Your new best friend could be called Neon. In a pre-CES teaser Samsung says it will reveal an an “artificial human” called Neon at the show. ‘Have you met an artificial?’ asks the teaser, while company posts say it is an ‘artificial intelligence being’ and a ‘best friend.’ Samsung says Neon is unrelated to its digital assistant Bixby. The company tweeted: ...

This, 59 years ago, was the headline on a story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of November 9th 1960. The story opens: Today, America’s three giant computer manufacturers are anxiously awaiting polling returns in the presidential election. For within an hour or two of the first counts, their computers are expected to predict the next President of the United States. Within ...

Tong Hsing and Kingpark, the Taiwan  CMOS Image Sensor (CIS) packagers have agreed to merge in a deal which will make them one of the world’s largest packaging firms for the CIS segment, reports Digitimes. Target markets are  smartphone, advanced driving, IoT, IoV, VR and AR markets. 60% of the CIS market is for smartphones but the automotive market for ...

A zinc rechargeable battery, being developed by NGK of Nagoya, Japan, has acquired UL verification based on the UL 9540A standard. NGK’s battery uses zinc as the negative electrode, aqueous solution as the electrolytic solution, and an NGK ceramic separator as a barrier between the positive and negative electrodes. Batteries that employ zinc as the negative electrode have a high ...

BeBop Sensors, the smart fabric sensor specialist, will display the Forte Data Glove – a VR haptic glove – at the show. It is designed for Oculus Quest, Oculus Link, Oculus Rift S, Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality, HTC Vive Cosmos, HTC Vive Pro, HTC Focus Plus, and Varjo VR headset technology. The gloves provide touch feedback and make users feel like the virtual ...

Loongson, formerly known as Godson, the China CPU designer, says it has made CPUs that use no third party IP. Loongson’s latest quad-core 3A4000 and 3B4000 processors are claimed to have equivalent performance to AMD’s 2015-vintage 28nm Excavator processors. Both chips have the GS464V microarchitecture,  are made on ST’s 28nm FD-SOI process and come in the FCBGA-1211 package. They each ...

BES of  Heywood has completed an £8.1 million project for the South Wales Compound Semiconductor Cluster to design, construct and commission an IS07-classified cleanroom along with a number of laboratory environments, including a photonics lab, a power electronics lab, an advanced packaging suite, an evaluation lab, a radio frequency lab and a high-power lab. All labs and cleanrooms have been constructed from ...

 Monzo, the four year-old cash-burning UK digital bank, is looking raise  £50-100 million to add to the £113 million it raised in June in a Series F round done at a valuation of $2 billion. So far Monzo has raised about £300 million. Monzo lost £50.7 million on revenue of £9.2 million in the 12 months to February 2019. It ...

After stalling in 2017, cellphone growth fell 4% in 2018 and is expected to be flat in 2019 at 1.37 billion units – 7% down on 2016 which was the peak and the last growth year, according to IDC. Next year, of course, the arrival of 5G phones could get the market growing again. IDC expects 5G smartphones to account ...

Japan Display Inc (JDI) is in talks with Apple and Sharp to sell its main Hakusan factory in Japan, reports the Nikkei. The price is said to be between $730 million to $820 million. Apple paid up-front for half the Hakusan factory’s $1.5 billion construction cost. It is said that Apple and Sharp are considering how to share stakes in ...