Electronics Weekly articles from February 2007

Electronics Weekly archives from February 2007

News.
February 7, 2007... Bletchley Park Post Office will celebrate the Colossus code cracking computers on March 1 this year with a special first day cover for the Royal Mail's 'World of Invention' stamps. "In a unique historical twist it [Colossus] was designed...

News.
February 7, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Intel and IBM have been showing off their wares as 45nm hafnium chips roll through their fabs. "We have had high-k oxide and metal gates moved into 300nm wafer in a production fab for more than a...

News.
February 7, 2007... A strong performance from semiconductor sales helped the UK component distribution industry end the year on a high, according to distribution trade organisation Afdec. Average daily bookings and billings improved in December compared both...

News.
February 7, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Cambridge-based CMR Fuel Cells is to work with inkjet printing specialist Xaar and Belgian chemicals group Solvay to develop a single-step process to make fuel cell stacks. "This collaboration...

News.
February 7, 2007... Feb 7-8: Southern Electronics Show, Thorpe Park. www.industry.co.uk/south Feb 12-15: 3GSM World Congress 2007, Barcelona. www.3gsmworldcongress.com Feb 22: Spectre wireless technology seminar, Cambridge. www.spectre-online.co.uk. ...

News.
February 7, 2007... California-based Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab is claiming a record efficiency with a concentrator solar cell efficiency of 40.7 per cent. "This solar cell performance is the highest efficiency level any photovoltaic device has ever...

News.
February 7, 2007... In the past year, a lot has changed in the European semiconductor industry. Process technology development is to be scrapped. Infineon is no longer in the top ten. STMicroelectronics and NXP are on the way to going fabless. "Everything is...

News.
February 7, 2007... Paul Double is CEO of EDA Solutions How do outsourcing and the rise of new economies affect the chip design world? Outsourcing to emerging economies affects the chip design industry, but not with the impact is has on manufacturing....

News.
February 7, 2007... The European Union's Seventh R&D Framework Programme (FP7) was launched this week with a UK Government event to raise awareness of the programme. The scheme is a publicly funded research programme for supporting collaborative R&D in the...

News.
February 7, 2007... By Nick Flaherty editorial@electronicsweekly.com STMicroelectronics is demonstrating its Sti7200 HD decoder chip this week to customers making Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, and says almost all of them are looking to develop universal...

News.
February 7, 2007... With Scottish Enterprise selling off its stake in the Alba Centre, the intention of creating a world class centre of excellence for chip design and IP development employing 6,000 people has been abandoned. "It was set up to develop...

News.
February 7, 2007... US semiconductor firm Broadcom has hailed the jury's verdict in its patent fight with Qualcomm as a victory for the entire digital video community, claiming that Qualcomm is trying to "tax an important new technology". The jury found that...

News.
February 7, 2007... Imagination Technologies has signed a licensing deal which could see its multi-standard mobile TV silicon platform used in a high volume consumer mobile phone for the first time. Sharp has licensed the UK-based firm's multi-standard...

News.
February 7, 2007... XJTAG has signed up eight distributors to cover 21 countries across Europe, the Far East, North America, the Middle East and Australasia. The firm said the move is part of a global roll out. Simon Payne, XJTAG's CEO is pictured third from right...

News.
February 7, 2007... Contract electronics manufacturer Barric has decided to offer a cable assembly and cable harness service. Previously the firm made cable assemblies and harnesses for clients who were having other types of products made at the firm.

Features.
February 7, 2007... After years of delay and a plethora of government consultations, the WEEE (electrical and electronic waste) Directive has finally arrived in the UK. But despite the high profile recycling has acquired, nothing has really been done to...

Features.
February 7, 2007... By Melanie Reynolds melanie.reynolds@rbi.co.uk The choice of working towards a postgraduate qualification or taking individual modules for professional development is left open for engineers when taking modules under CEESI's training...

Features.
February 7, 2007... Feb 15: Introduction to EMC - Leatherhead shop.era.co.uk Feb 19-23: Expert VHDL - Bournemouth www.doulos.com Feb 27: China RoHS - Leatherhead shop.era.co.uk Mar 8-9: EMC Testing - York www.elec.york.ac.uk/cpd ...

Technology.
February 7, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Korean researchers have made a flash-like non-volatile memory cell using polymers. "It must be a promising step toward novel organic electronic memory device for commercial applications,"...

News.
February 14, 2007... Icera has launched its next generation of wireless broadband in laptop PCs with a card that is ready for manufacturing. The Espresso PCI express mini-card, launched at 3GSM this week, supports the latest high speed data (HSDPA) Release 5...

News.
February 14, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk The majority of UK firms are complying with the RoHS Directive and firms have so far escaped prosecutions, but only just in some cases. "Ninety nine per cent of products are ninety nine per cent...

News.
February 14, 2007... Interest is growing in being able to connect a mobile phone to a large screen to display photos and video, according to Analog Devices (ADI). "We're seeing a lot of interest in video connectivity for mobile phones," said Doug Grant,...

News.
February 14, 2007... By Melanie Reynolds melanie.reynolds@rbi.co.uk The voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) chip market hotted up last week with NXP Semiconductors, Broadcom, Texas Instruments (TI) and CSR all announcing single chip products which...

News.
February 14, 2007... Silicon Laboratories claims its Si472x single-chip FM radio transceiver, announced at 3GSM this week, is the first to allow FM signals to be listened to on a mobile phone via a Bluetooth wireless headset. "One of the problems we've seen...

News.
February 14, 2007... By David Manners david.manners@rbi.co.uk A two-year old spin-out from Stanford University believes it can solve one of the key problems of parallel processors - the difficulty of programming them. Stream Processors has an...

News.
February 14, 2007... The 180m2 InterFab clean room has been specially designed for research on photonic circuits and microsystems at the University of Southampton. InterFab will act as the main laboratory for micro/nano-fabrication until the new Mountbatten...

News.
February 14, 2007... Oxfordshire-based 3D LCD firm Ocuity has invented a technique to cut production cost from its switchable 2D-3D displays. "We do think it will be cheaper and it will enable us to make thinner LCDs," company co-founder Jonathan Harrold told...

News.
February 14, 2007... Hampshire-based contract electronics manufacturer EC Electronics has recruited Paul Rubery as new business development manger. He has experience of both the contract electronics and distribution industries.

News.
February 14, 2007... Neill Ovenden Vibration sensor manufacturer Monitron has recruited Neill Ovenden as sales and marketing director. He previously worked for Leuven Measurement Systems where he was responsible for the UK and Ireland sales team and a...

News.
February 14, 2007... By Alex Mayhew-Smith alex.mayhew-smith@rbi.co.uk Three businesses owned by Abacus have been pulled together to form Alpha3 Manufacturing, focusing on cable harness wiring, custom enclosures and other electro-mechanical sub-assembly...

News.
February 14, 2007... Venture capital (VC) had a good year in the UK and Ireland in 2006, according to Ascendant, the technology corporate finance advisor. "The VC market improved during the year with funds invested growing by over 40 per cent to [pounds...

News.
February 14, 2007... Six mobile technology firms have formed an alliance to push the handset market to more quickly adopt 3G mobile phone technologies. NTT DoCoMo, Renesas Technology, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, Sharp and Sony Ericsson plan to collaborate in...

News.
February 14, 2007... By David Manners david.manners@rbi.co.uk Vista, the latest Microsoft PC operating system, will give ARM the chance to get more of its microprocessor cores inside PCs. "Vista gives us a lot of opportunity for half a dozen ARMs in a...

News.
February 14, 2007... CSR's shares gained over 10 per cent to reach 753.5p after the firm said it had added a Bluetooth comms capability to its voice-over IP phone reference design. CSR said the Internet phone market could grow to over 300 million handsets in the...

News.
February 14, 2007... Universal remote controllers, for which Zilog supplies chips, amount to 25 per cent of the firm's revenues. "I programmed a universal remote controller recently and it took me five minutes to enter the code for each device. It's been made...

News.
February 14, 2007... Farnell has won Schaffner's distributor of the year award for 2007. Pictured (l to r): Ferdinand Leicher, director of electronic design at Farnell Harriet Green, CEO of Farnell Sam Williamson, components sales manager at Schaffner and Paul...

News.
February 14, 2007... Less power consumption, better displays and simplification are needed for mobile phones, according to Gilles Delfassy, senior vice-president of the worldwide wireless terminals business unit semiconductor group at Texas Instruments. ...

News.
February 14, 2007... Paul Bentley is managing director of Cypress Semiconductor in Europe Having got out of MRAM, into which non-volatile memory technologies is Cypress pursuing R&D? We have introduced non-volatile SRAM devices, which replace...

News.
February 14, 2007... By Alex Mayhew-Smith alex.mayhew-smith @rbi.co.uk Rising labour costs in China, the Chinese New Year and the complications associated with manufacturing and shipping from there, caused rising optimism amongst UK electronics...

News.
February 14, 2007... Four European firms that provide electronic components engineering have merged to form Alter Technology Group. The companies operate in the space, defence, aeronautics and medical industries and are GG Component Technology of the UK, Hirex...

News.
February 14, 2007... Microfluidics-based systems, like lab-on-a-chip applications which analyse fluids, could be accelerated by the development of microfluidics-based logic. Microfluidics-based logic, dubbed 'bubble logic' by the Centre for Bits and Atoms at...

News.
February 14, 2007... NXP has acquired all-important CMOS RF semiconductor technology in a $285m deal to buy mobile phone chip product lines from Silicon Laboratories. It is predicted that two fifths of mobile phone RF transceivers will be made using CMOS...

News.
February 14, 2007... Cambridge antenna designer Antenova is to launch the world's first combined antenna for satellite navigation in mobile phone handsets at 3GSM this week. The combination of the passive balanced GPS antenna and the active phone antenna needs...

News.
February 14, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Cardiff-based electroluminescent (EL) display maker Pelikon has developed an auto-calibrating controller IC and is looking to break into mobile phones. "The chip is significantly more intelligent...

News.
February 14, 2007... The National Microelectronics Institute recently held its first operations network meeting for the UK's fabless semiconductor firms. "The first meeting identified four key workstreams and elected leaders for each, we already expect...

News.
February 14, 2007... Advances in digital signal processing (DSP), combined with strides in analogue-to-digital (ADC) and digital-to-analogue (DAC) converter technologies, have helped to create a new class of digital RF systems which are forming the basis for the...

Features.
February 14, 2007... Mobile radio technology based on UMTS is developing at breakneck speed. The prime objective is the provision of fast mobile data services. Operators of mobile radio networks are currently upgrading their networks with HSDPA (high speed downlink...

Features.
February 14, 2007... Two new definitions pertinent to fire are laid down by the IEC 695-2-1 standard: the glow-wire inflammability index and glow wire ignition temperature. These have been applied to produce standards for plastics used in components such as...

Features.
February 14, 2007... Stereophonic sound is usually only achievable when speakers are physically separated from each other by a considerable distance. When speakers are situated closer together in mobile phones it is possible to simulate stereo by using wave...

Technology.
February 14, 2007... University unveils 60 GHZ receiver front end The University of California, Berkeley has unveiled a 60GHz receiver front end in 130nm CMOS. The chip has 29GHz local oscillator feeding a mixer through a frequency doubler to feed a 2GHz IF...

Technology.
February 14, 2007... 10.6cm 320x140 flexible e-paper display on show Kyushu University demonstrated a 10.6cm 320x140 electronic paper display called Quick-Response Liquid Powder Display which uses black (+ve charged) and white (-ve) particles in air between...

Technology.
February 14, 2007... By Steve Bush Apart from being blindingly fast, transistors produced at 90nm do not lend themselves to analogue, mixed-signal and RF design as they have low gain and poor dynamic range. However, if 90nm is what the rest of a chip...

Technology.
February 14, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a feedback-control scheme that interactively tunes CMOS operating voltage to minimise dissipation. Energy consumption...

Technology.
February 14, 2007... The worlds circuit design showcase, the IEEE International Solid-State Circuit Conference is held this week in San Francisco. Electronics Weekly brings you just a few of the highlights over the next two pages.

Technology.
February 14, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Sharp has produced an LCD that also acts as a fingerprint and touch sensor. Described this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, the 64mm 640x480...

News.
February 21, 2007... If you are designing a touch-integrated flat panel display system yourself, this article should be both insightful and useful as a resource for future reference. Often short on engineering resources to accomplish this in-house, most companies...

News.
February 21, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk It is not hard to find electronic gadgets that consume over 5W when they are 'off', with that wasted power doing little more than keeping the front panel LED glowing. With this kind of sloppy...

News.
February 21, 2007... Mixed-signal firms are facing the prospect of further takeovers or mergers, according to co-founder of Portugese IP firm Chipidea. Last week Chipidea paid $6m for Nordic Semiconductor's data converter IP business in a move to strengthen its...

News.
February 21, 2007... PCB firm Exception has invested over E900,000 in a laser direct imaging and automatic optical inspection machine for BGA, flip-chip and CSP substrates. The firm said growth at its Tewkesbury facility has exceeded business plans. A plan to...

News.
February 21, 2007... Hitachi is to supply liquid cooling systems to HP for its latest AMD Opteron-based workstations. "We are assured that the HP xw9400 workstation with liquid cooling will provide end users with a quiet and comfortable environment. Working...

News.
February 21, 2007... By Steve Bush steve.bush@rbi.co.uk Belgian semiconductor research organisation IMEC has revealed a 90nm CMOS transmitter for ZigBee over UWB. "The digital transmitter is the first ever published IEEE 802.15.4a-compliant...

News.
February 21, 2007... Semiconductor chemicals firm Epichem has been acquired by Sigma-Aldrich of the US. Based in Bromborough, Merseyside the business had annual revenues of $40m and staff and management will stay in place, said Sigma-Aldrich. Barry Leese,...

News.
February 21, 2007... By Richard Wilson richard.wilson@rbi.co.uk Configurable processor designer ARC International expects to have its first multi-core processor licensee this year. The UK-based firm said there is potential to implement multiple CPUs...

News.
February 21, 2007... A Rohde & Schwarz team based in the UK designed most of the firmware and software for the firm's award-winning signal analyser FSUP. The product won the recent Best in Test 2007 award, presented by Test & Measurement World magazine, one of...

News.
February 21, 2007... Manufacturing firms in the UK are missing out on the Government's R&D tax credit scheme due merely to a lack of investigation on the part of the companies, according to consultancy Deloitte & Touche. Companies are unaware of how wide the...

News.
February 21, 2007... Feb 22: Spectre wireless technology seminar, Cambridge. www.spectre-online.co.uk Feb 28: Goepel's boundary scan seminar day, Cambridge University. Email: k.miles@goepel.co.uk Mar 6-7: MicroTech 2007, Imaps conference and...

News.
February 21, 2007... Raytheon Systems has delivered the final engineering build of the assessment phase for the British Army's Joint Effects Tactical Targeting System. Pictured are Col Peter Tomlinson (right), deputy leader of the future artillery weapons systems...

News.
February 21, 2007... Wafer reclaim firm Pure Wafer saw its shares gain over 40 per cent to reach 347.5p when the firm said it has an agreement to acquire a wafer recycling plant in the US. One broker raised its rating to "buy" for the firm. Pure Wafer is based in...

News.
February 21, 2007... David Grant is managing director of PCB sourcing company Kestrel International Circuits QWhat has been the biggest cultural difference you have encountered in China? AThe biggest difference I find in China is that people are more...

News.
February 21, 2007... By Nick Flaherty editorial@electronicsweekly.com Semiconductor companies are starting the characterisation of 45nm silicon for embedded and mobile phone products as early as the end of next year. "That's one of the reasons we went...

News.
February 21, 2007... London department store Harrods has used Vikuiti rear projection film and digital signage software from 3M to implement a 1.8m guitar-shaped video display. The film is applied directly to the public-facing window. "With no need for a bulky...

News.
February 21, 2007... Dear Editor Regarding your article in last week's Electronics Weekly, headlined Complications and rising costs reduce threat from China (14/2/2007, page 4). It details PCB front end production engineers who have seen their wages rise from...

News.
February 21, 2007... Freescale has developed a packaging technology that allows a complete mobile phone to be implemented in a few square centimetres. Redistributed chip packaging (RCP) used 0.8mm thin chip scale packaged silicon and combines it with passive...

News.
February 21, 2007... Opto components firm Bookham has announced that CEO and president Dr Giorgio Anania has left the company. The move comes as the firm begins what it called "an aggressive cost-cutting" programme. "During this important transition period and...

News.
February 21, 2007... By David Manners david.manners@rbi.co.uk "We will be looking very carefully at the iPhone," is the warning to Apple from Southampton-based touch sensor specialist Quantum Research, which already has one lawsuit proceeding against Apple...

News.
February 21, 2007... Basingstoke-based RFI Global Services has celebrated the tenth anniversary of its cellular business. The business provides mobile phone conformance testing and during this time the number of phones submitted per year from a manufacturer has...

News.
February 21, 2007... BT Movio believes its decision to go with DAB-IP technology to provide TV to mobile devices has allowed it to get ahead of the competition and provide the radio and TV which consumers want. "DAB has been around a long time now and a lot of...

News.
February 21, 2007... NFC (near field communication) is destined to become a standard technology included in every mobile phone thanks to an agreement which simplifies the security, according to NXP Semiconductors. "At the moment you have to put an NFC chip and...

News.
February 21, 2007... RF Micro Devices introduced at 3GSM last week self-shielding technology for RF circuits which is designed to eliminate the need for custom external metal shields. "Most modules are unshielded so the customer has to put a shield around it,"...

News.
February 21, 2007... By Melanie reynolds reporting from Barcelona Alcatel-Lucent and NXP Semiconductors are working together on semiconductor and system development to support the delivery of broadcast mobile TV in the S-band (2.2GHz) based on the...

News.
February 21, 2007... By Melanie Reynolds and Nick Flaherty melanie.reynolds@rbi.co.uk Data rates of 28Mbit/s could be available on 3G mobile phones as early as next year if the industry adopts a plan to upgrade existing HSDPA and HSUPA technology. The high...

News.
February 21, 2007... Cambridge-based design company Plextek designs and manufactures boards of both low-medium value/high volume (i.e. batches of 10,000 boards) and high value/low volume (e.g. batches of 10 boards). In 2000 Plextek began using a boundary scan...

News.
February 21, 2007... IBM says it has solved the apparent comms bottleneck in multi-core systems with a memory technology it claims has the fastest access times recorded for embedded DRAM. IBM claims it will double microprocessor performance beyond what...

News.
February 21, 2007... C-MAC MicroTechnology has sold its frequency control products division to New Zealand-based crystal oscillator firm Rakon, in a deal worth $37m. "Our core business moving forward is the design and manufacture of high reliability hybrid...