<

publicité

br> Texas Instruments unveiled details of a 45 nm semiconductor manufacturing process that leverages a "wet" lithography process to double the number of chips produced on each silicon wafer, increasing performance by 30 percent while reducing power consumption 40 percent. TI's 45-nm process will be manufactured on 300-mm wafers in the DMOS6 facility in Dallas, Texas. The low-power ASIC design library will be available by the end of this year, with samples of the first SoC product delivered in 2007 and initial production in mid-2008.

Powerwave Technologies and Filtronic announced that they have signed a definitive agreement for Powerwave to acquire the majority of Filtronic's Wireless Infrastructure division business for a combination of 20.7 million newly issued shares of Powerwave common stock and $150 million in cash. The specific product lines included in this transaction comprise transmit/receive filters, integrated remote radio heads and power amplifier products, all for use in commercial wireless infrastructure base station equipment. The proposed acquisition does not include point to point radio backhaul equipment, as well as Filtronic's other divisions, of compound semiconductors and defence electronics. Immediately following the close, Filtronic will have an equity interest in Powerwave of approximately 13%. Filtronic's wireless infrastructure business had a 12-month revenue for the period ending November 30, 2005 of approximately $332.1 million. Powerwave believes that combined revenues for calendar year 2007 will easily exceed $1.4 billion.

A key part of the strategy for Filtronic is to achieve further substantial growth in value for compound semiconductors. This division is seeing strong long term market growth as the mobile handset industry continues to adopt switches based on GaAs pHEMT technology, with the expectation that they will be used in around 80% of handsets produced by 2008, says Filtronic. So, the British company plans to expand the semiconductor facility to increase the size of this business by up to three times in the coming two years, at an estimated cost of £45m over the next twelve months.

Analog Devices has named Frederic Boutaud to the distinguished position of ADI Fellow. The Fellows honor is awarded when an engineer has contributed significantly to ADI's business and demonstrated important qualities such as innovation, leadership, entrepreneurial ability, and consulting skills. A 25-year veteran of integrated circuit design and architecture work, Mr. Boutaud joined ADI in 1996. He holds 46 patents in programmable architectures and wireless communications circuit design. Mr. Boutaud is a graduate of the Ecole Centrale de Lyon of Ecully Cedex, France and is also a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The worldwide market for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) was $5.1 billion in 2005 and is set to grow to $6.0 billion in 2006 (+17,6%) and to $9.7 billion in 2010, according to Yole Developpement (Lyon, France). Due to MEMS growth now moving to consumer applications where there is low pricing, competition and price erosion, and the diminishing significance of industrial applications, the growth rate at 15% is lower than the previous years in term of revenue. However, with consumer electronics come large numbers and the MEMS market’s unit growth will be higher, close to 20 percent over the same period.

Yole says that all 50 of the top 50 semiconductor companies are now involved in MEMS manufacturing or development.

The largest application area at present is the inkjet print head which is already being rivaled by optical MEMS (MOEMS), used for optical multiplexing. Both sectors were worth over $1 billion in 2005 and while inkjet heads will enjoy steady growth to $2 billion in 2010, MOEMS will grow even faster to approach $3 billion in annual sales in 2010, according to Yole. RF MEMS and silicon microphones should enjoy strong growth, each getting close to $1 billion in annual market in 2010.

Manufacturers will begin shipping Ultrawideband (UWB) chipsets in 2H06 and shipments are expected to ramp up with a total of 289 million chipsets shipping in the year 2010, reports In-Stat. PCs will be the initial and largest volume market for UWB wireless chipsets, with PC vendors shipping over 125 million desktop and laptop PCs with UWB capability by 2010.

Created in 1996, Europe Technologies, a French company specialized in the design and sale of ARM based systems-on-chip (SoC) for dedicated customer applications, changes its name to become Scaleo chip. Scaleo chip's methodology in ARM based system-on-chip (SoC) technology allows to create a first functional chip for its clients in less than six months. Gilles Marsigné is appointed sales and marketing manager.