Siemens blitzes North East with fab closure Roy Rubenstein Siemens has announced that it is to close its North Tyneside fabrication plant resulting in the loss of 1,100 jobs. “We deeply regret the effect this decision will have on our employees in the North Tyneside plant, and on the region overall,” said Alan Wood, chief executive of Siemens UK. The ...

Pace picks up with cable set-top box deal Richard Wilson Pace Micro Technology has won an important contract supplying 100,000 digital set-top box receivers to telecoms group Cable & Wireless Communications. The Yorkshire manufacturer’s share price rose accordingly in early trading today. Interestingly, the set-top boxes, which will be used to provide digital TV services in CWC’s UK cable TV ...

NEC and ARM to co-develop an intelligent memory controller Tom Foremski ARM and NEC Electronics will work on developing an intelligent memory controller that supports NEC’s 64Mbit virtual channel memory (VCM) SDRAM that will make it easier to develop ARM microprocessor core based system-on-a-chip products. The memory controller will act as an interface between ARM based products and NEC’s SDRAM, ...

IMRE and Siemens sign research collaboration agreement for next-generation display technology Tom Foremski The US chip division of Siemens has signed an agreement with the Singapore Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) to develop new types of display products. The focus of the partnership is on developing Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) technology on flexible substrates. IMRE brings to the ...

Mobiles in court over health warning labels Melanie Reynolds A court action intent on forcing mobile phones to carry health warning labels has been adjourned until September. The private action by Roger Coghill of Coghill Research Labs, a bio-electromagnetics laboratory, is against a local mobile phone distributor for allegedly contravening the 1987 Consumer Protection Act. Coghill started the action after ...

400 production jobs to go at IDT David Manners IDT is to lose 400 employees over the next six months following a first quarter loss of $50 million on sales of $134.5 million and a decision to close its San Jose fab. All the laid off workers will be production people.

Political correspondent

SyncLink DRAM interface will come in two versions David Manners SyncLink DRAM (SLDRAM), the alternative fast DRAM interface to Rambus and DDR, is going to come in two flavours. First versions, called SLDRAM-I, will be 128Mbit DRAM devices out next year, running at between 200MHz and 300MHz. These will achieve data transfer rates of 800Mbyte/s at 200MHz and 1.2Gbyte/s at ...

V-chip comes into question Alex Mayhew-Smith An industry television group has questioned the need for the V-chip to control access to violent or sexually explicit TV programmes in the UK. The group – made up of the BBC, the ITC and the Broadcasting Standards Commission – said that broadcasters should give clear guidance about TV violence instead of relying on ...

Another bug afflicting the top of the range Pentium II Xeon processor has been reported by Intel.