Finance

Renesas Technology Europe has launched a European version of its automotive infotainment and telematics consortium COMET (Community Enabling Telematics). The idea is to provide a common pool of software including real time operating systems, acoustic echo cancellation and noise suppression software, a Bluetooth application stack, and GPS software. For Renesas the automotive semiconductor market is very important – it has a ...

Avoiding inventory build-ups in the supply chain is as difficult now as it ever was, despite the lessons that could have been learned from the disastrous over-stocking of 2001. “The visibility of demand hasn’t improved at all,” Greg Lowe, senior vice-president at Texas Instruments, told the Electronica Forum. “What has improved is the working with the supply chain to see the ...

Strategic action is urgently needed if the UK is to maintain its position as a global knowledge-based economy in mobile communications over the next decade, according to a report from the DTI Global Watch Mission. The mission, which visited China and Korea, found that there was a difference from the UK in “the scale of funding and research exploitation”, although ...

The conclusion reached by last month’s discussion event on the ‘Future of the UK Electronics Industry’, organised by industry body Intellect, was that: “The UK must focus on retaining the design and specification of future products and systems.” Little wonder, therefore, that electronics activities in the UK are under pressure, when the industry’s representative body, or at least the chairman ...

September chip sales pulled through for Q3, despite evidence of ongoing inventory correction in some segments, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). The quarter’s sales were $55.2bn, an increase of 27.4 per cent from Q3 2003 and up 3.2 per cent sequentially from Q2’s $53.5bn. Worldwide sales for the first nine months of the year reached $157.6bn, an increase of ...

Bristol start-up Phyworks is opening a design office in Swindon with the aim of attracting engineers from along the M4 corridor. The firm plans to recruit an additional ten designers experienced in analogue and mixed signal design. Creating a new design team was easier than attracting staff to Bristol, said Phyworks, hence the Swindon move. Leading the Swindon team will ...

The year 2004 will bring record sales of $214bn for the semiconductor industry, but next year will remain essentially flat. That’s according to the annual forecast from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), released this week. Sales in 2006 will grow by 6.3 per cent and in 2007 by 15.2 per cent to $259bn. The SIA forecast an 11.8 per cent ...

This year’s second half slowdown will continue into 2005, World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) has reported. The industry group said it expects the world semiconductor market to reach $212.8bn this year, an increase of 28 per cent over 2003’s $166.4bn. But while growth was stronger than expected in the first half, Q3 shipments suggest an earlier than expected deceleration in ...

The failure of the UK’s Beagle 2 Mars Lander can be traced to a lack of Government financial support, according to a report by the Science and Technology Select Committee. The all-party committee said the mission’s failure stemmed from the Government’s unwillingness to commit funding early enough and the failure of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the UK Government to ...

PCB layout software that allows several designers to work simultaneously on one board has been developed by Mentor Graphics. XtremePCB, said John Isaac, director of market development at Mentor, allows “multiple layout designers to work on the same design at the same time, affecting the same database”. Changes made by one designer are immediately reflected on the screens of all ...