Archive : 1 June 2015 год

Intel has announced that it is to acquire Altera in a deal that values the company at US$16.7billion. The acquisition will see Intel bundle its processing chips with Altera's programmable FPGA devices in a move that will enable the chip maker to deliver a host of new products targeting the growing IoT and data centre markets.

The deal is Intel's biggest since it bought security software maker McAfee in 2011 for $7.7billion and underscores the company's determination to expand beyond its mainstay - chips for PCs.

Net revenue from Intel's PC group increased just 4% in 2014, while revenue in its date centres group increased 18%, providing just over a quarter of overall revenue.

Intel said that it plans to offer Altera's FPGA products with its Xeon processors to provide highly customised, integrated products. Intel said that it also expected to enhance Altera's products through improvements in both their design and manufacturing by employing its integrated device manufacturing model.

"Intel's growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments," said Brian Krzanich, ceo of Intel. "With this acquisition, we will make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more."

Commenting John Daane, president, ceo and chairman of Altera said: "We believe that as part of Intel we will be able to develop innovative FPGAs and SoCs for our customers in all market segments. This is an exciting transaction that provides immediate and significant value to our stockholders."

Altera will become an Intel business unit to facilitate continuity with existing and new customers. Intel intimated that it plans to continue support and development for Altera's ARM-based and power management product lines.

Pic: Brian Krzanich, ceo of Intel

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

The European Semiconductor Industry Association has reported that according to the latest World Semiconductor Trade Statistics data European semiconductor sales amounted to US$2.889billion in April 2015. That represents a fall of 2.3% on the figure for March and is down 5.6% on this time last year.

The results are in line with sales developments in the other regions, with the exception of Asia-Pacific, where sales were up 0.9% on the previous month and 7.3% on this time last year. Worldwide semiconductor sales were US$27.602billion in April, representing a fall of 0.4% from March but up 4.8% on last year.

Looking in more detail at the European market strong growth was observed in a number of key segments. Sales of Diodes were up 2.7% compared to March, Optoelectronics were ahead 4.1% and Sensors and Actuators rose 2.9%. In addition, application specific semiconductors performed well, with devices designed to be used in consumer and wireless communication growing by 3.2% and 1.7% respectively compared to March.

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

A new carbon material developed at Stanford University is said to boost the performance of energy storage technologies. "We have developed a 'designer carbon' that is both versatile and controllable," said Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. "Our study shows this material has exceptional energy-storage capacity, enabling unprecedented performance in lithium-sulphur batteries and supercapacitors."

According to Prof Bao, 'designer carbon' represents a dramatic improvement over conventional activated carbon. "A lot of cheap activated carbon is made from coconut shells. To activate the carbon, manufacturers burn the coconut at high temperatures and then treat it chemically."

The activation process creates nanosized pores that increase the surface area of the carbon. But Prof Bao says activated carbon has serious drawbacks, including limited ability to transport electricity.

Prof Bao and her colleagues have based their approach on conducting hydrogels. "Hydrogel polymers form an interconnected three dimensional framework that's ideal for conducting electricity," Prof Bao said. "This framework also contains organic molecules and functional atoms, such as nitrogen, which allow us to tune the electronic properties of the carbon."

Graduate student John To added:"We call it 'designer carbon' because we can control its chemical composition, pore size and surface area simply by changing the type of polymers and organic linkers we use, or by adjusting the amount of heat we apply during the fabrication process," To said.

As part of its work, the team produced carbon material with a surface area of 4073m2/g.

Testing 'real world' performance, the Stanford team fabricated carbon coated electrodes and installed them in supercapacitors. The results were said to be dramatic, with electrical conductivity improved by a factor of three compared to electrodes made of conventional activated carbon.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

A MEMS microphone from Vesper is said to have the highest acoustic performance of any commercially available MEMS microphone. The company says the VM101 solves some of the performance issues facing those manufacturing consumer products by enhancing the quality and clarity of audio in a range of devices.

"Voice is expected to supplant touch as the dominant user interface in consumer products," said Vesper's CEO Matt Crowley. "This makes higher performance MEMS microphones increasingly critical because they are right at the beginning of the audio signal chain. But today's MEMS microphones are versions of something developed in the 1950s."

According to Vesper, the VM101 has an SNR of 68dB, compared to the 65dB SNR of current high end capacitive MEMS microphones. The higher SNR is said by Crowley to improve far field audio performance. "Many people post videos online," he said, "but sound quality is bad. The higher SNR is like 'audio zoom', if you can capture sound at a distance, it will be of higher quality."

The VM101 is said to turn on in less than 10µs, making it suited to 'always on' applications. Alongside a typical SNR of 68dB, the device consumes 150µA.

Looking to the future, Crowley anticipates improving the performance of Vesper's MEMS microphones by '2 to 3db per year' until it reaches 80dB.

Pic: The VM101 pictured on a US 10cent coin

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

According to Imagination Technology, Baikal Electronics has integrated Imagination's latest MIPS Warrior P-class P5600 CPU into its multi-core processor the Baikal-T1. The Baikal-T1 is suited for use in a number of networking-related applications such as wireless routers, home gateways and other connected devices for applications such as industrial automation.

The chip contains a dual-core MIPS P5600 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz. Baikal-T1 also includes multiple high-speed (1G/10G Ethernet, PCIe, SATA 6G, USB) and low-speed interfaces (GPIO, I2C, UART, SPI). The package measures 25 x 25mm and is manufactured on 28nm process technology, achieving less than 5W of total power consumption.

The MIPS P5600 CPU is based on a wide issue, out-of-order implementation of the MIPS32 architecture, supporting up to six cores in a single cluster with high performance cache coherency. It is said to achieve the industry's leading CoreMark/MHz score per core for licensable CPU IP. The OmniShield-ready P5600 also integrates hardware virtualisation for security and reliability, and 128-bit SIMD support for high performance on data parallel operations such as DSP, imaging and media.

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Digi-Key's president and chief operating officer Mark Larson will step down at the end of June 2015 after 39 years at the head of the company. Taking over will be Dave Doherty, currently executive vice president of operations. Larson will take up the role of vice chairman and company advisor.

Since joining Digi-Key in 1976, Larson has grown the company's revenues from $800,000 to $1.76billion and from 14 employees in Thief River Falls to more than 3400 employees globally.

"It's certainly been an amazing ride," said Larson. "Over the past 39 years, I've enjoyed the daily challenge of adapting and improving our business to better serve our customers. By staying the course and focusing on the fundamentals, we just kept doing what we did best better and better each day. Looking forward, as the industry continues to evolve, Digi-Key is well positioned for the next stage and I'm extremely confident in the future of the company with Dave Doherty at the helm."

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Infineon says that it is working with Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) to develop a sensing solution based on its 60GHz transceiver technology. Potential applications for the solutions are said to include wearables, Internet of Things and automotive.

Google ATAP demonstrated some of the first potential applications for the technology – including gesture recognition and presence detection – at the Google I/O Developers Conference, held last week in San Francisco.

"Infineon is a recognised leader in radar based sensor ICs, providing component and system-level solutions for consumer, automotive safety, industrial and commercial sensing and machine vision applications – markets that are expected to grow significantly in the coming years," said Philipp Schierstaedt, general manager of Infineon's RF and Sensors business.

The sensor is said to be compact and low power, suitable for integration in mobile and fixed devices. Alongside Infineon's transceiver technology, the sensor is also said to include an RF transceiver, antenna and control electronics.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Altium has announced the release of never-before-seen roadmaps for its entire product lineup. These roadmaps provide a glimpse into the goals and development plans for the company's PCB focused design and management tools, including Altium Designer, Altium Vault, PCBWorks, CircuitStudio, and CircuitMaker.

"Transparency is a top priority for us, and we're more excited than ever to share our plans for the future of PCB design," said Peter Ricci, head of PCB at Altium. "We want everyone to know exactly where the future of their tools resides. It's our goal to instil a sense of confidence and security so our customers know that their PCB design tools have a future with Altium."

The move by Altium to reveal its development plans comes at a time of stability in the company's development, release, and technology processes. The roadmaps contain specific development plans, and gives feature additions and visions for the company's products. This release acts as an insight for current and prospective customers about the intent of Altium's PCB design tool offerings going forward.

Author
Tom Austin-Morgan

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk