ARM sets the bar high

ARM has set itself some aggressive targets in the mobile computing, networking and data-centre markets.

ARM CFO Chris Kennedy

ARM CFO Chris Kennedy

ARM expects to double its royalties from mobile computing applications in the next five years, says CFO Chris Kennedy, this will take the figure to around $750 million.

Units are expected to grow 7% CAGR till 2020, and the increasing ARM content in SoCs e.g. Mali, physical IP, video, new cores etc will support an increase in rates.

ARM has upped its expected share of the 2020 networking market from 35% to 45% which could represent about $50 million in royalties.

In the data-centre, ARM has increased its 2020 market expectation from around 10% to 25% which could represent royalties worth another $50 million.

david manners

Elektra Awards 2015 – the finalists are named

Elektra-AwardsElectronics Weekly presents the finalists for the Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards 2015. After reading a record number of entries this year, the panel of independent judges have filled out their score-cards. The assessment process mean that specialists judged specific categories.

Business Awards – The Elektra Awards promotes exceptional business practice.

Distributor of the Year (Sponsored by Panasonic)

This award category is open to companies that derive a majority of their revenues from the selling of components, systems or software products which are manufactured by their principals.

Digi-Key
Farnell element14
Mouser Electronics
Rapid Electronics
RS Components
Solid State Supplies
TTI

 

Manufacturer of the Year (Sponsored by Southern Manufacturing & Electronics)

The award will be given to the manufacturer which has demonstrated the most impressive level of commercial success and new business projects in global markets during the past 12 months.

Axiom Manufacturing Services
Asteelflash (Bedford)
AWS
Tenkay Electronics
TT Electronics Integrated Manufacturing Services

 

New Company of the Year

Venture fund or privately financed companies which have set up operations in Europe in the past five years can enter for this Award.

Ultrahaptics
UltraSoC

 

Design Team of the Year (Sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz UK)

This award category is open OEMs and design houses involved in product development projects.

AndersDX
ByteSnap Design
Escatec
Plessey
Peratech

 

Educational Support Award (Sponsored by Mentor Graphics)

This Award will be presented to a company which demonstrates a commitment to the education of engineers of the future by providing support to schools, colleges and universities.

Imagination Technologies
National Instruments
TDK-Lambda

Product Technologies – The Elektra Awards promotes exceptional technical innovation

Design Tools and Development Software Award (Sponsored by Swindon Silicon Systems)

This Award will be presented to the software design tool, application or software IP which demonstrates both outstanding technical capabilities and usability. Product types eligible for this category are EDA chip, design verification, emulators, PCB design tool suites and embedded development tools for microcontroller based systems.

Cadence Design Systems – Automotive functional safety verification
Future Facilities – 6SigmaET Release 9
Mentor Graphics – Calibre xACT platform
National Instruments – LabVIEW Communications System design suite
Silicon Labs – Simplicity Studio software suite
Xilinx – SDSoC development environment

 

Passive & Electromechanical Product of Year

Product types eligible are resistors, capacitors, inductors, sensors, switches, connectors or actuators which were introduced in the past 12 months

AVX – Hermetically sealed conductive polymer tantalum capacitors
Cliff Electronics – XLR feed-through
DelfMEMS – SP12T RF MEMS contact switch
Harwin – M300 hi-rel power connector series
Kemet – F862 film capacitor
Vishay Intertechnology – Enycap hybrid energy storage capacitor

 

Power System Product of the Year

Eligible product types are DC-DC, AC-DC power modules, open, closed and encapsulated power supplies, power ICs and discrete power components.

Analog Devices – ADM7154 low noise RF linear regulator
Freescale Semiconductor – RF power GaN transistor in plastic package
Linear Technology – LTM4623
Maxim Integrated – Himalaya power module
Power Integrations – InnoSwitch range of switcher ICs
TDK-Lambda – ZMS100 AC-DC power supply

 

Renewable Energy Design Award

Eligible products will include hardware/software systems or semiconductor products.

Heliatek – HeliaFilm
Zeta Specialist Lighting – Solar poster case kit

 

Semiconductor Product of the Year – Analogue (Sponsored by Mouser Electronics)

This award will be presented to an analogue or mixed-signal semiconductor product which demonstrates outstanding technical capabilities and usability.

AMS – TMG399x gesture sensor
Freescale Semiconductor – FXTH87 tyre pressure monitor
Intersil – TW9984 automotive safety four-channel video decoder
Novelda – X2M200 respiration sensor module
On Semiconductor – Medical sensor system-in-package
Peregrine Semiconductor – UltraCMOS monolithic phase & amplitude controller

 

Semiconductor Product of the Year – Digital (Sponsored by GCS Engineering)

This award will be presented to a digital semiconductor IC which demonstrates outstanding technical capabilities and usability.

Altera – Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs
Ambiq Micro – Apollo microcontroller
Cypress Semiconductor – PSoC 4 and PRoC Bluetooth LE
Linear Technology – LTC2983 digital output temperature sensor
Lattice Semiconductor – iCE40 UltraLite FPGA
Xilinx – Zynq UltraScale MPSoCs

 

LED Lighting Product of the Year (Sponsored by Anglia)

Eligible products are LEDs, lighting modules, luminaires and driver ICs.

Cambridge Nanotherm – Nanotherm DM
Khatod Optoelectronic – Gaia optical system
On Semiconductor – Ballast and LED driver for automotive front lights applications
Zeta Specialist Lighting – The SlamTube

 

Test Product of the Year

Eligible products include benchtop, handheld, modular, PXI-based, boundary scan and in-circuit production test equipment.

Anritsu – MT8821C radio communication analyser
Keysight Technologies – E5080A ENA network analyser
Labnation BVBA – SmartScope
National Instruments – PXIe-8880 eight-core PXI controller and chassis
Rohde & Schwarz – FSWP phase noise analyser and VCO tester
Tektronix – RSA306 handheld USB spectrum analyser

 

Internet-of-Things Product Innovation Award (Sponsored by Micron)

Eligible products must provide some element of the IoT – wireless communications, security, storage or user applications, and the product must have been introduced in the past 12 months.

Antenova – The Weii antenna
Arrow Electronics – SmartEverything development board
Imagination Technologies – Whisper radio processor
Lynx Software Technology – Persistent threat detection software
Panasonic Automation and Industrial – Grid-Eye infrared array sensor wireless board
Renesas Electronics – Synergy platform

 

The other awards include:

Consumer Product Innovation of the Year – Online vote (Sponsored by Avnet)

In this category visitors to the Electronics Weekly website are invited to select the Consumer Electronic Product Innovation which they feel makes the most inspirational use of technology. A shortlist of products will be selected by the Editor.

University Research Award – Online vote (Sponsored by RS Components)

In this category visitors to the Electronics Weekly website are invited to select the university research project which they feel will make the largest impact on the commercial market in the next five years. A shortlist of research projects will be selected by the Editor.

Four Awards will be presented for:

Excellence in Design in High-Reliability Systems (Sponsored by Vicor)
Excellence in Design in Medical
Excellence in Design in Industrial
Excellence in Design in Automotive

 

Judges:

Steve Furber ICL professor of computer engineering, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester
Professor Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5GIC, University of Surrey
Paul Hide, director of operations, techUK
Claudio Zizzo, head of electronics at Dyson
Derek Boyd, CEO, NMI
Jon Howes, technology director, Beecham Research
Nick Flaherty, technology writer.
Mick Elliot, online editor
Adam Fletcher, chairman, Electronic Component Supply Network
Graham Prophet, technology editor
Richard Wilson, editor, Electronics Weekly
Steve Bush, technology editor, Electronics Weekly

The industry’s largest technology and business awards are in their 12th year of celebrating the best the electronics industry has achieved. The Elektra Awards, which are the industry’s largest and longest running awards, demonstrate the inherent strength of the industry and the ambition and vision of the individuals who work in it.

The awards will be presented at the industry’s biggest gala evening dinner on Tuesday 24 November at the Lancaster London Hotel. Book your table now »

 

Richard Wilson

HP to shed another 25-30,000 jobs

HP is to cut another 25,000 to 30,000 jobs as it splits into HP Inc and HP Enterprise.

Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman

The cuts are expected to be implemented by the end of October.

The latest job losses, announced yesterday, will hit HP Enterprise, although HP Inc is expected to lose 3,300 jobs over the next three years.

“We’ve done a significant amount of work over the past few years to take costs out and simplify processes and these final actions will eliminate the need for any future corporate restructuring,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman.

Four years ago, when Whitman became CEO, HP had 350,000 employees. She had sacked 55,000 before this latest cut which will take the head count down to between 265,000 and 270,000.

HP Inc is the PC and printer business. HP Enterprise is the server and software business. The split takes effect on 1 November.

Five years ago HP profit was $8.8bn. Last year it was $5bn.

david manners

5G project tests millimetre-wave network in Bristol

A group of European companies and universities are looking into the use of 5G networks which can reconfigure more quickly to meet the data demands of users.

BWT019LightningModuleA pan-European project involving Huawei, Telefonica, Blu Wireless Technology with the universities of Bristol, Dresden and Thessalias is investigating the building of adaptive networks which will meet the anticipated high capacity data traffic in airports and concert arenas.

Called 5G XHaul, the project is part of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP).

It will  consider the limitations of today’s mobile networks and specify requirements for the next generation of communications networks and services.

First field trials are already underway in Bristol as part of the “Bristol in Open” project, which is a joint venture between the council and university to provide three new fast networks in the centre of Bristol.

Dr. Eckhard Grass of the IHP, writes:

“5G XHaul proposes a converged optical and wireless network solution able to flexibly connect Small Cells to the core network. Exploiting user mobility, our solution allows the dynamic allocation of network resources to predicted and actual hotspots. Due to the dynamic allocation of network resources we can serve the needs of the users”.

As part of the Bristol is Open initiative, local firm Blu Wireless is deploying a millimetre-wave radio tnetwork to extend the fibre network.

5G XHaul is funded by the EU communication program Horizon 2020 at a estimated cost of 7.3 million euros. It will run for three years, until June 2018.

Partners in the project include: Huawei, Telefonica I+D, i2CAT, Blu Wireless Technology, ADVA Optical Networking, COSMOTE, Airrays, TES Electronic Solutions as well as University of Bristol, TU Dresden, University of Thessalias and IHP.

Richard Wilson

RFEL brings hardware-in-loop to military designs

Untitled

The qu-IQ platform

RFEL has introduced a development system for signal processing designs which the company says will bring hardware-in-loop (HWIL) testing to security, military and industrial applications.

Launched at the DSEi show in London today, the qu-IQ platform brings the DSP performance of Xilinx Kintex 7 FPGA and a Xilinx Zynq 7045 System on Chip with a dual-core ARM A9 processor to military and security system designs.

There is 3Gbyte of DDR3 memory on a PCIe 2.0 host card and the additional of an FMC interface with LVDS and GTX data lanes means that data transfer rates of up to 180Gbit/s are possible.

The PCIe Gen2x8 interface will support DMA data transfers up to 24Gbit/s to and from the host PC.

This development board has 750k logic cells and nearly 2500 DSP48 slices. RFEL have also added an evaluation version of its ChannelCore Flex IP core. This allows the developer to program response frequency, bandwidth and channel response on each of 128 channels.

“We have drawn on all our years of expertise to design this open development platform for prototyping and algorithm development, which is also targeted at hardware-in-loop testing,” said Dr Alex Kuhrt, RFEL’s CEO.

The qu-IQ development board will be available in Q4 2015 .

Richard Wilson

5G mobile faces 60GHz spectrum allocation issue

Higher speed 5G mobile communications services using the millimetre wave frequency band look likely to be delayed due to issues over spectrum allocation in the 60GHz frequency band.

Research into 5G radio technology in Asia, the US and Europe, including the UK’s 5G Innovation Centre, may lobby their respective national frequency bodies to allocate the 60GHz spectrum.

But global frequency bands will be fixed in 2019, only a year before the proposed launch of the first 5G services.

The 5GIC, which officially opened at the University of Surrey this week, is pre-empting the millimetre-wave frequency issue by working with partner Huawei of China on a new radio architecture, called RCA, which will make more efficient use of the available spectrum in the 2.4-5.0GHz band.

It has already demonstrated 4k video streamed over a 20MHz radio channel.

According to Professor Rahim Tafazolli, head of the 5GIC, the £70m research facility is also working on millimetre-wave technologies.

“But we do not want to invest too much resource into one specific frequency band before it is allocated,” said Prof Tafazolli.

Work on millimetre-wave radio technology is developing rapidly in Asia. Samsung in Korea is developing 30GHz radio technology and as a partner in the 5GIC, it is bringing this millimetre-wave research to the UK facility.

“There are issues with frequency allocation for millimetre-wave. We are still a long way off identifying the frequency band, but this is not stopping research in this area and millimetre-wave is only one component of 5G,” said Howard Benn, head of standards and industrial affairs at Samsung Electronics Research Institute.

It is widely predicted that in order to support the wide radio channel bandwidth (500MHz and higher) needed for the higher 5G download speeds, networks will need to operate away from the crowded spectrum below 5GHz and in the 40-60GHz frequency band, which is known as millimetre-wave.

ITUBut these frequency bands are scheduled to be allocated by the ITU- World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC) on the global basis as late as 2019.

It seems likely that suppliers will not have time to build networks in the 60GHz band for a launch of 5G in 2020.

As a result the first 5G services could use the 5GHz band which may have a smaller channel bandwidth.

“First 5G services may not use milliwave-wave frequencies due to the lack of spectrum allocation, but some countries may go it alone,” said Benn.

Operators now expect there to be a two stage introduction of 5G services, similar to what has happened with 4G with LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies.

 

 

Richard Wilson

Harriet Green to run IBM’s IoT divsion

Harriet Green, formerly boss of distributors Macro, Arrow Asia/Pac and Premier Farnell, is to run IBM’s internet of things (IoT) business.image

Green is vice-president and genreal manager of IBM’s IoT division, which says it will invest $3bn in analytics and hardware for implementing IoT.

Green joins IBM from heading travel company Thomas Cook.

As well as heading IoT, Green will lead IBM’s new education unit, which will be formally launched later this year.

david manners

IQE increases revenues and profits

IQE_SiMachine1IQE saw profits and revenue increase in H1 2015, with debt reducing. Revenue was 2% up year-on-year at £53m and profits were up 5% at £6.7%, with debt reduced by 12% to £31m.

“IQE’s revenues continue to diversify as its photonics sales grow rapidly,” says IQE CEO Drew Nelson. “The growth in the photonics business follows on from strong engagement by IQE in its customers’ product development programmes over the past few years. The increasing number and quality of customer product development programmes is a positive lead indicator which is providing a high level of confidence over the growth outlook for photonics.

“Other non-wireless businesses continue to make good progress,” adds Nelson,”notably, advanced solar (CPV) achieved a major milestone with initial sales into field deployments, and the technical progress made with GaN technologies, is advancing the group towards initial sales into the RF and power markets in the next 12 to 18-months. The wireless business has delivered a stable performance despite disruption at one customer site (unrelated to epi wafers) which pushed Q2 demand into Q3. Whilst we remain vigilant to the macroeconomic risks, our customer forecasts continue to reflect a normal second-half weighting of demand.”

IQE saw increasing revenue diversity, with non-wireless revenues accounting for 24% of Group sales (H1 2014: 21%) and photonics revenues up 28% year-on-year to £7.4m, and started shipments of advanced dolar wafers (CPV).

IQE took an exclusive licence and option agreement with Translucent for ‘cREOTM’ technology.

 

david manners

China IC industry worth $12.5bn, says China SIA

TI China fabChina made $12.5bn-worth of ICs last year, reports the China Semiconductor Industry Association, of which $5bn came from IC design, $3.7bn from IC fabrication and $3.8bn from IC packaging and testing.

China invested $10bn in the memory industry, because it is the largest memory market and buys 75% of the global memory.

Most  Chinese IC design companies rely on parent companies that are partly state-owned enterprises, says the report, with “almost no” independent IC design companies in existence.

For example, the parent company of Nari Smart-chip Microelectronics is a subsidiary of State Grid, with main products smart meter ICs and a monopoly position.

The parent company of CEC Huada is China Electronics Corporation (CEC) which monopolises the ID card-use IC market.

Non-state-owned large enterprises Huawei, ZTE, Datang Telecom (with TD-SCDMA technology) and SMIC Microelectronics act as the backers of Hisilicon, ZXIC, Leadcore Technology and Galaxycore respectively.

Independent IC design companies include Spreadtrum, RDA, Rockchip and Allwinner Technology. Spreadtrum and RDA need a lot of money but hold limited financing channels and have been acquired by state-owned enterprises.

The major shareholders and technology sources of Goodix and FocalTech are actually Taiwanese companies.

In mainland China, IC design companies are highly dependent on the mobile phone and tablet PC markets. Some companies are even completely dependent on the smartcard market, such as Nari Smart-chip Microelectronics, Fudan Microelectronics and Hua Hong Integrated Circuit.

david manners

Qualcomm buys into medical IoT

healthcareQualcomm has bought medical equipment integrator Capsule Technologie, with an eye on medical applications in the internet of things (IoT).

“Qualcomm is focused on strengthening its position in specific Internet of Everything verticals, like healthcare,” says Qualcomm president Derek Aberle. “The acquisition of Capsule expands the breadth of our healthcare platform, enabling us to provide connectivity solutions for the entire care continuum and create one of the world’s largest connected health ecosystems. This will be an important step in advancing the Internet of Medical Things.”

Capsule’s medical device integration and clinical data management platform enables data collection, EMR and health IT system integration and monitoring. According to the company its networking also delivers clinical data to various in-hospital decision support systems, alarm and notification systems and asset management tools, which help to reduce latency and transcription errors to ensure timely, informed care.

“As health care continues to move into the home and ambulatory settings and outside of traditional care areas such as the hospital, the convergence of medical device data from wherever the patient is located is critically important,” says Gene Cattarina, CEO of Capsule.

david manners