Electronics Weekly articles from February 2004

Electronics Weekly archives from February 2004

The search for NAND flash.
February 4, 2004... The rise of NAND flash in 2003 coupled with sales growth forecasts of 30 per cent in 2004 due to higher sales of portable products means the relatively few firms that can make it are struggling to keep up, writes David Manners im and...

Association for design and production of flexible displays plans training programme.
February 4, 2004... There are encouraging signs that engineering may be starting to reverse its traditionally poor image as a career opportunity amongst young people. Recent government figures indicated that there has been a large increase in the number of schools...

Fujitsu gives more power to passive fuel cells.
February 4, 2004... Fujitsu Laboratories claims to have developed a solid electrolyte which enables concentrated methanol to be used in non-pumped (passive) fuel cells. "It allows 30 per cent methanol as a fuel source and enables much higher power capacities for...

LED doubles light by mopping up spills.
February 4, 2004... Omron has introduced an LED package which, compared with 5mm LEDs, more than doubles the amount of light usefully extracted from the die, it claims. The design uses total internal reflecting secondary optics to capture light normally spilled...

Scientists learn to mimic insect and bird flight.
February 4, 2004... Professor Sunil Agrawal of the University of Delaware's mechanical engineering department is working on machines that mimic the flight of birds and insects, particularly hummingbirds and hawkmoths. "We are quite enthusiastic about being able to...

Altera structure change improves efficiency in FPGA logic elements with structure.
February 4, 2004... Altera has redesigned its FPGA logic elements to improve efficiency, dropping the four-input look-up tables (LUT) that formed its elementary blocks. Rather than building each logic element from a four input LUT and a register, Altera has...

Google knows about Mr Ohm.
February 4, 2004... This is a temperature distribution simulation of a superconducting metal coil 150ms after part of it (non-blue) loses superconductivity. The comprehensive software model allowed researchers at Berkeley Lab in the US to design and build a...

Flexible display can bend to radius of 10mm, says Philips.
February 4, 2004... Philips has announced a flexible display capable of being bent to a radius of 10mm. The QVGA (320x240 pixel) device, which has a five inch diagonal and a resolution of 85dpi, uses a 200[micro]m thick front pane of monochrome, reflective...

Things look up as chip industry 'believes' again.
February 4, 2004... The semiconductor industry is starting to believe that things can get better, according to analyst Future Horizons at its 'IFS 2004' seminar in London. "This time last year no one believed in anything," said Future Horizons' CEO Malcolm Penn....

It's seventh heaven for Canon LCDs mar.
February 4, 2004... Canon has said it is to enter the seventh-generation LCD arena. LCD product manufacturing plants are rated by the size of glass they can handle. Last week Sharp said it had begun production at its sixth-generation (1.5x1.8m) plantin Japan. The...

Manufacturer: Place beats price.
February 4, 2004... Customers of contract manufacture are starting to value geographical accessibility, rather than simply asking for production in low cost locations, according to Singapore-based Flextronics. "The trend that we saw in the downturn, which was a...

UK development tool firm creates single pin debugging device with reduced surface area.
February 4, 2004... A UK firm has invented a single pin debug technique that can save area and pin count on microcontrollers. Debug Innovations from Cambridge calls its technology J-Link and says it can debug software just as fast as a traditional five pin JTAG...

Marconi calls a halt to business sell-offs.
February 4, 2004... Marconi says it has no plans to sell off any more of its businesses following the sale of its North American Access (NAA) business to Advance Fibre Communications. The firm has yet to set a timescale for the redemption of its longer term...

All-organic flexible monochrome display employs same process to deposit TFTs and shift registers.
February 4, 2004... Philips has demonstrated a highly flexible active matrix monochrome display which it claims is the first example of an all-organic device in which both the TFTs and shift registers are deposited using the same technology. The substrate is a...

MCU developer improves tool offerings from ARM.
February 4, 2004... ARM says it acquired US microcontroller development company Triscend to provide better development tools. Chief executive Warren East said the firm wanted to improve development boards and software for designers using ARM-based...

Green light for UK digital park.
February 4, 2004... Plans to create a [pounds sterling]20m Digital Media Park in Tayside have been given the green light by Dundee City Council. It is proposed the park will create up to 1,000 jobs, and will support the development and growth of start-up and...

Memory products firm spun out.
February 4, 2004... A memory and storage products firm has spun off from European Process Management. The business, called European Memory Products, is also hoping to break into the consumer market for mobile computing; it already supplies industrial sectors such...

Asic firm ponders future of ZigBee device market.
February 4, 2004... AMI Semiconductor, one of the first firms to offer products compliant to the IEEE's ZigBee standard for low data-rate, short range radios, is unclear how the market for the devices is developing. AMI released a sub-1GHz implementation of the...

Verdant wins Smart award to continue CCTV work.
February 4, 2004... UK firm Verdant Technologies has won a [pounds sterling]45,000 Smart award to further develop its CCTV technology, which can transmit multiple video signals over existing co-axial cabling. "We're harnessing some older technology and re-working...

Production lines get UK supervisor.
February 4, 2004... Surrey-based Line Yield Technologies has introduced software that it claims can improve efficiency of production lines for electronics. The firm's software takes data from production line test gear, including manual test stations, and...

Optical components survivors rise again on network demand.
February 4, 2004... Optical components companies that survived the last couple of years look set to reap the rewards of growing demand for next generation switches, amplifiers and multiplexers as carriers finally begin to invest in their networks. Many of the...

Samsung chooses UK technologies for multimedia mobiles.
February 4, 2004... Samsung Electronics has chosen two UK-developed chip technologies for its multimedia mobile phones. The South Korean manufacturer has taken a licence from ARM for a 3D graphics accelerator chip, marketed under licence from developer Imagination...

SAMs take control of magnetic radiation.
February 4, 2004... Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) developing so-called self-adaptive materials, or SAMs, have developed a demonstrator cell in collaboration with the St. Petersburg State Technical University in Russia. Using the device (see...

Scottish start-up Acuid to turn fast serial bus technology into product.
February 4, 2004... Edinburgh start-up Acuid is evaluating first silicon of its high-speed serial bus technology and has revealed plans for a product. "All functions are operational. The silicon we have is clearly good enough to demonstrate to what we call...

French atomic body evaluates UK PFT technology.
February 4, 2004... France's Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has evaluated the pipelined frequency transform (PFT) technology developed by RF Engines (pictured above). CEA benchmarked the PFT, looking at its ability to analyse RF signals with very short duration,...

Japanese consumer supplier shakes up digital radio market.
February 4, 2004... The digital radio market has seen the entry of heavyweight consumer firm Hitachi, which has designed the DAB radio module of UK firm RadioScape into its products. The entry of a major Japanese supplier into the fledgling market, currently...

Welsh electronics industry hit as closure plan threatens 600 jobs at Panasonic.
February 4, 2004... One factory faces closure and another needs a new owner as the Welsh electronics industry faces a period of uncertainty. Up to 600 jobs are in the balance following Panasonic's decision to close its TV and set-top box manufacturing plant in...

US start-up gets over $16m for DWDM channel products in second round of funding.
February 4, 2004... US start-up Polychromix has attracted second round funding of over $16m as it plans to set up a second production line for its DWDM channel management products. The firm's v-p of marketing and business development, Mouli Ramani, told EW that...

Intel's first 90nm device will be 3.4GHz Pentium 4.
February 4, 2004... Intel has launched its first product using a 90nm process, the Prescott processor. Branded as a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, devices will clock at speeds between 2.8 and 3.4GHz, and maximum power consumption up to 115W. Clock speed is only...

Surveillance on the move.
February 4, 2004... University of Rhode Island researchers have developed moving object tracking software for surveillance cameras. "It's one intelligence level above any existing system, and we've found the right compromise between speed and accuracy," said...

EPSRC consults over HECToR.
February 4, 2004... The EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) is consulting the UK supercomputer community about its potential HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) programme. "We are starting to consult the high-performance computer...

Welcome rise in vacancies; for engineering graduates.
February 4, 2004... Vacancies for graduates in engineering and industrial companies are on the up as employers report an increase in graduate vacancies for the first time in three years. The survey by the AGR found that after two consecutive years of reduced...

Naming of the parts.
February 11, 2004... Distributor Premier Farnell organised a round-table discussion to examine issues around the forthcoming European Restrictions of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and electrical waste (WEEE) directives. Steve Bush sat in on the debate magine...

Camera zooms in.
February 11, 2004... Sharp has announced the "industry's smallest 2Mpixel CCD [charge- coupled device] camera module with auto-focus", it claims. The 2.63cm3 device is aimed at high-end mobile telephones. It has 1,632x1,224 pixels, operates down to 2lux and should...

Thomson Broadband Llantrisant facility.
February 11, 2004... The digital set-top box manufacturing plant at Llantrisant in South Wales is owned by Thomson and not Grundig as mistakenly reported in last week's issue. The facility was acquired by Thomson from Grundig in 2002 and as a result has no...

Chip start-up set for recruitment drive as it heads to market.
February 11, 2004... Power IC start-up Cambridge Semiconductor expects to increase its staff by up to 50 per cent in the next six months, as it begins to take its patented high-voltage switching technology to market. The firm, which collected [pounds sterling]3.75m...

CriticalBlue accelerates embedded software.
February 11, 2004... CriticalBlue, an EDA start-up based in Scotland, will be in Paris next week to demonstrate its Cascade tool in public for the first time at DATE 2004. The firm's technology accelerates software in embedded microprocessor applications by...

Beach makes customisation of SoC generators easier for designers.
February 11, 2004... Beach Solutions, the Reading-based EDA firm, will release at the DATE exhibition in Paris next week a suite of tools that allow the generators used for interface design and data validation in complex systems-on-chip (SoC) to be customised...

UK firms still ignorant of EU Pb-free rules.
February 11, 2004... Electronics Weekly is still finding firms which have no idea they will have to be completely RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances) compliant, including being Pb-free, before the mid-2006 deadline. There are several ways information should...

Lack of data threatens RoHS plans.
February 11, 2004... A lack of component information threatens to hold back UK firms as they attempt to hit the impending Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) deadline. "Information can be quite difficult to come by," Alan Lund, product compliance manager at...

IMEC tools analyse C.
February 11, 2004... Tools developed at Belgian research centre IMEC for the design of low-power devices are being made available through US start-up Power-Escape. The technology, which is known as Atomium, analyses C code and algorithms and provides feedback at...

Miss Univers shows off co-verification talent.
February 11, 2004... Adveda, the recently launched software tool supplier from the Netherlands, will be demonstrating its co-verification product at next week's exhibition. Part of its Univers design tool for both hardware and embedded software design of...

Researchers recover materials from PCB liquid waste.
February 11, 2004... Research body Tin Technology has found a way to usefully recover raw materials from the acidic metal-containing liquid waste generated by some PCB-making processes. "This study materialised in response to a growing need by public opinion and...

3D e-beam makes smallest globe yet.
February 11, 2004... Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) has created the world's smallest globe, 60[micro]m in diameter, using an electron beam (EB) lithography system that enables 3D nanoscale fabrication. The system allows patterning down to 10nm. Current 3D...

Micromachined RF capacitors are electrically variable.
February 11, 2004... Philips' researchers have micromachined electrically variable RF capacitors. "The devices, which are the microscopic equivalent of air-spaced variable and switchable capacitors, can be integrated into silicon chips using conventional wafer...

Fanless components cooler absorbs heat with organic material.
February 11, 2004... A simple fanless cooling system for handheld devices, which uses the solid-liquid phase change of an organic material to absorb heat generated by components such as microprocessors, has been investigated by researchers in Singapore. The system...

Silicon Labs puts power amp for GPRS phones on one chip.
February 11, 2004... A single chip power amplifier for GPRS phones, made in pure CMOS and requiring no external components, has been unveiled by Silicon Laboratories. "It's the first time all the disparate components that make up a power amplifier have been brought...

Astute sets up Chinese subsidiary.
February 11, 2004... Distributor Astute Electronics has set up its first sales office in China as it looks to grow sales from manufacturers which have moved to the region. The Hertfordshire-based distributor took the decision last year to set up a Shanghai-based...

Atmel searches for specialist staff in huge wafer push at Tyneside fab.
February 11, 2004... Atmel is scouring the worldwide semiconductor industry for scarce human resources as it dramatically ramps the North Tyneside fab which it bought from Siemens. With the industry moving towards under-capacity, Atmel has ramped North Tyneside...

Blue LED creator gets [pounds sterling]103m.
February 11, 2004... Blue LED and laser diode inventor Shuji Nakamura has been awarded [pounds sterling]103m by a Japanese court, recognising his work at Nichia. Nakamura sued Nichia in 2001, claiming he should benefit from his work and patents on blue LEDs. Last...

Mentor upgrades tool.
February 11, 2004... Mentor Graphics has upgraded its analogue and mixed signal tool, Advance MS, with support for the SystemVerilog and SystemC languages. Advance MS is aimed at system-level verification of mixed-signal designs, combining its Eldo and ModelSim...

Verification flow combines companies' software tools.
February 11, 2004... TransEDA and Verisity have developed a chip verification flow that integrates their respective software tools. Reqtify, the specification coverage tool from TransEDA, is combined with vManager, verification management software from Verisity....

Welsh Assembly backs PPP move to boost profits.
February 11, 2004... Welsh Assembly leaders want to turn the area's technology industry into a public/private partnership, a move it hopes will boost jobs and profitability. Backed by the Welsh Development Agency (WDA) and the Welsh Electronics Forum (WEF), the...

Chip packaging and SOI technology are key to UK wealth, says report.
February 11, 2004... The UK should develop expertise in the packaging of wide bandgap semiconductors and silicon-on-insulator technology for devices capable of operating in harsh environments, to take advantage of a lucrative market. Oxford academic Dr Colin...

Sondrel doubles its design staff.
February 11, 2004... UK design consultancy Sondrel will double the size of its design team this year, adding eight staff, after contributing to 16 Asic design projects in 2003. "Only the really big names, such as Infineon, TI, Motorola, Philips or ST would expect...

Wireless handset market boosts Filtronic.
February 11, 2004... Filtronic has seen strong growth on the back of the wireless handset market in its interim operating profits. Sales of antennas to the wireless handset market increased by 37 per cent. The company also reported increased market share and better...

Researchers develop CCD image sensor with 20ns per row parallel readout time.
February 11, 2004... Scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire have developed what they claim is the fastest CCD (charge-coupled device) image sensor, with a readout time which is 20ns per row. "There is no other CCD technology that can...

EU approves investment aid for AMD.
February 11, 2004... The European Commission has approved investment aid of $545m for AMD's new fab in Dresden. The money comes from the German federal government and the state of Saxony. The amount represents 22.67 per cent of the total $2.4bn cost of building the...

How to find the Higgs boson with an ATLAS.
February 11, 2004... As if it were needed, here's further proof that physicists deal in big numbers. The ATLAS experiment due to switch on in 2007 at the 27km long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently under construction at CERN on the Swiss border will use 7,000...

Infineon expands memory R&D.
February 11, 2004... Infineon Technologies is to add another 120 jobs at its memory development centre in Dresden, particularly for DRAM and flash products. A new building costing $120m, containing a development cleanroom, will be built over the next two years....

CERN slashes costs of making blind and buried vias in multi-layer PCBs.
February 11, 2004... A cheap technique for making blind and buried vias in multi-layer PCBs has been developed by scientists at CERN, Europe's particle physics research lab. Rather than using expensive plasma or laser drilling, the CERN approach uses a chemical...

Scipher restructures into three core areas.
February 11, 2004... Radical restructuring at troubled technology and licensing firm Scipher will see it concentrate on three core businesses - Wavelength (broadband wireless communications), CRL Opto (microdisplays), and TSSI (secure identification). An ongoing...

Glass e-paper debuts this year.
February 11, 2004... Philips could have its first electronic paper display this year, according to the firm's head of research. The "e-paper" display will use electronic ink technology, but unlike the flexible display announced last week, this will be a glass...

Intel and Sun count in big transistors.
February 18, 2004... Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley are describing a 12pJ/instruction microcontroller for 'smart dust' - sensor, processor and wireless in a few cubic millimetres - applications. The chip has subsystems for sensing,...

RF Engine's dish deal.
February 18, 2004... RF Engines (RF) has been improving signal processing at the German Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. The institute uses custom analogue filter banks in floor-to-ceiling 19in. racks to analyse signals from its radio telescope (pictured...

Online information for lead-free directive.
February 18, 2004... Silica has created an online information service addressing the issues arising out of the upcoming RoHS directive stipulating the use of lead-free components. Called the Green Products portal on the distributor's website, it will provide a...

Stocking distributors back in business.
February 18, 2004... As we move into 2004 it is clear that there is a significant upturn in business under way. January was the highest bookings month for over a year. Perhaps more significant is that most of the orders are for shipments during the first quarter of...

Brace yourself for monumental lead-times.
February 18, 2004... Component supply will be one of the first symptoms of any major recovery in 2004 and all manufacturers should brace themselves for both price and lead-times fluctuations that could range from mild to monumental. For the past three years,...

Order with care!
February 18, 2004... Extended lead-times for electronic components could be the result of over ordering by customers. Distributors have put out the word and asked for a realistic approach to the problem. Richard Wilson finds an upturn beginning to bite ...

Procurement practices must adapt to avoid backlogs.
February 18, 2004... Across a range of semiconductor technologies, there can be no doubt that four week lead-times are a thing of the past. After an extended downturn, it has not taken long for the upturn to have an impact on the supply chain. There is very little...

EW Buyers' Guide is web directory.
February 18, 2004... A free-to-use web-based product-finder directory contains information on over 23,000 suppliers. The launch of the EW Buyers' Guide is the result of a partnership between Electronics Weekly and search engine service provider Dial Electronics....

Lead-free exemptions may be overlooked.
February 18, 2004... A new and potentially major obsolescence issue which is just beginning to surface is the transition to lead-free component terminations. Whilst the majority of products will need to conform to the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS)...

Designers merge WLAN standards on a single chip.
February 18, 2004... Single-chip, all-CMOS devices covering the three 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN standards are being shown by research teams at ISSCC. The designers incorporate radios for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands on one chip using functional blocks in common. In a...

15.2GHz chip draws just 1.6mW of power.
February 18, 2004... A microprocessor clocking at 15.2GHz and drawing just 1.6mW is being described this week at ISSCC. This low power is achieved using 5,000 superconducting Josephson junctions made from niobium. Not only that, instructions and data in the 8-bit...

Semiconductor firms find leakage current a problem at 90nm.
February 18, 2004... The transition to 90nm is proving painful when it comes to leakage current. A paper from Intel describes some of the techniques it was forced to use in designing Prescott, the 90nm version of Pentium 4. Performance was carefully traded against...

Prosthesis restores sight to the blind.
February 18, 2004... Scientists at the University of California are presenting a retinal prosthesis at ISSCC, for use by patients with photoreceptors permanently damaged as a result of disease. The 28.9mm2 intraocular device is attached to the inner surface of the...

Ink-jet printed all-polymer Fets take technology into the future.
February 18, 2004... ISSCC's Technology Directions papers are a look into the future, giving a glimpse of unconventional developments which could enter the mainstream in the next few years. Among these, Seiko Epson is describing ink jet printed all-polymer Fets....

Philips' 35.2 to 37.6GHz inductor capacitor has novel output buffer.
February 18, 2004... Philips Electronics has revealed a 35.2 to 37.6GHz inductor capacitor (LC) VCO at ISSCC. Made using a 70GHz fT, 100GHz fmax, SiGe BiCMOS process, the oscillator uses a novel output buffer with a negative impedance input. To make oscillation...

Low-leakage 300MHz chip for mobile phones.
February 18, 2004... A team from Hitachi, SuperH and Renesas Technology are giving a paper on a 300MHz SRAM module with a standby leakage of 25[micro]A/Mbit. Aimed at devices such as mobile phones, the module has three modes; high speed, low-leakage yet active,...

Small university departments get research funding lifeline.
February 18, 2004... Smaller university research departments were handed a lifeline last week with the publication of the format for the next Research Assessment Exercise. "The new system will mean that those big departments that have 60 per cent of research that...

Europe neglects science and engineering training warns Altran Foundation.
February 18, 2004... Science and engineering is being neglected as an economic driving force by European countries, and technical education among the continent's population is in steady decline. This is the message from the Altran Foundation for Innovation, a body...

Synopsys, ARM in verification plan.
February 18, 2004... Synopsys and ARM are collaborating to produce a methodology manual for verification of ICs and SoCs. "We're working together with the intention of making life easier for verification engineers," said Tim Holden, EDA relations manager at ARM....

UK technique can make safety tests on powered up systems.
February 18, 2004... A technique for performing flash safety tests on equipment that is powered up has been developed by Clare Instruments, the UK safety test equipment maker. Using the Clare system could result in more thorough safety testing of goods, both at end...

Lead-free group talks production.
February 18, 2004... Speakers at this month's Smart Group lead-free seminar are keen to ensure that production issues are not sidelined by Government policy. They heard about a DTI fact finding US trip. But some delegates wanted more financial help, by way of tax...