Electronics Weekly articles from December 2007

Electronics Weekly archives from December 2007

Features.
December 12, 2007... Here's to good health in 2008 By Craig Barclay Undeniably 2008 will be another challenging year for the UK electronics industry. Looking beyond the continuing issues that we face, the effect of manufacturing migration still one of...

Features.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07DISTfarnell.jpg The future of customer loyalty in an offline world By Marianne Culver When I started in the industry in 1987, the prevailing buoyant market was dominated by many niche players whose relentless focus was in...

Features.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07DISTsurtech.jpg Enclosure configuration - the unsung hero of the industry By Mike Johnson Enclosures, ranging from small plastic boxes for hand-held instruments to 2.2m high server housings stuffed full of many thousand of...

Features.
December 12, 2007... 19dec07DISTrutronik1.jpg 19dec07DISTandreas.jpg Technical support is the key By Andreas Mangler With the growing complexity of products and technologies, the need for technical support is constantly on the increase. At the...

News.
December 12, 2007... The shortage of electronics engineers could get worse as the number of students opting to take electronics and electrical degrees has fallen by a shocking 45 per cent over the last five years, according to a report last week. "The number...

News.
December 12, 2007... Senior managers from the component distribution sector have told Electronics Weekly that the increasing availability of counterfeit components is a concern in the supply chain. EW polled a group of managers about the existence of...

News.
December 12, 2007... Alps Electric UK has hosted schoolgirls from Denbigh School in Milton Keynes for a Monozukeri (making things) day at its facility. The children learnt about the lean manufacturing of toy electronic pianos, from components to finished musical...

News.
December 12, 2007... CamSemi has opened a sales and application design centre in Taiwan to push the firm's C2470 family of mixed signal controller ICs for the linear power supply replacement market. The facilities include a power supply design laboratory for...

News.
December 12, 2007... By Nick Flaherty Intel has developed a test chip for software defined radio that can handle WiFi, WiMAX and DVB-H digital TV in one chip. This kind of chip would allow equipment to access the WiFi network in the home, automatically...

News.
December 12, 2007... A consortium of car makers and equipment suppliers in Europe is developing a demonstrator system that will link moving cars together via a wireless network providing data on traffic flows and accidents from car to car. The car2car...

News.
December 12, 2007... Swindon-based SiConnect is gaining customers for its POEM powerline technology which will be integrated into audio products and also be developed into products for the Chinese market. The powerline modem chips for these products - PLi050A...

News.
December 12, 2007... Plextek has made its play to enter the market for software defined radio-based WiMAX design platforms. The Cambridge-based design firm has created a hardware platform which combines an RF transceiver with the necessary baseband processing...

News.
December 12, 2007... Mixed signal device test company Ateeda has won the Best Emerging Business category in the Scottish Software Awards. The firm has an EDA tool called OptimATE. Ateeda's CEO David Hamilton (left) was presented with the award by Scottish Equity...

News.
December 12, 2007... Altera is to go after the wireless handset market with a series of zero-power CPLDs which cut static power from milliAmps to microAmps. "Static power has been reduced to 29 microAmps. Our previous low power CPLDs had static power...

News.
December 12, 2007... Getting the femtocell industry off the ground in terms of regulatory and interference issues and ease of installation, were the main aims of the Femtocell Conference in Dallas last week. "Everyone who is working in femtocells is getting...

News.
December 12, 2007... The UK auction for spectrum bands between 10GHz and 40GHz will be held online early next year by communications regulator Ofcom. The spectrum will be sold on a technology and service neutral basis which will allow users to change the...

News.
December 12, 2007... Amplicon has lent its support to education initiatives by hosting a Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) study day for teachers. The aim is to help equip 16-18 year olds for the workplace and consists of diplomas available in five key...

News.
December 12, 2007... Cree saw its shares gain after it sold a lighting fixtures business, called Genlyte, to Philips for $2.7bn. The acquisition will give Philips a complete LED offering from chips to fixtures, according to analysts.

News.
December 12, 2007... Shares at Zetex saw an upturn of over 10 per cent last week, rising to 51p. Shares in the EW Index gained just half a point. Zetex is expecting to make its hay in the LED market next year as the need for power hungry LEDs means a demand for...

News.
December 12, 2007... The year started with numerous semiconductor IDMs announcing their intention of going fab-lite, and ended with silicon foundries saying they were reducing capex and limiting capacity. Then there were the IDMs who announced they were giving...

News.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07Stubbings.jpg Andy Stubbings is managing director of Noritake Itron in the UK Can the vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) which you develop continue to compete with lower cost LCD technologies? VFD has traditionally had a...

News.
December 12, 2007... Configurable processor core designer ARC has developed a family of low power cores and an operating system with special instructions to control them. The EnergyPro cores have been developed with Cadence Design Systems and Virage Logic,...

News.
December 12, 2007... Moortec, a two year-old company founded by former employees from Zarlink, is offering its customers a revised business model for analogue and mixed-signal design. If customers let Moortec retain the IP in their designs, they will get a cheaper...

News.
December 12, 2007... IBM claims it has developed a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator to convert electrical signals into pulses of light. The breakthrough will allow supercomputers that today consist of thousands of individual processors connected by...

News.
December 12, 2007... Design LED Products and IGT Industries say they have integrated thin printed lightguide technology with embedded LEDs into capacitive switches. Typically 1mm thick, the switches include the capacitive switch sense pad, light-guides with...

News.
December 12, 2007... In January leading microelectronics academics, the UK Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) and industry will meet to decide the future of what they call the grand challenges in...

News.
December 12, 2007... Exception Group is starting to ship electronics products other than PCBs into Europe from its Malaysian-based sourcing service. The firm imports $50m worth of PCBs into Europe through its sourcing business, said the firm's chief executive...

News.
December 12, 2007... A high-speed BiCMOS process which could potentially be capable of replacing gallium arsenide in many designs will be described by NXP Semiconductor at this week's IEDM Conference in Washington. The process has a transition frequency of...

News.
December 12, 2007... Jaotech has teamed up with healthcare software developer Lincor Solutions to supply patient terminals for hospitals around the world. Surrey-based Jaotech is a two year-old start-up which designs and manufactures embedded PC display...

Features.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07DISTboyd.jpg What's New in 2008? By Alastair Boyd 2007 was another challenging year for both semiconductor manufacturers and their franchised distributors in the UK. The UK Industry has two driving factors that affect...

Features.
December 12, 2007... By Dave Burns In 2007 we saw that the CEM sector trying to win new business by impressing potential clients by the speed of which proposals are delivered. In turn, this means that CEMs are demanding immediate, same-day turn-around on...

Features.
December 12, 2007... By Tony James The traditional perception of the rep is an individual or company supporting companies too young or too small to offer their own direct presence in the UK or European market. For a number of reasons, however, we're...

News.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07Cypress.jpg Cypress Semiconductor has aimed its latest West Bridge peripheral controller at those applications that are looking to use lower cost multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash. The West Bridge Astoria controller will...

Features.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07STM1 12dec07STM2 Recent developments in microcontroller technology mean that 32-bit products for embedded applications can no longer be considered 'specialised' or 'difficult'. Importantly, with costs for both microcontrollers...

Features.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07 Cypress1 Lumileds Luxeon K2 light output versus junction temperature plot The colour output of LEDs is programmable which means a system of LEDs can be combined to create different colours. In LCD backlighting, multicolour...

Features.
December 12, 2007... The concept of M2M (machine to machine) may have been around for many years, yet it is still at the bottom of the growth curve. However, this is changing as GSM/GPRS-based mobile systems meet the rapidly growing data connection needs of a...

Features.
December 12, 2007... Solar cells comprise a p-n junction in which incident light energy (photons) causes electrons and holes to recombine, generating an electric current. As the p-n junction's characteristics are similar to those of a diode, the electrical...

News.
December 12, 2007... By Richard Wilson E-paper display company Nemoptic has received an injection of funding from the French government to support the development of paper-like display technologies for use in mobile devices. The funding amounts to...

News.
December 12, 2007... 12dec07sstl.jpg Captions Image 1) GIOVE-A signal received directly (before reflection). Image 2) GIOVE-A signal received after reflection off the Arafura Sea near the north coast of Australia. The signal is spread out in delay...