Electronics Weekly articles from February 2005

Electronics Weekly archives from February 2005

IP, cost control and a bit of luck create a wireless chip world beater.
February 2, 2005... Cambridge-based CSR may not have been the first to the Bluetooth party, and certainly not the biggest but it has been one of the most successful. CEO John Hodgson explains to Richard Wilson how his company has done it ow does a...

Digital TV switchover gets university course.
February 2, 2005... The University of Surrey will be offering a Digital Television Switchover course for the first time on 17 May 2005. The course has been designed and developed by Peter Barnett of ManderCom and addresses the issues involved in switching over...

Amino on fast track to profit after huge rise in turnover.
February 2, 2005... Amino Communications has reported a profit for the last eleven months, after floating just six months ago on the AIM stock exchange. The firm's finance director Stuart Darling told EW that Amino has a budget in place to take on about 20 extra...

Government set to invite proposals for SoC network.
February 2, 2005... The Government appears set to invite proposals for a national electronics design network, which could qualify for funding under the knowledge transfer network (KTN) programme. The idea of a system-on-chip design network has been looking for DTI...

German PCB firm opens UK offices.
February 2, 2005... German PCB firm Wrth Elektronic has launched PCB operations in the UK with offices opening in Northampton and Portsmouth. "Wrth is now offering PCB technologies to the industrial, automotive, sensors, telecom, military and medical sectors of...

Freescale licence to graphics core.
February 2, 2005... Imagination Technologies has licensed the PowerVR MBX Lite graphics core to Freescale Semiconductor, through technology partner ARM. The PowerVR graphics accelerator was developed by Kings Langley-based Imagination and it has been integrated in...

Pace fined over listing breach.
February 2, 2005... Pace Micro Technology has been fined [pounds sterling]450,000 by the Financial Services Authority for breaching listing rules in 2002. The set-top box company failed to ensure information regarding the withdrawal of its trade credit insurance...

University wins funding to break GaAs Mosfet barrier.
February 2, 2005... The University of Glasgow has received financial backing to breakthrough technology barriers that currently make the mass production of gallium arsenide Mosfets impossible. Scottish Enterprise has given the University of Glasgow [pounds...

8-pin flash chip ticks for Swatch.
February 2, 2005... Swatch has moved into the 8-pin flash microcontroller market. Its device, produced by subsidiary EM Microelectronic, is aimed at portable devices and can run on less than 6[micro]A. "This is a general purpose microcontroller requiring no...

Hydrogen stores better by raising fuel cell temp.
February 2, 2005... Hydrogen could be more effectively stored by increasing the operating temperature of the fuel cell, according to research by a Dutch PhD student. Currently large high-pressure cylinders are used to store hydrogen for buses, but these are too...

European EDA thriving on system-level design methodology as Asic market starts to decline.
February 2, 2005... The system-level design methodology is driving software design tools into a new era, and technology in the field is stronger in Europe than in the US, according to the chair of this year's Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE)...

Compulsory certification of 3G handsets looks likely this month.
February 2, 2005... Compulsory certification of 3G mobile handsets looks set to be introduced in February following completion of the approval of a majority of the required test cases by the Global Certification Forum (GCF). "At the GCF meeting the other week the...

Li-ion rechargeable battery is used without protection.
February 2, 2005... Karlsruhe-based Fortu PowerCell is developing Li-ion rechargeable batteries which can be used without protection circuits. "It resists overcharge and is insensitive to discharge to 0V," said company engineer Markus Borck. Existing Li-ion cells...

Disciplined chip firms cut back spending as analysts spread gloom.
February 2, 2005... The semiconductor industry is acting in an unusually disciplined way and its major problem is the poor perception of its prospects, the IFS 2005 industry forecast seminar was told last week. "Business confidence is high in every industry, but...

Liberalisation of spectrum raises fears of interference.
February 2, 2005... Proposals for spectrum liberalisation in the UK have prompted concerns among the mobile network operators regarding protection from interference for the spectrum which they so expensively acquired. "Orange, and the other 3G operators, purchased...

Amino profits from competition in voice and data services pushing demand for equipment.
February 2, 2005... Telecoms firms are starting to invest heavily in Internet protocol TV as competition for voice and data services increases, according to UK set-top box firm Amino Communications. The firm sees sales of its low cost equipment growing on this...

WiFi could hit phone operators, says analyst.
February 2, 2005... An analyst firm has warned that increased deployment and aggressive pricing of WiFi wireless LANs could wipe out up to $12bn of profits for US operators. Strategy Analytics said US wireless operators are facing a reduction in wireless revenue...

ARM plans Indian summer as strong results fuel expansion.
February 2, 2005... ARM intends to expand staff numbers this year, doubling the number of employees in India. The Bangalore team was acquired when the firm bought Artisan Components last year. "Artisan has been successful in growing that design centre and we will...

BAe plans to cut jobs.
February 2, 2005... BAE Systems last week announced 1,400 redundancies across the company as part of efforts to "match anticipated order intake and workload with capacity". Of the redundancies, 672 are from engineering positions. Mike Austill, MD of BAE's Avionic...

Mesophotonics' technology strikes gold on substrates.
February 2, 2005... Southampton-based photonics developer Mesophotonics has applied its technology to substrates for the analytical technique of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The company said photonic crystal structures patterned onto the gold...

PCB firm wins green award.
February 2, 2005... PCB firm Prestwick Circuits has received the ISO14001 environmental management standard. The Scottish firm, owned by parent company TT Electronics, has managed to make significant financial savings by reducing and recycling the amount of water...

Wireless LAN could support bandwidths for 3D TV.
February 2, 2005... Researchers at Oxford University are using line-of-sight optics to develop a wireless LAN that could support bandwidths of tens of Gbit/s. Dr Dominic O'Brien and his colleagues have demonstrated the feasibility of creating a two-dimensional...

RadioScape links with TI to cut price of DRM receivers.
February 2, 2005... Texas Instruments (TI) and RadioScape have signed an agreement to develop technology which can bring Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) to the mass market by reducing the price of the radio receivers. "At the moment DRM receivers are [pounds...

Reserve battery harnesses ; liquid-repelling nano needles.
February 2, 2005... Connecticut-based mPhase Technologies is developing a reserve battery which uses the liquid-shedding properties of nanometre-sized needle mats. "A battery depends upon a chemical reaction," said the firm. "Nanotechnology provides a unique...

European Parliament dispute threatens to derail patent Directive.
February 2, 2005... Moves in the European Parliament are threatening to unravel a draft software patent directive. Objections have already stalled the passage of the draft Computer Implemented (CII) Directive through the European Council of Ministers. Now 61 MEPs...

Demand rises for 40Gbit/s opto networks.
February 2, 2005... Demand for 40Gbit/s optical networks could finally be appearing. First plans to build a network in Europe have been announced by T-Com, the fixed-network division of Deutsche Telekom. "There's been a lot of interest in 40Gbit/s from the...

CEM reports record-breaking profit figure.
February 2, 2005... The world's biggest electronics contract manufacturing company has reported a huge increase in quarterly profits. Flextronics said in Q3 results it had made a net income of $98.7m, up 361 per cent from $21.4m for the same period a year ago. It...

Piezoelectric floor locates residents.
February 2, 2005... A smart floor which locates people within a building and detects their vital signs is the aim of a project at the University of Edinburgh. "We have been able to develop an intelligent flooring system that could be used in a care home or...

Hong Kong operation protects IP.
February 2, 2005... Scientific Generics, the technology and business consultancy, has set up SGAI Tech, a Hong Kong-based product development and manufacturing service. The joint venture with Hong Kong manufacturer Automatic International will enable clients to...

Reconfigurable silicon could double ST, says analyst.
February 2, 2005... STMicroelectronics is nurturing a product which could double the size of the company, according to an industry analyst. The product, unveiled last October, is GOSPL (generalised open source programming logic) which provides a reconfigurable...

Intellect CEO calls on organisations to pull together in representing industry.
February 2, 2005... The head of the UK's largest electronics industry body has called on other organisations to cooperate on improving the way they represent their members. John Higgins, CEO of Intellect, believes the whole industry has something to learn from the...

Important ingredients for success in securing your dream job interviews.
February 2, 2005... Electronics firms are always on the look out for quality, skilled professionals even when the market is poor, but how do you make sure that when you spot that dream job you will stand out from the other hopefuls? Lee Tedstone points you in the...

Surrey University to help fund training for engineers in industry.
February 2, 2005... The University of Surrey's School of Electronics and Physical Sciences (SEPS) has moved to address the problem that many companies have in managing to pay for the training of engineers. The aim is to provide funding for engineers based in...

Biotech firm gets MathWorks tools.
February 2, 2005... US biotechnology firm Agencourt Bioscience is using tools from The MathWorks to collect and visualise the huge arrays of DNA-related data it generates in developing nucleic acid purification products. Agencourt uses Matlab and Image Processing...

UK actuator for Flextronics gear.
February 2, 2005... Cambridge technology developer 1Ltd has licensed its Helimorph piezoelectric actuator to giant contract manufacturer Flextronics for use in autofocus cameras for mobile phones. The low-power device, made from the ceramic PZT, enables the use of...

Molecules show order on mercury.
February 2, 2005... Scientists in the US have found that very thin films of organic molecules grown on the surface of liquid mercury adopt progressively more ordered patterns as the density with which they are packed onto the surface is increased. Despite the...

'Lowest noise' op amp drives ADC to 100MHz.
February 2, 2005... Texas Instruments has introduced a fully-differential op amp for driving fast ADCs up to 100MHz, claiming it to be the lowest noise, lowest distortion amplifier of its type. Built on the firm's SiGe-on-insulator BiCom-III process, the...

High Street head scan gets in tune for personal stereo surround sound.
February 2, 2005... The man in the street, who these days is as likely as not sporting the white earphones of an Apple iPod, may soon be enjoying entirely lifelike sound customised exactly for him, thanks to work at the universities of York and Sydney. To a...

Turning colour into sound.
February 2, 2005... A Cornell University team is developing software to turn colour in to sound, to aid a blind atmospheric scientist in reading weather maps. "The most natural approach was to try sound, since colour and pitch can be directly related and...

Duracell surveys mobile engineers.
February 2, 2005... Duracell has results from its survey of engineers designing portable device in the UK, France and Germany. AA-size primary batteries get 27 per cent of design-ins, followed by all rechargeables (22%) and button cells (12%). Prismatic...

Digital scope bandwidth hits 15GHz as DSP adds a boost.
February 2, 2005... Tektronix has pushed the performance of digital storage oscilloscopes with a scope which uses digital signal enhancement techniques to achieve an effective bandwidth of 15GHz. Based on the TDS6124C DSO, with 40Gsample/s sampling rate and...

Storing bits in intersections of wires at HP.
February 9, 2005... Work at HP Labs in the US has suggested that it will be feasible to replace tricky-to-scale down three-terminal transistors with a 'crossbar latch' design using bistable two-terminal molecular switches. The HP idea, shared by others, is that...

Universities put names to common design plan.
February 9, 2005... The new spirit of co-operation in the electronics design community has spread to UK universities. Professors Hilary Kahn and Steve Furber at the University of Manchester are two of the industry's leading academics who have proposed that the...

Enhanced technology brings GPS location to the masses.
February 9, 2005... E-GPS (enhanced global positioning system) technology which combines E-OTD with GPS location technology has been announced by Cambridge Positioning Systems (CPS). "This will give coverage everywhere and be a lower cost implementation," said...

Pay-by-the-hour computer service.
February 9, 2005... Sun Microsystems has launched a service to provide vast amounts of computing power to clients on a pay-by-the-hour basis. Sun said the cost of the 'utility computing' service will be $1 per CPU hour. The firm has also partnered with electronic...

Cars to dial 999 after accidents.
February 9, 2005... New cars from 2009 will be fitted with equipment to automatically make an emergency call in the event of an accident following the agreement of a European Commission and industry action plan. The eCall action plan targets the end of this year...

Headsets and car kits could kick-start rush to Bluetooth.
February 9, 2005... Mobile phone design-ins are vital for the long term demand for Bluetooth short-range wireless comms technology, according to leading chipset suppliers. While the integration of Bluetooth technology into mobile phones is growing, penetration...

BT to set up ring-fenced business for local loop network provision.
February 9, 2005... BT has announced a proposal to set up a "fenced off" part of the business responsible for ensuring equal access to the local loop copper network. The proposal, in response to regulator Ofcom's Strategic Review, comes after years of calls for BT...

Infineon cuts wirebond for flip-chip technology.
February 9, 2005... Infineon Technologies is phasing out wirebonding for its chip cards in favour of its proprietary FCOS, (flip chip-on-substrate) technology which it is ramping up at its packaging plant in Regensburg, Germany. "This year we will have 30 per cent...

Management buyout saves contract manufacturer.
February 9, 2005... Banbury-based contract electronics manufacturer General Hybrid UK has been bought out of administration and will continue to trade under the new name of Copernica. The thick-film hybrid manufacturer, formerly part of the HiDensity Group based...

Filtronic seeks buyer for antenna division to concentrate efforts on basestation business.
February 9, 2005... Filtronic is looking for an exit from its antenna business to concentrate on its basestation operation. "We are expecting growth in wireless infrastructure to remain in line with the strengthening market in 2.5 and 3G," said Professor David...

CDT project sees brighter future for OLED materials.
February 9, 2005... Researchers have boosted the light-emitting ability of ink-jet printable OLED materials. "We have demonstrated the feasibility of [red-emitting] materials with twice the external quantum efficiencies of 1st-generation red polymer OLEDs," Dr...

Memory for low bit-count applications.
February 9, 2005... Intellectual property firm Impinj has produced a CMOS-compatible non-volatile memory aimed at low bit-count designs. Based on its reprogrammable fuse technology, AEFuse is available in TSMC's 0.18 and 0.25[micro]m processes. Because AEFuse is...

Group plans embedded OS.
February 9, 2005... A project to develop an operating system suited to embedded distributed processing has been started in Europe. Run by Open License Society, the OpenComRTOS project aims to develop a scalable system running not only on individual devices but...

First photos from UVOT telescope.
February 9, 2005... This image of the pinwheel galaxy M101 is one of the first taken by the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) on board NASA's Swift gamma ray observatory. The UVOT, developed in collaboration with scientists at University College London's...

LSI Logic to make Asics in FPGA design times.
February 9, 2005... LSI Logic is bidding to match the short design cycles typically achieved with FPGAs with its low cost platform Asic products. Compared with the design cycle for full custom Asics of a year or more, the firm claims to turn a platform Asic design...

1Ltd to launch autofocus for camera phone.
February 9, 2005... Cambridge technology developer 1Ltd will launch a reference autofocus module using its Helimorph piezoelectric actuator at the 3GSM World Congress next week. Last week the firm said it had licensed the device to Flextronics for use in mobile...

Graphics and video processed in same core animate small screen.
February 9, 2005... Norwegian graphics IP developer Falanx Microsystems has introduced improved versions of its low-power Mali cores that use a single pipeline architecture to process both 3D graphics and video in the same gates. The company, which is based in...

Power source ; scavenges energy from environment.
February 9, 2005... The University of Southampton has spun-out a company called Perpetuum to make power sources which scavenge vibrational energy from the environment. The firm's target markets is ad-hoc sensing networks. "We can comfortably get 100 to...

Fresh crisis besets Directive.
February 9, 2005... Further doubt has been cast on the future of Europe's Computer Implemented Invention (CII) Directive. The European Parliament's legal affairs committee voted to ask the European Commission to "present a fresh proposal on the patenting of...

Aerial firm puts RF transceiver directly inside phone antenna.
February 9, 2005... Cambridge-based aerial firm Antenova has developed a phone antenna with a built-in transceiver. The combined structures are small and resist proximity de-tuning. "What we are doing is a lot more efficient than current antennas," said Simon...

Spin-out to trial solar energy technology next year.
February 9, 2005... Cambridge University spin-out Enecsys is aiming to start trials next year of its power conditioning unit, which converts energy from solar panels into useable electricity. "There's always some sort of power electronics which goes between, and...

Brain cells and chip functions.
February 9, 2005... A paper from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich looks in detail at the differences and similarities in the way semiconductor devices and brain cells function. The former uses electronics as charge carriers, the later uses ions...

EW employment trends survey.
February 9, 2005... EW is inviting its readers to participate in a survey of employment trends in the UK electronics industry. A short questionnaire covering salary, employment conditions and attitudes towards job searches can be found via a link on the EW...

Financial guys happy, but chip industry remains depressed.
February 9, 2005... Two different views of the future for the semiconductor industry have surprisingly similar analyses, but where they do differ is over the issue of pricing. David Manners spoke to analyst Malcolm Penn and ST's Jean-Philippe Dauvin wo very...

US universities make single chip lead pollution detector.
February 9, 2005... The Universities of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Utah, Salt Lake City, have made a single chip detector for lead pollution, adding the sensor as a few thin-films over 0.5[micro]m analogue CMOS. The detection process is subtractive anodic stripping...

ADC architecture for ADSL modems.
February 9, 2005... An unusual pipelined analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture described in a paper by STMicroelectronics and the University of Pavia, Italy is designed to address the specific dynamic range requirements of discrete multi-tone-based...

Organic thin film circuits on show.
February 9, 2005... Philips described organic thin-film circuits including a 240 stage shift register integrated with a 300x300[micro]m pixel, 240x320 array electrophoretic active-matrix display. The pentacene devices are processed on 150mm diameter 25[micro]m...

8Gbit memory chips move flash beyond DRAM density.
February 9, 2005... Memory chips always break new barriers at ISSCC, and 2005 is no exception with flash and SRAM both featuring. Perhaps most notable are the two 8Gbit flash devices detailed by Samsung and by Toshiba/Sandisk, which take flash beyond DRAM density....

CMOS temperature sensor increases accuracy five-fold with &0.1[degrees]C error.
February 9, 2005... Delft University of Technology has produced a CMOS temperature sensor with a 3 error of &0.1[degrees]C from -55 to 125[degrees]C. "This level of accuracy represents a five-fold improvement in the state of the art," said the University. "This...

Stripline resonators squeeze 60GHz performance from 0.13[micro]m CMOS.
February 9, 2005... Folded stripline tank circuits in its metal layers are the key to a 0.13[micro]m CMOS 60GHz direct conversion receiver from the University of California, Los Angeles. Resonance boosts the effective transition frequency of the 80GHz NMOS...

ADC with 23MHz bandwidth is <0394><03A3>.
February 9, 2005... University of Toronto researchers Navid Yaghini and David Johns presented a 43mW (1.8V) CT complex delta-sigma ADC with 23MHz of signal bandwidth and 68.8dB SNDR (signal to noise and distortion ratio). They said the inherent anti-aliasing...

UWB chip uses novel designs to minimise area.
February 9, 2005... A team from the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan presented an implementation of the OFDM-based 802.15.3a standard for ultra wideband. To keep silicon area, complexity and power to a minimum, they used novel designs for the low-density...

Image sensor has smallest pixel.
February 9, 2005... Claimed to be the smallest, Sanyo's CCD image sensor pixel is 1.56x1.56[micro]m, making it suitable for 3Mpixel sensors in phones. The CCD has a 2,040x1,533 pixel image area and a storage area of 2,040x511. The storage area has a third of the...

Power-controlled 100W Intel processor prompts drove of papers at conference.
February 9, 2005... Intel's Itanium processor has again spawned a number of papers at ISSCC, this year detailing power control, dual multi-threaded cores and 26.5Mbyte of on-die cache. Codenamed Montecito, the 1.7 billion transistor processor runs at 100W, with...

Direct buying of components online goes into overdrive as firms stock up websites.
February 16, 2005... The purchasing of electronic components and other products direct from distributor websites is growing faster than at any time in the last five years. According to the UK's leading online store, RS Components, within a year it will be carrying...

Farnell takes initiative on RoHS sales.
February 16, 2005... Farnell InOne seems to have taken the initiative on the issue of lead-free product information with the launch of what it calls the first RoHS (Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substances) Directive compliant catalogue. Containing...

HDTV switches on a good picture for year ahead, says DT boss.
February 16, 2005... DT Electronics had a strong year in 2004 seeing sales increase by around 26 per cent, and according to MD Tony Frere, the company is expecting a 15 per cent sales boost this year. Originally specialising in the communications and broadcast...

Spectre puts faith in embedded telematics.
February 16, 2005... DT Electronics had a strong year in 2004 seeing sales increase by around 26 per cent, and according to MD Tony Frere, the company is expecting a 15 per cent sales boost this year. Originally specialising in the communications and broadcast...

Questions hang over the supply chain.
February 16, 2005... Is the supply chain getting better at controlling inventory? asks Gary Kibblewhite In short, the answer is yes. However, the answer has to be qualified. If the chain stretches from a UK designer to Shanghai and then on to a customer in...

Future installs system to track business from design-in to production.
February 16, 2005... Future Electronics is installing a new business management system which will help it to track business from local design-in to production orders anywhere in the world. The issue facing all distributors is how to ensure that they benefit from...

Cell chip has ; 234 million transistors.
February 16, 2005... By Richard Ball With nine processor cores capable of executing 28 instructions per clock cycle, Cell has a formidable architecture. The prototype chip - at 221mm2 and 234 million transistors - will clock at 5.4GHz, although IBM's Klaus...

IBM, Sony and Toshiba join forces on architecture to rival Intel x86.
February 16, 2005... IBM, Sony and Toshiba are bidding to create a global microprocessor architecture which will rival the x86 architecture of Intel. The likelihood of an attack on the processor market became apparent as details of the Cell microprocessor...

Sarantel plans listing on AIM to raise [pounds sterling]15m.
February 16, 2005... Ceramic antenna developer Sarantel has announced it intends to list on the Alternative Investment Market at the beginning of March. The company said in December it was expecting to see 500 per cent growth during 2005, and at that time was...