News

Highest F value ever! Steve Bush Acal Electronics is offering the UK what is believed to be, at 100F, the highest value capacitor yet produced. It is part of capacitor-maker Elna’s Dynacap DZ range of so-called super capacitors designed for back-up use. This type of capacitor was originally developed to supply power to memory, which only consumes microamps of current, ...

Padded packing shifts chips Steve Bush PCB maker Cranford Circuits has introduced a way of packing its products that has reduced costs. It is also claimed to be kinder to the environment and is more convenient for its customers. The technique was established partially in response to comments from customers and from the company’s own experience with ‘fly away’ polystyrene ...

Archer hits jobs bullseye Jon Mainwaring Archer Communications Systems has announced a list of future competitive tenders between subcontractors for the supply of equipment and services to the ?2bn Bowman tactical battlefield communications system. At the official launch last week, the Archer consortium (see box) announced that the Bowman programme will secure 7,000 UK jobs – including 1,000 at Siemens ...

Ericsson backs US start-up Richard Wilson Ericsson has joined Northern Telecom, 3Com and Siemens in putting financial backing behind a Silicon Valley start-up which is developing a high speed data switching technology. The company called Juniper Networks has a design for a data switching chip which can operate at speeds of 2.5Gbit/s. This is a factor of four faster than ...

Altera warns of poor Q3 growth Richard Wilson Leading programmable logic manufacturer Altera, has warned that sales for its current third quarter will be lower than expected. The announcement sparked off a sell off in chips stocks as a nervous stock market worried about earnings for other tech firms. Altera said that third quarter revenues will be flat or slightly ...

NTL/Telewest merger talks may be off Svetlana Josifovska Reports suggest that merger talks between the cable and broadcast company NTL and cable operator Telewest Communications have broken down. A Telewest spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the report: “All I can do at this stage is confirm our last statement which was that we receive approaches from time to time. ...

UK power house gets switched on David Manners After three years of negotiation, Ken Sanders has pulled off his management buy-out at Texas Instruments’ former discrete power semiconductor division at Bedford. The new company is called Power Innovations Ltd. Power Innovations (PI) makes high-voltage planar transistors, general purpose transistors/Darlingtons, thyristors and triacs up to 800V, 1A to 25A, and transient-over ...

Chip market eats into Astec profits Richard Wilson Weakness in the semiconductor market bit into turnover and profits at Astec, the power supply and component manufacturer. Pre-tax profit was one per cent down at ?13m for the first six months of the year, while turnover was ten per cent down at ?179.4m. As well as being hit by the weak ...

EnerTel ends bid for Dutch network Richard Wilson Dutch mobile phone group EnerTel has withdrawn from the contest to run Holland’s third mobile phone network. The operator, which was making a bid in conjunction with Orange of the UK and Deutsche Telekom, blamed delays due to lack of government approval for the third mobile phone licence. Details of the licence ...

Multimedia controller highlights at Hot Chips Tom Foremski in San Jose The first multimedia controller with an on-chip Rambus interface, and a superscalar processor for a supercomputer design, were among the advanced chips announced at last week’s Hot Chips IX conference in the heart of Silicon Valley. The conference focused on such issues as multimedia processing and techniques for speeding ...