Electronics Weekly articles from July 2004

Electronics Weekly archives from July 2004

Government approach blunts competitive edge.
July 7, 2004... viewpoint By john higgins At present, the Government is using measurements designed for old economy needs, making it impossible to understand the UK's progress towards the new knowledge driven economy or effectively plan policies to support it....

Orange plans 3G network in July.
July 7, 2004... Orange is to launch its 3G mobile phone network in the UK on July 19 which will offer coverage of 66 per cent of the population. "With the launch of our first high-speed network, we've begun to light up our map of Europe," said Sanjiv Ahuja,...

Chip-scale devices save space in mobiles.
July 7, 2004... Philips Research is developing chip-scale devices to save space and improve performance in mobile phones. The firm said manufacturers are keen to save the 70 per cent of a phone's board area currently occupied by discrete surface-mount...

Time for design.
July 7, 2004... The complexity of the design process and the amount of time it now takes for chip verification has left gaps in the tool chain which are being filled by specialist firms. Harry Yeates finds out what some of these firms are up to eventy per...

Accounting for engineers.
July 7, 2004... David Bloomfield highlights the importance of financial training so you make the right decisions o you have any idea how much money is in your bank account? Or even, how much money you have left over each month after all your bills are...

Digital rises in the East.
July 7, 2004... The wind of change is blowing in the semiconductor market as consumers go digital and Fujitsu's electronic devices president Toshihiko Ono is confident the firm has the technology to take advantage. He spoke to David Manners fter a lean...

Founders buy flat screen TV display company's IP assets.
July 7, 2004... The intellectual property assets of display firm Printable Field Emitters (PFE) have been bought by a consortium of its founders, former directors and other stakeholders using personal funds. When the firm went into administration, "we were...

Peratech wins award for sensor technology.
July 7, 2004... Darlington-based Peratech has won the Best Of Sensors Expo Technologies Gold Award for its 'QTC Pills' at the Detroit Sensors Expo sensing technologies conference. QTC (quantum tunnelling composite) is a metal-loaded elastomer developed by...

Nokia concerned at Ofcom consultation.
July 7, 2004... Nokia has voiced concern over a consultation currently being run by industry regulator Ofcom on ensuring competition in a spectrum market. A question in the document suggests the regulator is going back on undertakings, made in a consultation...

Cambridge researchers close in ; on SiGe quantum cascade laser.
July 7, 2004... In an attempt to create a silicon-compatible high-temperature terahertz laser, researchers at Cambridge University have demonstrated population inversion in a SiGe quantum cascade device. Existing terahertz laser sources have been built using...

EC completes transport TTA project.
July 7, 2004... The European Commission's nextTTA project, intended to develop the next level of time-triggered architecture (TTA) for transport electronics, is complete. The two-year project "proved that event-triggered communication such as industry...

Doping method doubles wire's resistance to magnetic fields.
July 7, 2004... Researchers in the US have repeated work on magnesium diboride superconductors that shows how doping with carbon doubles its resistance to magnetic fields. The Ames Laboratory of the US Department of Energy added five per cent carbon to MgB2,...

Uncertainty hangs over UK lead-free plans.
July 7, 2004... "The biggest problem we face over the European lead-free and waste directives is not planning, it is not resource, it is simply that the EC cannot get its act together." That comment from the MD of a UK-based electronics component supplier sums...

Academic wants better control of chip deposition.
July 7, 2004... Better techniques for controlling the orientation of polymer semiconductors during deposition are needed to improve the performance of polymer devices, rather than new materials. That was the message from last week's Horizon symposium on...

Chip company releases TV data decoding MCU.
July 7, 2004... Matsushita has released a microcontroller (MCU) specifically for decoding TV data services. The 8-bit MCU has a built-in vertical blanking interval data slicer that supports all VBI-data service standards employed around the world, claimed the...

NEC conducts world's largest trial into next generation web protocol.
July 7, 2004... NEC has organised the world's first large-scale trial for the next generation Internet configuration protocol, DHCPv6, claimed the firm. Its Network Laboratories in Heidelberg, together with the Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Munster will...

'We're chuffed as buttons' says Amino MD ; as IPO turns heads of tier one customers.
July 7, 2004... Amino Communications, the company specialising in TV over Internet Protocol (IPTV), can now attract tier one customers following its initial public offering (IPO) in June. The Cambridge-based company is about to do a major deal in Japan. "We're...

DTI-funded group holds; competitive UK review.
July 7, 2004... EPPIC (Electronics and Photonics Packaging and Interconnection), one of the DTI-sponsored Faraday Partnerships designed to improve the competitiveness of UK industry by promoting links between companies and academia, has completed its...

Symmetry of quasicrystals gives low thermal, high electrical conductivity.
July 7, 2004... The image (right) from a scanning tunnelling microscope shows a 10nm x 10nm section of a 'quasicrystal' of an aluminium/nickel/cobalt alloy. The material has unusual ten-fold symmetry, and, unlike periodic crystalline structures, cannot be...

EC sees way to r6bn fund for research.
July 7, 2004... The European Commission is pushing for public/private partnerships to fund electronics research. European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin said the partnerships should bring in $6bn a year. "Europe cannot afford to miss the next...

EM shielding is halogen-free.
July 7, 2004... A halogen-free, flame retardent electromagnetic shielding material has been developed by Showa Denko. The material is made from magnetic materials dispersed in a resin compound, but without the halogens, antimony, lead or siloxane often found...

Ugly barcodes banished as Fujitsu hides printed data.
July 7, 2004... ID numbers, web links and other data can be hidden on colour images, according to Fujitsu which has developed embedded printing technology. The Japanese firm said data can be printed in magazines, on consumer products or from home colour...

Firms to cash in as Europe resolves Galileo and GPS dispute with the US.
July 7, 2004... Satellite positioning and navigation equipment makers will benefit from the European Union and US decision to make Galileo and GPS interoperable. The two have resolved their differences and signed an agreement allowing their respective...

Capacity expansion and 90nm migration threaten to curtail DRAM market growth.
July 7, 2004... Recently expanded DRAM manufacturing capacity, and migration to 90nm technology next year threaten a premature end to a market which was expected to grow 49 per cent this year. Inotera Memories, the DRAM joint venture between Infineon...

Location technology finds CPS investing funds in recruitment.
July 7, 2004... Cambridge Positioning Systems (CPS) is recruiting again, a year after it was forced to cut staff from 80 to 30 after being pushed out of the US E911 emergency location market. "We are going for relatively modest growth," said Chris Wade, CEO of...

Vicor converter licence for Sony is part of trend to power integration.
July 7, 2004... Sony has licensed power semiconductor technology from DC-DC converter module supplier Vicor. The consumer company will use the technology in its own product, but it will also use it in a range of power converters. The agreement demonstrates the...

Library vendors address power dissipation.
July 7, 2004... Power dissipation problems caused by the shift to 0.13[micro]m and 90nm IC processing are coming under attack from Asic library vendors. Firms including Virage Logic and Virtual Silicon are providing libraries of standard cells that aim to...

Bell Labs plans Dublin centre; g.
July 7, 2004... Bell Labs is to set up a telecoms R&D centre at the Dublin-based facility of its parent company Lucent Technologies. The centre, which will concentrate on research into telecoms and supply chain technologies, will benefit from a $69m investment...

Intellect initiative gives powerful lobby voice to design community.
July 7, 2004... The design community will get a new lobbying voice when industry body Intellect launches its Electronic Design Group initiative later this month. According to Peter Maguire, Intellect's director of components and manufacturing, planning for the...

Sony Ericsson expands China R&D into global unit.
July 7, 2004... Sony Ericsson is to expand its R&D Centre in China into a global development unit, one of four such units which will develop products and applications for the global market. The firm also announced it had taken control of joint-venture mobile...

Chip firms catch cold from handset fall out.
July 7, 2004... The leading mobile phone manufacturers are losing market share and those semiconductor suppliers which are heavily reliant on the major handset makers are losing share as well, according to US analysts iSuppli. In 2003, Nokia's market share...

Double helix fibre sorts light.
July 7, 2004... Researchers at Chiral Photonics in the US have created optical fibres (pictured above) that can sort light travelling along them according to its polarisation. By twisting fibres with a rectangular core to create left- and right-handed (chiral)...

Chip prices and margins rise as recovery takes a hold.
July 7, 2004... Increases in chip prices and profit margins are kicking in as the industry enters the second stage of its recovery, according to a mid-year report from UK forecasters Future Horizons. So far the recovery has seen increasing unit volumes with...

Wi-LAN legal bid against Cisco.
July 7, 2004... Broadband wireless specialist Wi-LAN has launched legal action against Cisco Systems for producing IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g devices without a licence. The Canadian company claims its patents for W-OFDM technology are necessary for the...

Haptic torch for the blind senses obstacles.
July 7, 2004... Graduate Adam Spiers is looking to develop his haptic torch for blind people in a proposed PhD. Spiers, a graduate of the University of Reading's Cybernetics department, developed a sensing device for the blind which includes a haptic...

University spin-out pushes monitoring system in new markets.
July 7, 2004... University spin-out Optical Reference Systems (ORS) is targeting the white LED and optical coatings industry with its thin film coating monitoring system, which was developed to improve the production yield of thin film semiconductors. "We're...

Design lobby must shout to be heard.
July 7, 2004... If the electronics design community's contribution to the economy is to be fully recognised by Government it needs a new and powerful lobbying voice. So the emergence of a new action group from within the industry association, Intellect is a...

Nanoscale memory technology could squeeze 12Tbytes onto CD-size space.
July 7, 2004... A memory technology which could squeeze almost 12Tbyte onto a CD-sized surface is under development in West London. Brunel University spin-out firm Diameter is looking for funds to develop a nanoscale memory based on shape-memory metal. The...

Rival flash technology on brink of going commercial.
July 14, 2004... Ovonic unified memory (OUM), or phase-change memory (PCM), one of three non-volatile technologies being developed to replace flash in future high-density applications, is on the brink of commercial applications. Two recent research papers from...

ADC on microprocessor achieves 89dB SINAD.
July 14, 2004... Silicon Laboratories has integrated two 1Msample/s 16-bit ADCs with an 8051 processor on CMOS, and achieved 89dB SINAD (approx. equal to sig/noise). High resolution ADCs are notoriously difficult to integrate with digital logic and 89dB is...

UK plasmon work makes new 'toy' for engineers.
July 14, 2004... Manipulating light at the chip-scale, perhaps enabling optical computation devices, is a potential outcome of research at Imperial College. Working with Spanish colleagues, Professor John Pendry has shown that drilling holes in materials that...

Arguing intelligent agents learn how best to negotiate.
July 14, 2004... Researchers at the University of Southampton are hoping to boost the performance of 'intelligent agents' by making them argue. "A lot of what agents need to do is to perform some sort of negotiation. To make them more effective, we are adding...

UK system could constantly check for cracks in rails on train network at normal train speed.
July 14, 2004... The condition of the UK's rail network could be monitored constantly at normal train speeds, if a non-contact ultrasonic test device demonstrated at the University of Warwick is commercialised. The system is the brain child of Dr Steve Dixon,...

Lifetime support good for your health.
July 14, 2004... The speed technology changes means obsolescence is a real problem, says Martin Holmes hen Gordon Moore made his famous observation in 1965, the electronics industry was quick to seize the exciting implications. However it was less quick to...

Brunel puts web in the frame.
July 14, 2004... Brunel University design student Andrew Fayle is developing an Internet-enabled picture frame, and has made a prototype. Called Living Frame, "it lets people stay in touch by receiving and displaying messages and pictures from friends and...

Pico quadruples bandwidth to 200MHz in USB scopes.
July 14, 2004... Pico Technology has quadrupled analogue bandwidth to 200MHz in its latest PC-based USB-connected oscilloscopes. The PicoScope 3000 series (185x134x32mm) has sampling rates up to 200Msample/s for single shot measurements and 10Gsample/s for...

Cats inspire satellite orientation technology.
July 14, 2004... Cats, and the way they always land on their feet, have inspired a novel way to orientate satellites in space. The idea came out of discussions at Drury University in Missouri. "Understanding the concepts involved in a cat's free fall is a very...

UK start-up Icera plans jobs drive after $22.5m investment coup.
July 14, 2004... Bristol start-up Icera will double its head count in the next year after winning $22.5m in second round funding. The fabless firm said the investment was sufficient to take it through to production of its wireless chips. "Over the last 18...

Ultrasound piezoelectric crystal research wins grant.
July 14, 2004... Scottish R&D centre The Crystal Consortium (TCC) has won [pounds sterling]75,000 in Government grants to develop a piezoelectric crystal for ultrasound systems. The crystal could replace ceramic piezo devices in high end acoustic transducers...

Ultra-wideband chip firm builds R&D team with [pounds sterling]14m first round funding.
July 14, 2004... Ultra-wideband silicon developer Artimi has completed a $14m first round of funding, expected to last the firm two years. Richard Dellabarca, chief financial officer at Artimi, said the money "is to build our R&D team, it's to build our senior...

Asic customers to use 90nm process in platform devices to minimise risks.
July 14, 2004... LSI Logic, which is about to launch its first 90nm product, believes the risks of going to the new process node will push Asic customers into using it mainly for platform products. "Our first product in 90nm is a standard product which will be...

Wideband snags are quality talk.
July 14, 2004... Wideband systems are being held back by a lack of speech quality specifications and adequate tools for assessing and planning of speech communication systems, according to standards body ETSI. An ETSI workshop on the subject has begun to define...

DTI centre to help SMEs adopt RFID technology.
July 14, 2004... The DTI is to set up an education centre to help SMEs adopt RFID technology, with backing from Microsoft and Intel. The centre is the idea of Ed Cowley, director of RFID promoter the RFID Networking Forum, who has secured financial backing from...

Opto breakthrough for film.
July 14, 2004... Oki Electric is claiming a world first for high speed comms in demonstrating a single channel optical device capable of transmitting and receiving data at a rate of 160Gbit/s data over a distance of 640km. The firm highlighted the importance...

Gwyneth Paltrow helps us see the light.
July 14, 2004... Gwyneth Paltrow could be one of the surprise saviours of the optical communications infrastructure market. Not on her own, but along with the movie-making industry, they could prompt a new wave of high speed optical fibre network upgrades in...

A bit of rough gets creative.
July 21, 2004... worth a look Dr Jonathan Hare, the 'true renaissance man' of Rough Science and techie expert in the BBC's wonderfully oddball Hollywood Science, has a terrific website at www.creative-science.org.uk Click on 'things to make' and admire the...

Nanoscale work faces a charge.
July 21, 2004... Developments in quantum and nanoscale engineering could suffer from surface charge effects, according to research from the University of Rochester in the US. Quantum nanorods made from cadmium or selenium, for example, should in theory be...

Process technology regains importance as semiconductor firms seek 'Holy Grail'.
July 21, 2004... The semiconductor industry could return to the days when an advantage in process technology is the key competitive differentiator. The problem now bedevilling the industry at 90nm is leakage current. "The physics is that if we all use the same...

EU lead-free directive on course as truce called in war over words.
July 21, 2004... The European RoHS (lead-free) Directive is moving towards ratification again, after being bogged-down by arguments over wording which will set maximum concentrations of banned substances in consumer electronics. Decision making on the crucial...

LED companies respond to doubts over fitting quality.
July 21, 2004... High power LED makers are taking steps to generate confidence within the lighting industry and protect the fledgling LED lighting market. At issue is the quality of light fittings made by luminair manufacturers, many of which have not used...

Tools for 3D etch.
July 21, 2004... Germany's SUSS MicroTec has developed etch-resist tools for micromachine production. "Applications for fabricating 3D microstructures and processing of thick photoresists are gaining momentum," said the firm. The Gamma resist processing system...

Technology on your radar.
July 21, 2004... FPGAs and Compact PCI bus architecture have changed the way radar systems are designed. Richard Wilson considers their effect on the processing performance and I/O bandwidth of radar in military designs is a good few years ago now that...

Research body seeks partners for novel e-RAM development.
July 21, 2004... IMEC is looking for partners to co-develop novel types of embedded RAM (e-RAM) for applications needing large amounts of on-chip memory at the 45nm node and below. e-RAM is seen as a dense, volatile memory suitable for applications where...

Soldiers get more punch.
July 21, 2004... The FIST programme is intending to gear up dismounted soldiers with the right level of equipment for every situation that confronts them. Prime contractor Thales is due to start trials in September. Alex Mayhew-Smith reports he first major...

Electrical buzz in the air.
July 21, 2004... Electric motors save an enormous amount of weight when they replace hydraulics in planes, and while the all-electric aircraft is some way off, the more-electric aircraft is very much with us, says Steve Bush eroplanes have had electronics...

Proposals for 802.11n divided between IP owner consortiums.
July 21, 2004... The two major groups proposing technical specifications for the IEEE 802.11n next generation wireless LAN standard are separated more by IP ownership issues than any real technology differences. Last week an IEEE plenary meeting saw the first...

Mirrored array stares into the eye.
July 21, 2004... This is a 240 x 200 array of individually addressable mirror elements, each 40[micro]m on a side, being developed for adaptive optic uses by the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonics and Microsystems in Germany. Rather than relying on a patient's...

Fab equipment utilisation at 'all time high', says ASML.
July 21, 2004... The chip market recovery is continuing and sustainable, according to the boss of Dutch lithography equipment supplier ASML. The firm posted encouraging second quarter results last week in which it reported a tripling of net profits to $65m...

Schools compete in robotic trials.
July 21, 2004... Pupils from nine south Wales schools competed in the annual Micromouse competition organised by the University of Wales. The school teams designed and built their own robotic mice, which were put to the test at the University's School of...

Aculight fibre laser performs with high-power at green wavelengths.
July 21, 2004... US-based Aculight has produced a 60W 540nm, frequency-doubled, large mode area (LMA) fibre laser. "We've achieved something very unique with our new fibre laser system," said Aculight's v-p, Roy Mead. "We wanted to produce a high-power green...

Electronics graduates' salaries rise above national average.
July 21, 2004... Starting salaries for electronics graduates are now [pounds sterling]21,100, just above the national average, while the number of vacancies in the sector has increased by 24 per cent. According to a report from the Association of Graduate...

The cost of nanotechnology.
July 21, 2004... The industry has entered the era of nanotechnology, and each step brings new challenges to be solved. These challenges, such as how to draw features smaller than the wavelength of the light used for the drawing, are getting more difficult and...

Cancer-detecting diode development gets [pounds sterling]200k grant.
July 21, 2004... Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have been awarded almost [pounds sterling]200,000 to develop planar T-Ray Gunn diodes, which could be used to produce low cost equipment for detecting skin cancer. The money, from Scottish Enterprise's...

Intel to start production of NOR flash memory on 90nm process.
July 21, 2004... Intel says it will begin production of NOR-type flash memory on a 90nm process using 200mm wafers during Q3. Using 200mm wafers in fabs converted from Pentium production will mean a low capital cost of entry, making it competitive with rival...

XJTAG tools sold with DiagnoSYS.
July 21, 2004... Test specialist XJTAG has signed a deal that will see its boundary scan test equipment sold alongside tools from DiagnoSYS. DiagnoSYS will act as a distributor for XJTAG, and integrate the tools into its PinPoint II in-circuit tester. "We are...

Japanese mobile operator invests in chips.
July 21, 2004... NTT DoCoMo has invested in two major chip manufacturers to develop a single chip which will allow its FOMA 3G mobile phones to operate on W-CDMA/GSM/GPRS networks. The Japanese network operator is investing around [pounds sterling]34.8m over...

Grant to look at telecoms in flight.
July 21, 2004... The University of Bradford has been given [pounds sterling]50,000 to look at improving telecoms services during aircraft flights. The grant from Northern Aerospace Technology Exploitation Centre (NATEC) has been used to launch the Aeronautical...

Pace seeks UK engineers in face of India plans.
July 21, 2004... Pace Micro Technology is recruiting 40 engineers in the UK and is not planning to reduce its R&D effort here, despite plans to increase its outsourced team of engineers in India. "These are mainly 'leadership positions' to oversee the...

Asics versus programmable logic battle 'a year away'.
July 21, 2004... The much touted battle between hard-wired Asics and programmable logic has not happened yet and is still about a year away from taking place, says Wilf Corrigan, founder, chairman and CEO of LSI Logic. "Battle has not yet been joined - despite...

Near-field techniques test limits of diffraction.
July 21, 2004... Near-field techniques have allowed researchers to duck the diffraction limit, producing 30nm features with 244nm ultraviolet light without resorting to phase-shift masks. The technique, under investigation at the University of Sheffield, is...

Lessons to be learnt in the art of funding.
July 21, 2004... The Government may have increased its commitment to funding technology R&D in this country but the electronics industry will only get its entitlement if it does a better job at winning public funding for projects. Any political advantage which...

Spiratech wins funding for modelling software.
July 21, 2004... Spiratech from Manchester has received over $1m in second round funding to continue development of its transaction level modelling software. "It's almost all going to go into R&D," said Simon Calder, CEO of SpiraTech. "We envisage hiring...

Tool links design and PCB layout.
July 21, 2004... A tool linking programmable logic design and PCB layout has been unveiled by Mentor Graphics. Called I/O Designer, the tool aims to simplify both FPGA and PCB design flows. John Isaac, director of market development at Mentor, said I/O...

Foundries set to expand.
July 21, 2004... Foundry capacity will expand 25.9 per cent this year, according to US analyst iSuppli, with a further 23.6 per cent expansion predicted for 2005. By contrast, the semiconductor industry's overall capacity will only grow by 7.3 per cent this...