Electronics Weekly articles from December 2005

Electronics Weekly archives from December 2005

Industry looks to network talks.
December 14, 2005... The industry will hope to get a better indication of how the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) for electronics will take shape at the gathering of business and academic groups this week. "It is the first opportunity to get a broad...

Largest flexible organic display.
December 14, 2005... This is the world's largest flexible organic active matrix display, according to Cambridge start-up Plastic Logic. The 10-inch diagonal SVGA (600 x 800) device has a resolution of 100 pixels per inch and four levels of greyscale. It was built...

IEEE wireless delays turn UK group to Europeans.
December 14, 2005... One of the two groups pushing for IEEE standardisation of ultra wideband radio technology has turned instead to a European organisation after over two years of delay and debate. The IEEE's working party has been deadlocked for so long that...

GSM dielectric planar antenna.
December 14, 2005... Distributor TDC is stocking Taoglas' PA22 tri-band (900/1800/1900) GSM dielectric PIFA (planar inverted-F antenna). Measuring 29.8x6x5mm, the antenna has 0dB gain for both the 880-960Mhz and 1.71-1.99Ghz ranges and has an operating temperature...

Heading here.
December 14, 2005... Hittite Microwave has two fully integrated power amplifier modules aimed at cellular and 3G repeaters; wireless data; laboratory; and automatic test equipment. HMC-C012 and HMC-C013 provide 40dB of small-signal gain and a minimum of 10W of...

Heading here.
December 14, 2005... NEC is to introduce an automotive high-side driver aimed primarily at controlling 55W light bulbs. Included is 36V load-dump, short-circuit and over-temperature protection, as well as a diagnostic function. In a five pin TO-252 packaged, the...

Danish test company ?set to expand in 2006.
December 14, 2005... Test firm Delta Microelectronics is to expand in 2006, as the UK's blooming start-up culture brings a rising stream of business. The Danish company, which has its UK headquarters in Hengoed, South Wales, has signed a test contract for...

Qinetiq advances InSb work.
December 14, 2005... Qinetiq and Intel have reported further progress in their joint work to develop fast, low power transistors using the III-V material indium antimonide (InSb). The latest devices have a channel length of 85nm, and the enhancement mode'...

News.
December 14, 2005... Head mounted games display A head mounted display (HMD), launched this month by Dutch firm Cybermind, uses a 24bit, 1280 x 1024 pixel colour microdisplay from Dalgety-based CRLO Displays. The Visette45 SXGA weighs less than 600g, including...

Moore's Law is no longer logic, say CEOs.
December 14, 2005... Shrinking transistors along a traditional Moore's Law progression is a thing of the past for logic products, according to industry leaders. In separate interviews with EW, John East, CEO of FPGA specialist Actel said: "We're going to see...

Heading here.
December 14, 2005... ClearSpeed's shares rose just under 15 per cent to 250p after the firm said it intends to raise [pounds sterling]20.7m in a share placing at the end of December. The placing, said the firm, follows its selection the Tokyo Institute of...

MCU firm raises [pounds sterling]3.25m on AIM.
December 14, 2005... Cyan Technology, the Cambridge-based fabless microcontroller developer, raised [pounds sterling]3.25m last week when it placed on the Alternative Investment Market with a capitalisation of [pounds sterling]18.5m. The offer price was 22p a...

Eastern Europe seeks to copy UK electronics start-up scene.
December 14, 2005... Former Eastern Bloc countries, keen to join the lucrative electronics industry, are emulating the UK and its ability to produce successful start-ups. According to Sean Redmond, v-p of European sales at Cadence, the excitement of the UK...

Ratification of 802.11n wireless hit by hold ups.
December 14, 2005... Politics is rearing its ugly head in the battle to ratify the standard for 802.11n next generation wireless LAN after a vote on the standard failed to take place in November. "This is a political arena," said Beau Beck, v-p of business...

News.
December 14, 2005... Farnell InOne has opened a training and design facility in Leeds. Called the electronic design engineering (EDE) lab, it will be used for workshops on the latest industry issues such as RoHS and lead-free soldering (pictured). The distributor...

Heading here.
December 14, 2005... Rebound Technology, the component and hardware distributor, has acquired Azego Technology Services in the UK. Launched in 2003, Rebound has a [pounds sterling]10m turnover and the acquisition has given Rebound new customers and will take...

Competition to win an investment opportunity.
December 14, 2005... Electronics industry innovators can win places on a fast-track investment workshop in Venture Capital Partners' Zero-to-Hero 2006: The VC Challenge scheme. Winning companies will be able to informally discuss their businesses with key...

Renesas ends 8Gbit flash development to concentrate on core chip businesses.
December 14, 2005... Renesas Technology has decided not to invest in developing future generations of flash memory and to switch those resources to its other chip businesses. "We have a minority position in the NAND flash market but we are number one in...

News.
December 14, 2005... The Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) research institute has opened at Queen's University Belfast. It has equipment worth over $1m, supplied by Agilent Technologies, which will be used for the characterisation of...

FPGA supplier eyes market for motor control.
December 14, 2005... Actel, the FPGA specialist, has come up with a new product concept with which it plans an assault on the microcontroller market. "Half the chip is FPGA divided into two segments, one for a microcontroller core (ARM, 8051 or LEON) and the...

News.
December 14, 2005... 2006 Jan 9-13: Advanced digital signal processing short course with the University of Surrey in Guildford. www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/ce Jan 18-19: Design for CE marketing seminar in Livingston. www.e-design-scotland.org.uk Jan 19:...

Taiwan SoC start-up targets chip at low cost video functions on mobiles.
December 14, 2005... Taiwan-based system-on-chip start-up Mobilic has released silicon aimed at enabling diverse video applications on a range of handheld devices. Its MP830 chip family is based around a 200MHz ARM926EJ-S core and supports full camera...

Chips up 7 per cent in 2005; top six grow faster.
December 14, 2005... The semiconductor market grew 6.9 per cent in 2005, according to US analysts Gartner Dataquest, with six members of the top ten outgrowing the market. Intel, Samsung, Texas Instruments (TI), Toshiba, Hynix and AMD outgrew the market while...

A flexible future.
December 14, 2005... A forecasts go, Afdec's take on the UK components market is a gloomy picture. Even the 2007 growth predicted by the UK distributors association will only bring the market back to the 2005 level of [pounds sterling]1.058bn. There is no getting...

A step ahead in RoHS compliance game.
December 14, 2005... M anufacturers of passive components have been quicker than some of their counterparts in the semiconductor market to post really quite detailed information of RoHS compliance issues on their websites. A visit to the websites of suppliers such...

The dual supply approach to non-compliant components.
December 14, 2005... Andy Kerr There is no standard approach to how suppliers are identifying their RoHS compliant components. Some manufacturers are changing the part numbers of components to identify compliant and non-compliant products, which potentially creates...

Two challenges facing passives manufacturers.
December 14, 2005... Craig Hunter The challenges for passive components in achieving RoHS compliance are largely based around two areas. One is finding a suitable replacement for lead in the solder terminations of devices and the other is ensuring products can...

Pictures without noise.
December 14, 2005... igital video imaging (DVI) is fast replacing the traditional analogue VGA standard, and is becoming the de facto standard interface for the high-speed transfer of high volumes of digital image data. DVI uses a technique called transmission...

News.
December 14, 2005... Dielectrics based on the element hafnium look likely to be viable in 45nm processes, according to Belgian research centre IMEC. The properties of hafnium dielectrics and fully silicided' nickel gates [degrees] both candidates for...

Atmel fills AVR microcontroller pin-count gap with tiny trio.
December 14, 2005... Atmel is filling a pin-count gap in its AVR microcontroller range. "We received requests for 14-pin AVR devices," said AVR marketing director Jukka Eskelinen. "ATtiny24, 44 and 84 devices complement the existing tinyAVR range that offers...

Slippers with headlights...
December 14, 2005... Worth a look Too considerate to turn the light on, but keep tripping over the dog on the way to the loo at night? Take a look at www.brightfeetslippers.com from where you can purchase slippers with headlights. Scroll down to see them in...

1mm thick polymer Braille display is bendable and carried in a pocket.
December 14, 2005... The University of Tokyo has developed a thin flexible polymer Braille display. First announced earlier this year (EW 06/09/05), the device was revealed in full last week by its inventor Dr Takayo Someya at the International Electron...