Processors on the move.
April 9, 2003... As mobile applications overtake desktops as the main areas of competition between processor designers, issues of cost, power consumption and performance are dictating players' strategies, writes RICHARD BALL With the desktop processor...

Speech therapists.
April 9, 2003... The latest software for adding word recognition for command and control functions to high performance mobile platforms is a welcome way to put data into today's shrinking mobile devices, but speak clearly, says HARRY YEATES Dynamics. "It's...

Grey market blues.
April 9, 2003... Grey market products are hitting companies where it hurts - in their profits - and it's a growing problem, according to a survey by KPMG LLP. Other factors like component obsolescence are adding fuel to the fire, writes RICHARD WILSON ...

Brain damaging protein fibres used to grow nanowires in US.
April 9, 2003... US researchers have used prions, the mis-folded protein fibres that damage brain tissue in diseases such as BSE and CJD, to grow conductive nanowires. Led by Professor Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in...

NEC monitor screen doubles as speaker.
April 9, 2003... Computer monitors in which the screen doubles up as a speaker are being marketed by NEC. The monitors, only on sale in Japan, use SoundVu technology, developed by Cambridge-based company NXT. "The sound quality is very good, probably...

Israeli R&D firm creates $5 DAB chip.
April 9, 2003... Israeli R&D firm Sonarics has developed a $5 DAB (digital audio broadcast) chip which includes MP3 decoding, AM and FM digital baseband processing and audio sound effects. "$5 is the selling price of the chip and we have our own RF radio...

Silver epoxies, not solders, to bond flip-chip.
April 9, 2003... In a programme with industry and other universities, the University of Greenwich is developing conductive epoxies and processes to replace solder in flip-chip PCB assemblies (EW, 02/04/2003). Solder melts into a liquid during use and...

Location matters.
April 9, 2003... EC figures show that valuable time is lost by the emergency services responding to 999 calls from mobile phones when the caller is unsure of where they are, but will new E112 legislation help? MELANIE REYNOLDS has her doubts While the EU...

Japan chip alliance.
April 9, 2003... The Japanese chip industry has been given a major shot in the arm with the merger of the chip businesses of Hitachi and Mitsubishi into Renesas Technology. DAVID MANNERS spoke to the new firm's European president Renaissance is the...

Platform soles in fashion.
April 9, 2003... The growing use of platforms in the shrunken telecoms equipment market is a survival test for semiconductor companies, says Steve Dodsworth The severe market decline that began around two years ago is leading to new and transformed...

Kent-based Israeli firm puts $5 chip into DAB receivers.
April 9, 2003... Steve Bush Sonarics, based in Israel and headquartered in Kent, is producing silicon and applications intellectual property for DAB radio receivers. "Our offering will mostly come from the software arena," said company chief technical...

China: Uninspired, derivative.
April 9, 2003... The signs are not promising for the Chinese electronics industry. It is an industry focused on short term gains, one in which all the players want to be making other people's products. Where is the innovation? asks DAVID MANNERS China is...

IDT comms processor includes encryption.
April 9, 2003... Integrated Device Technology has unveiled a comms processor that includes data encryption hardware. The RC32365 device could be used in home and small office applications, said the firm. Virtual private networks could be created between...

Electronics rewarded for adventurous university research with five-year fund.
April 9, 2003... Half of the UK university research groups singled out last week to receive five years of guaranteed funding under a novel scheme to promote adventurous research are based in electronics departments. They include Professor Steve Furber's...

Acal forges technology division to boost growth.
April 9, 2003... Acal Group's recently created subsidiary Acal Technology is looking to increase turnover from the mid- to high-end FPGA and ASSP markets. The 85 strong distribution business which was formed after the merger of Gothic Crellon and Amega...

UK optical storage firm to sign up portable licensees.
April 9, 2003... Harry Yeates Scottish optical storage specialist Infinite Data Storage has finalised manufacturing deals for its latest Komodo and Nexus products, and is now chasing licensees. The company hopes to officially announce the partner...

RA proposes CB radio deregulation and halving number of channels.
April 9, 2003... The UK Radiocommunications Agency is proposing to deregulate CB radio, removing the licence fee and cutting 40 of the current 80 channels. Applications for the pound sterling15 CB licence have dropped from 300,000 at their peak to 24,000...

Comms market in Europe is recovering, says Conexant.
April 9, 2003... Europe's comms market is growing again after more than two years of downturn, according to Dwight Decker, CEO of comms semiconductor specialist Conexant. The main driver, said Decker, is deployment of xDSL-based broadband access systems....

Analyst identifies network and interoperability hurdles for 3G.
April 9, 2003... Complexities in network infrastructure and handset interoperability are two of the main hurdles to 3G mobile implementation, according to the latest report from Allied Business Intelligence (ABI). ABI also pinpoints unrealistic projections...

Actel sees rapid growth in telematics as driving force for anti-fuse FPGAs.
April 9, 2003... Actel is making a push into the automotive market for its anti-fuse FPGAs. The firm reckons demand for high-reliability devices is set to soar in applications such as telematics. "This is an industry segment poised for rapid growth...

Nallatech opens design and sales office in Silicon Valley.
April 9, 2003... Scottish firm Nallatech has extended its reach in the US by opening a sales and design office in Silicon Valley. The reconfigurable computing firm has an office in Florida, but with nearly half of its business in North America, a west-coast...

STMicroelectronics revenues may fall below first quarter forecasts.
April 9, 2003... STMicroelectronics' net revenues for the first quarter of 2003 are expected to fall below previous forecasts. Based on preliminary data it expects net revenues of $1.618bn and a gross margin of 35 per cent, below the firm's previous bottom...

ST top of the application specific chip market place.
April 9, 2003... STMicroelectronics has topped the application specific chip market with nearly $1bn more in revenues than the number two player Texas Instruments. Xilinx has widened its lead in the FPGA market over nearest rival Altera, according to...

IBM joins CERN with database.
April 9, 2003... IBM is joining the European physics lab CERN to create a data-management system built on Grid computing. Called Storage Tank, it will handle data regardless of where or on what operating system the data resides. IBM and CERN will work...

Mobile graphics gains from fewer polygons.
April 9, 2003... High end 3D graphics techniques, previously limited to games consoles, could make it into handheld devices using hardware from PowerVR, the graphics division of Imagination Technologies. PowerVR has combined its MBX embedded core with...

Aerospace engineers are top earners.
April 9, 2003... Electrical engineers working in aerospace earn an average salary of pound sterling25,500 compared to pound sterling16,500 for those working in the electronics and communications sector, according to an Engineering Employers' Federation pay...

Ford sees future of telematics in govt applications.
April 9, 2003... Government applications, such as congestion charging, represents a significant market for the future use of telematics, according to car company Ford. "The governmental side is the strong side of the market," said Niklas Wahlberg, head of...

Chinese mobile sector matches Europe, says TTPCom director.
April 9, 2003... China's mobile phone sector is developing into a sophisticated market to match Europe, according to Richard Fry, sales and marketing director at TTPCom. "Many people don't fully realise how sophisticated the Chinese mobile market is," said...

UK chip assembly firm doubles up.
April 9, 2003... Ramsay: Six million a month. South Wales chip packaging and test house Atlantic Technology (UK) has doubled the number of chips it handles in the last 12 months. "It was three million a month at the beginning of 2002 and is now in...

Dupont claims OLED success.
April 9, 2003... DuPont Displays claims the optical performance of devices from its joint OLED development programme with Universal Display (UDC) have significantly improved. "We are developing materials that exhibit electrical efficiencies very close to...

Toshiba sees flash future in floating gate; g.
April 9, 2003... Toshiba sees a future for floating gate flash memory all the way down to 55nm, whereas rivals are talking about transitioning from floating gate to alternative technologies. Rivals are usually following the MNOS (metal nitride oxide...

South Korean exports suffer as DRAM prices take a dive.
April 9, 2003... South Korea's exports have been severely hit by the decline in DRAM prices and the situation is expected to get worse as the US-imposed tariff on Hynix sales to the US takes effect. The Korea Semiconductor Industry Association (KSIA)...

UKflirtation with DRAM ends with NEC fab sale.
April 9, 2003... David Manners The sorry saga of inwardly investing DRAM companies in the UK has been capped by NEC's announcement that it will sell its wafer fab in Livingston, Scotland. Samsung, Hynix (formerly Hyundai Semiconductors), LG...

Welsh opto start-up seeks funding for medical LEDs.
April 9, 2003... Richard Ball Welsh optoelectronics start-up Enfis is planning to raise further investment funding and double its staff this year. The firm is developing LED sources for medical equipment, and is concentrating on power and cost...

Electronics companies act to prevent spread of killer virus.
April 9, 2003... EW reporters Electronics companies are taking action to combat the Asian pneumonia-like SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) virus which has already killed over 80 people. Semiconductor companies with sites in the affected areas of...

Automatic mobile calls will improve road safety.
April 9, 2003... Automatic calls providing location information to emergency services from vehicles will play a major part in improving safety on Europe's roads, says the European Commission. "We are of the opinion that substantial achievements can be made...

Engineering council funds computational systems R&D work.
April 16, 2003... Harry Yeates The challenge of managing and exploiting complex computational systems is being addressed with two funding themes by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). One initiative, backed with pound...

Toshiba to develop flash with control combination.
April 16, 2003... David Manners Toshiba is working with Israeli design house M-Systems to produce a NAND flash with a controller in the same package to deliver parallel access NAND, delivering an SRAM-type interface to a NAND for a product called...

Smartmos8 detailed by Motorola.
April 16, 2003... Motorola has detailed its latest power-analogue-digital process: Smartmos8 MV (medium voltage). Deep trench isolation in the 0.25[micro]m process allows devices up to 90V to be made. Logic density is 20,000 gates/mm2, bipolar...

IR powers up unregulated rails for card-edge converter chipset.
April 16, 2003... Steve Bush IR's DC Bus chipset at a glance Part****Package****Rating****RDS(on)*****Qg****Qgd****Per set****Function IR2085S****SO-8****100V****************1****Primary-side control IC ...

Imagination boosted by 3D graphics licence with TI.
April 16, 2003... Imagination Technologies has received a major boost by licensing its 3D graphics technology to Texas Instruments. The PowerVR MBX graphics core will be integrated into TI's OMAP family of processors for wireless devices such as mobile...

The memory men.
April 16, 2003... The market for non-volatile memory is set to overtake volatile storage as the memory of the future on the back of portable USB, digital cameras, MP3s, mobiles and PDAs, but there are pitfalls. DAVID MANNERS sorts it out What's the best...

Optoelectronics firm Kamelian builds up customer confidence after funding coup.
April 16, 2003... Alex Mayhew-Smith Optoelectronics start-up Kamelian has won $6.7m of funding which the firm says will reassure customers in a nervous market. "It gives us credibility with our customers, we can demonstrate that we have funding and the...

Old cars and the ; obsolescence ; manager....
April 16, 2003... Ian Blackman of BAE Systems The programme has been announced for the third international obsolescence conference to be held by the Component Obsolescence Group (COG) in co-operation with the US DMSMS Teaming Group. It will take place at...

WLAN chip firm announces 802.11 access point device.
April 16, 2003... Harry Yeates Reading-based wireless LAN chip firm Synad, which is sampling a dual band chipset for client cards supporting all three IEEE 802.11 standards, is on the verge of announcing an access point product. Until now it has offered...

Microsoft grants customers right to modify source code.
April 16, 2003... Richard Ball Microsoft has extended its Shared Source Initiative to the Windows CE operating system, giving firms such as ARM, Intel, National Semiconductor, MIPS and Toshiba the right to modify source code. Chip developers and OEMs...

Tiny fuel pod built into US micro cell.
April 16, 2003... The miniature 'fuel processor' pictured is part of a micro fuel cell system developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. The device contains two vapourisers, a heat exchanger, a catalytic...

Xilinx extends Spartan to five million logic gates.
April 16, 2003... Xilinx is making a ten-fold increase in density of Spartan, its lower cost FPGA family, a move largely enabled by the jump to 90nm feature, 300mm wafer, processing. Spartan-3, the latest generation of the devices, is due for production...

Electronics slips on DTI Value Added Scoreboard.
April 16, 2003... Alex Mayhew-Smith The electronics sector has lost serious ground in the Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI's) latest Value Added Scoreboard. The industry ranking saw the electronic and electrical sector drop 20 per cent in Europe...

Chinese supermarket.
April 16, 2003... With a potential market of many millions of subscribers, China is seen as a trophy market for mobile phone companies. RICHARD WILSON writes Mobile communications companies may be still searching for that elusive "killer application" to...

Cambridge University claims 3.5THz quantum cascade device is the longest wavelength laser.
April 16, 2003... Harry Yeates Researchers in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University have demonstrated continuous wave operation of laser devices emitting at 3.5THz ( = 85[micro]m), the longest wavelength yet shown from a quantum cascade device....

Govt cautious in replacing fraud-riven ILA programme.
April 16, 2003... The Government is exercising caution in finding a replacement for the Individual Learning Accounts (ILA) after the scheme was closed in November 2001 following fraudulent claims estimated to total pound sterling67m. "We were seared by the...

Mentor sharpens profiles in design.
April 16, 2003... Mentor Graphics has added code profiling and bus analysis to the fifth generation of Seamless, its hardware/software co-verification tool. Seamless has been around for some seven years, and allows real application software to run on a...

MoD picks BAE to lead sensor R&D.
April 16, 2003... A research centre for electromagnetic remote sensing technology is one of two centres being set up by the Ministry of Defence. The contract for running the centre, which will conduct research aimed at enhancing performance of sensing...