Electronics Weekly articles from August 2003

Electronics Weekly archives from August 2003

A bit of light relief.
August 6, 2003... After the highs of a booming telecoms market came the lows of a downturn where research spending and venture capital was slashed. But it's not all gloom and doom as work in optoelectronics goes on. HARRY YEATES reports For a long time...

Networking: The way to successful job hunting.
August 6, 2003... Relying on the usual routes to gain employment can be a risky strategy in a time when there are lots of applicants but few employers. Try using a network of contacts to find out about jobs before they are advertised, says NICK SHELL Amid...

Cost reductions fail to stem losses for Alcatel.
August 6, 2003... Alcatel losses deepened in the second quarter despite what it called "substantial" cost reductions. The firm's fixed communications network business broke even at the operating level, but the loss-making optical networking business added to a...

Three chip firms join Nokia in multimedia mobile initiative.
August 6, 2003... Steve Bush Three semiconductor firms have joined with Nokia to encourage the development of next generation multimedia mobile phones. ARM, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments are working with Nokia to define and promote open...

Radio Agency asks firms to research mobile antennas.
August 6, 2003... Steve Bush Cambridge-based aerial developer Antenova with Orange and Queen Mary University are to research the spectral efficiency of mobile antennas for the Radiocommunications Agency. "The contract is to develop MIMO [multi-input...

Virtual keyboard chipset for mobiles.
August 6, 2003... Canesta has released its chipset that allows products such as mobile phones to project a virtual keyboard on flat surfaces. Another device locates the user's fingers in space and tracks the intended 'keystroke'. A third device in the system...

Integrated optical antenna better than lens.
August 6, 2003... Optical Antenna Solutions (OAS) of Coventry has produced its first integrated demonstrator, made in conjunction with Silicon Sensors, a German company which is expected to licence the technology for a product. OAS, a spin-off from the...

Bookham move follows solid precedent.
August 6, 2003... There is nothing new in altering course when the technology wind changes. DAVID MANNERS writes Last week, Bookham Technology announced it was dropping development of the ASOC product platform, which was the raison d'tre for its founding,...

Growth in electronic personal healthcare sees Philips expand.
August 6, 2003... Steve Bush Philips is expanding research into electronic personal healthcare by setting up a chair of medical information technology at the Aachen University of Technology in Germany. "The reason we support the chair is we see in...

Who holds the aces in the telecoms market?
August 6, 2003... The optoelectronics companies have seen their influence on the telecoms industry fall as the markets collapsed, and now as the industry rebuilds the order of importance has changed. MELANIE REYNOLDS picks up the pieces The man across the...

Latest ARC processor core due out before end of year.
August 6, 2003... Alex Mayhew-Smith ARC CEO Mike Gulett predicted there would be further consolidation in the semiconductor IP market and insisted ARC would be a "survivor". He added that ARC had in the past been in several serious discussions about...

BT to re-enter mobile arena after 56 per cent profits rise.
August 6, 2003... BT surprised the mobile industry by saying that it was re-entering the consumer mobile phone market less than two years after exiting it with the sale of its mmO2 mobile business. This time BT will be using mmO2 rival T-Mobile's network to...

Zetex protected Mosfet lets OEMs customise security.
August 6, 2003... Steve Bush First IntelliFET product The first IntelliFET product is the BSP75G. This 60V 550m1/2 1.6A general purpose low-side switch is protected against over temperature, over current, over voltage (active clamp) and ESD. Clamping...

Wavelength pattern on polymer film creates feedback lasers.
August 6, 2003... Solid-state distributed feedback lasers have been built by researchers at the University of St Andrews by embossing a wavelength-scale pattern into a thin film of semiconducting polymer. The pattern, a grid with a pitch of 400nm, is pressed...

GSM system makers eye Chinese market.
August 6, 2003... GSM system manufacturers are pushing for their technology to be adopted in the world's largest mobile market in China. Industry group the GSM Association (GSMA) hopes to convince the Chinese government that the country should be adopting...

Government tells firms to develop Far East projects.
August 6, 2003... Richard Ball The Government is encouraging UK firms to develop partnerships and operations in the Far East. A recent conference saw Nigel Griffiths, Minister for Small Business, speak alongside the Asia Pacific Electronic Business...

Technology firms team to assess IP viability.
August 6, 2003... Technology licensing firm BTG has linked up with Semiconductor Insights, a company specialising in analysis of ICs and structures. Semiconductor Insights will assess the technical viability of intellectual property, while BTG addresses the...

Quasar buy-out on verge of major deal.
August 6, 2003... Microwave products firm The Waveguide Solution, which appeared earlier this year following a management buyout of Quasar Microwave Technology's waveguide business, is on the verge of a contract that will guarantee major revenues for the next...

UK firm sharpens focus of polymer OLED microdisplay.
August 6, 2003... Harry Yeates Edinburgh microdisplay developer MicroEmissive Displays has introduced a full colour, active matrix, polymer OLED for viewfinder applications. The company claims its CMOS-based ME3203 device is the world's first active matrix...

Actel updates design software.
August 6, 2003... Actel has updated its FPGA design software, adding links to third party synthesis tools and improving the performance of designs. Version five of Libero can take inputs from Mentor Graphics' two synthesis tools, Leonardo Spectrum and...

OEMs holding up European chip recovery, says analyst.
August 6, 2003... David Manners Europe is not sharing in the semiconductor industry recovery because of the lack of competitiveness of its OEMs, it was alleged at a semiconductor industry seminar in London last week. "In the first half of the year...

Flomerics 'well placed' despite losses.
August 6, 2003... Thermal analysis firm Flomerics dropped into loss in the first six months of the year as turnover fell 18 per cent to [pounds sterling]4.88m. Losses before amortisation of goodwill were [pounds sterling]103,000 compared with a profit of [pounds...

Edge to bridge gap between 2.5 and 3G.
August 6, 2003... David Manners STMicroelectronics sees GSM taking the volume part of the wireless telephony business for the next five to seven years with the GSM enhancement technology Edge bridging the gap between GPRS and 3G. "Edge will enhance the...

Test company acquires Racal's wireless group.
August 6, 2003... Test firm Aeroflex has acquired Racal's wireless group for $38m in cash and a deferred payment of up to $16.5m in cash or shares. Racal Wireless, part of Racal Instruments, is based in Slough. The group develops digital wireless test and...

UMC goes back to roots.
August 6, 2003... UMC is returning to its established business model under its new CEO, Jackson Hu, rather than continuing to seek close alliances with fabless companies that pledge 100 per cent of their production needs to UMC. UMC is the world's second...

Asic usage tumbled 29 per cent in 2002.
August 6, 2003... Consumption of application specific ICs including modems, Ethernet devices, SONET/SDH, voice-processing chips, network processors and public telecoms network PDH devices) by the global networking OEMs dropped 29 per cent in 2002, according to...

First China foundry to join ARM.
August 6, 2003... ARM has announced that Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) has become the first foundry in mainland China to join its programme. In addition, SMIC has licensed the ARM7TDMI microprocessor core. The deal follows...

Orange brings speech to festival.
August 6, 2003... Mobile operator Orange is using Rhetorical Systems' rVoice text-to-speech technology to send news to Edinburgh Festival visitors. The service takes news items that have been submitted by reporters and 'reads' them to mobile phone users at...

ISLI expands summer courses.
August 6, 2003... The Institute for System Level Integration is expanding its annual Test Summer School to the south of England with a five-day course at Southampton University from 15-19 September. The School is aimed at digital or analogue core designers...

Motorola battles for 100Mbit/s UWB prize.
August 6, 2003... Harry Yeates Motorola is squaring up to a consortium of 26 major electronics firms as the process to define the physical layer of a 100Mbit/s short range wireless standard using ultra wideband (UWB) radio hots up. A field of 31...

Fibre sensing firm buys Bragg grating developer.
August 6, 2003... Insensys, the optical fibre sensing company, has bought Indigo Photonics, a Birmingham-based firm developing fibre Bragg grating components. The value of the all-share deal was not disclosed, but the combination brings significant...

Bookham would rather sell UK wafer fab than close it down.
August 6, 2003... Richard Ball Optical device manufacturer Bookham Technology could sell its wafer fab at Milton Park, Oxfordshire along with all the associated intellectual property. Last week the firm announced its intention to "dispose" of the...

Robotelescope's first images.
August 6, 2003... The UK-built 2m Liverpool Telescope, the world's largest robotic telescope, captured its first images this week. "It is fully autonomous," said Dr Andy Newsam, the National School's Observatory astronomer. "We send it observations to make,...

PCB maker gets UL approval and seeks specialist sectors.
August 6, 2003... Alex Mayhew-Smith Stevenage Circuits is bidding to compete in previously inaccessible PCB markets after winning UL approval for flexible and hybrid flexible rigid boards. David O'Donoghue, the PCB maker's sales manager, said the...

Cameras lift mobile sales 19 per cent.
August 6, 2003... Cameras and colour screens in mobile phones sparked a 19.2 per cent rise in handset sales to reach 118.3 million phones sold worldwide in the second quarter, according to analysts IDC. The popularity of smartphones, handsets with datacomms,...

Optical fibre hopes on 10Gbit/s Ethernet.
August 6, 2003... High speed Ethernet networks running at 10Gbit/s are the next big target application for optical fibre system suppliers looking for ways to emerge from the infrastructure spending freeze of the operators. According to Steve Methley, a...

R&D work likely to follow manufacturing move to cheaper countries, says report.
August 6, 2003... Manufacturing is gone or is going and now, according to a report by the Institute for Manufacturing (IFM), executives are expecting R&D work to move from the UK to cheaper cost countries. "The House of Lords report - Chips for Everything -...

Atmel VLIW DSP for SoC.
August 6, 2003... Atmel has introduced a very long instruction world (VLIW) DSP core that provides single-cycle execution of FFT butterflies and vector arithmetic for wave processing applications. The mAgic VLIW core is designed for SoC implementations and...

Cambridge University's supercapacitors could be used to power electric vehicles.
August 20, 2003... Harry Yeates Researchers at Cambridge University are developing electrode materials for very high performance supercapacitors that could be used to power electric vehicles. The university is also looking for investors to help...

Swarm of robots can map out environments and find objects.
August 20, 2003... Steve Bush Robots use Debian Linux The robots run the Debian distribution of Linux and use a software control system developed at SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center (see SRI website), which was first created as an integrated...

The China Syndrome.
August 20, 2003... Original equipment manufacturers are moving production operations to China almost for the sake of it, paying little or no attention to the costs associated with supply chains, logistics and so on. Harry Yeates reports You're building a...

Beyond the FPGA.
August 20, 2003... Bernie Vonderschmitt is the man who founded the Silicon Valley phenomenon called Xilinx, which invented the FPGA and turned it into a huge market. He spoke to DAVID MANNERS about life, people, history and ideas You would never guess, if...

Weapons programme creates jobs.
August 20, 2003... Over 110 jobs are expected to be created or sustained following the announcement of a [pounds sterling]140m plan to equip the Army and Royal Marines with electronic warfare equipment. The jobs will be at QinetiQ in Malvern Worcestershire,...

Don't worry if new rules show deficit in your pension fund.
August 20, 2003... Year end****Market value****FRS17 surplus/******** Company****2002****of assets [pounds sterling]m****(deficit) [pounds sterling]m BT****March****27,100****(1,830) Invensys****March****4,784****25 ...

3D sound company to broker audio IP.
August 20, 2003... Middlesex-based 3D sound company Sensaura, part of the Scipher group, is to become an intellectual property (IP) broker for audio patents, aiming at automotive, consumer and communication sectors. "Scipher has an established patent...

Casimir force work will improve nanomachines.
August 20, 2003... Richard Ball Better photonic mirrors and nanomachines could be the result of work to measure the Casimir force by a team from Purdue University in the US. The Casimir force comes into play when two objects have very small separations,...

Atmel uses its brains to get high performance at low clock speed.
August 20, 2003... The human brain's ability to perform very high numbers of operations per second at a low clock speed inspired the VLIW architecture of Atmel's mAgic DSP core, announced recently. Pier Stanislao Paolucci, who led the development work in...

No scope for analyser combo, says Tektronix.
August 20, 2003... Advances in test equipment design will not lead to a combined logic analyser and oscilloscope in one box, according to Tektronix. The test instrument supplier has no plans for an integrated scope/logic analyser despite saying the building...

Snubber-less switch has the power.
August 20, 2003... Researchers at Virginia Tech in the US have developed a fast snubber-less high-power switch, called an emitter turn-off thyristor or ETO. "The ETO is a solid-state switch that is suitable for use in high-frequency power converters," said...

Zuken launches PC routing software.
August 20, 2003... Richard Ball Zuken has unveiled a four tier offering of its Cadstar PCB design software, bringing its high-end routing software to the PC. The XR 2000 software is bundled with Cadstar, for four layer, six layer or unlimited layer...

Taiwan processor maker guarantees five year life.
August 20, 2003... Taiwanese processor maker VIA Technologies is guaranteeing a five year lifecycle for its low power Eden processor. The x86 class device needs no fan, making it suitable in industrial applications and devices such as point of sale terminals,...

Aspex licenses technology to chip maker in fab deal.
August 20, 2003... Richard Ball The Middlesex firm has secured a number of customers, including one described by Greenfield as a "big brother", which will manufacture Aspex's chips. "They've got an OEM licence to resell our chip under their own name,"...

GPS kit for indoor receiver testing.
August 20, 2003... Chronos Technology has developed a global positioning system (GPS) re-radiating kit allowing receivers to be developed, tested and demonstrated indoors. An external antenna with 40dB gain receives the GPS signals, which are then...

Display company shows gap in basic LCD market.
August 20, 2003... Richard Ball Newbury-based Intelligent Display Solutions (IDS) says there are major opportunities for firms selling basic LCDs, as most of the UK's distributors are concentrating on more expensive TFTs. Many of the smaller technical...

Stick with Europe and US, Flextronics urges clients.
August 20, 2003... Harry Yeates Flextronics, the contract electronics manufacturer, is urging its customers to consider using facilities in Europe and the US, rather than reverting as a matter of course to China. The company said that, when the effect on...

BOC connects up for US superconducting cable joint venture.
August 20, 2003... David Manners UK gas and chemicals group BOC and Sumitomo, the Japanese chemicals and materials company, have joined US superconductor specialists Intermagnetics to develop a superconducting cable for the New York power grid. Also,...

Basestation tests meet guidelines.
August 20, 2003... Over 250 UK sites have been tested for emission levels from mobile phone basestations and the highest reading achieved is 1/279 of the guidelines set by the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP). The...

Scottish universities develop computers the size of sand grains.
August 20, 2003... Five Scottish universities are sharing a [pounds sterling]1.3m grant to develop computers the size of grains of sand. The Speckled Computing project was thought up by a team from the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Napier, St Andrews...

Government publishes guide to waste reduction.
August 20, 2003... A guidebook on how to reduce waste in PCB production has been published by the Government's Envirowise programme. It describes simple and practical measures PCB manufacturers can take to save money by improving their use of laminate,...

LCD company plans display production with DTI award.
August 20, 2003... Melanie Reynolds Cambridge-based Screen Technology (STL) is planning to start low volume manufacturing in March 2004 after securing a [pounds sterling]756,000 DTI Smart funding award to create an automated pilot manufacturing line for its...

DSL access module market grows 16%.
August 20, 2003... The market for DSL access modules (DSLAMs) grew 16 per cent in Q2, according to Gartner Dataquest. The leading supplier by a long way is France's Alcatel, which shipped 3,120 DSL ports in the quarter. In second place was Huawei of China...

Infineon teams up with Taiwan firm for fibre optic components.
August 20, 2003... Infineon Technologies and United Expitaxy Company (UEC) of Taiwan, have agreed to set up a joint venture in October for the manufacturing and development of fibre optics components at UEC's facility in the Hsinchu science park. Infineon...

Oxford University offers patterning method for biochips.
August 20, 2003... Isis Innovations, the intellectual property arm of the University of Oxford, is offering biochip engineers an improved method of patterning surfaces. "The technology's resolution approaches that of photolithography," said Isis' Dr Taj...

ST and TI can compete in CDMA market.
August 20, 2003... David Manners Low cost manufacturing will allow STMicroelectronics (ST) and Texas Instruments (TI) to compete in the CDMA chipset business with market leader Qualcomm, according to Aldo Romano, corporate v-p at ST. "I don't expect...

Surrey aims for tenfold cut in fuel cell prices.
August 20, 2003... Researchers at the University of Surrey hope to cut the price of high-temperature fuel cells by ten, and have [pounds sterling]249,000 to support their fundamental research. "We are looking to develop a system operating somewhere between...

Chairs get Bluetooth.
August 20, 2003... Lancaster University is leading a project to wirelessly connect everyday objects. The EU project, called Smart-Its, is attempting to enable ordinary objects such as coffee cups, chairs and tables with processing power, memory, sensors and...

Panasonic increases Welsh R&D.
August 20, 2003... Panasonic has increased its R&D staff in Wales to create a centre of excellence for new product innovation, in a bid to move away from low value-added manufacturing. "The objective has been to move the entire operation up the value chain....

Antenna start-up unveils MIMO chipset for WLANs.
August 20, 2003... US antenna start-up Airgo Networks has launched a MIMO (multiple input/multiple output) chipset for 802.11 wireless LANs. The company claims its multiple antenna technology increases data rates to 108Mbit/s per channel and extends range,...

Share placing may mark end for Eurodis' search for buyer.
August 20, 2003... Eurodis Electron seems to have made little progress in its discussions with a potential buyer for the company. The discussions, which have been taking place since April, are continuing but remain at a "very preliminary" stage, according to...

UWB chip developer backs Xtreme Spectrum proposal.
August 20, 2003... Artimi, which develops chips for ultra wideband radio, would prefer to see the system from US firm Xtreme Spectrum and backed by Motorola win approval at September's IEEE meeting in Singapore. However, the Cambridge start-up's CEO Jack Lang...

Backplane growth too slow to save opto firm.
August 20, 2003... Harry Yeates Edinburgh optical communications start-up Terahertz Photonics has been placed in administration. The firm, which was developing materials for optical backplanes and telecoms components, had signed up to a [pounds...

TV star to host industry awards.
August 20, 2003... Award-winning impressionist Alistair McGowan will host the inaugural European Electronics Industry Awards gala dinner and dance which takes place on September 24 at Le Meridien Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London. Don't miss out on...

Fall in wired comms chips to stop.
August 20, 2003... The decline in the wired communications semiconductor market will, says iSuppli, stop by the middle of this year. But the researcher expects the year to end with the market down seven per cent from 2002. Factory revenues for wired comms...

R&D work stays at home.
August 20, 2003... Richard Wilson The electronics industry has hit back at claims that R&D activities are following manufacturing offshore to lower cost regions such as China. "I certainly do not agree that product design will necessarily follow...