News & Analysis

Teledyne Coax Switches has announced its selection by Astrium Ltd, Portsmouth U.K. as the supplier for coaxial switch blocks to be used on the Alphasat I-XL satellite programme. Alphasat I-XL, one of the world’s largest telecommunications satellites, is being built by Astrium for Inmarsat to augment its Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN).

Altera has announced that Sumitomo Electric Industries is using its 40-nm Stratix IV GX FPGAs in a low-density parity-check (LDPC) high-speed measurement system that verifies the forward error correction (FEC) code for high-speed digital signal processing.

Tensilica has announced that Blue Wonder Communications has licensed Tensilica’s Xtensa dataplane processors (DPUs) for an LTE (Long-Term Evolution) embedded broadband modem design. Blue Wonder Communications is an independent design house developing mobile broadband solutions for the telecommunications and semiconductor industries. Many of the employees at Blue Wonder Communications previously were employed by NXP’s wireless division and hav...

Microtune has announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Auvitek International, Ltd. for approximately $9 million in cash and stock and with a potential earn-out if certain performance targets are met, all subject to various standard closing conditions. The acquisition is expected to close this month.

NXP Semiconductors and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. have announced their cooperation to deliver the industry’s first single-chip 45nm global LCD TV platform, TV550. With NXP already delivering the engineering samples to its lead customers, NXP and TSMC have reached a major milestone in enabling the next generation of mainstream digital TV sets for TV manufacturers.

Microtune has announced that its wideband tuner (MT2170) and its DOCSIS 3.0 upstream amplifier (MicroStreamer MT1570) have been deployed in cable modems that achieved certification status by Cable Europe Labs for the EuroDOCSIS 3.0 specification.

The National Microelectronics Institute (NMI), the trade association representing the semiconductor industry in the UK and Ireland, has announced the creation of a Design Advisory Board to oversee its development of strategy and implementation plans for the semiconductor design community.

Lime Microsystems and Blue Wonder Communications have announced that they are jointly developing a complete LTE reference platform that will enable early adoption of this emerging standard. The fully characterised LTE reference platform will accelerate time to market for OEMs developing LTE systems. The reference platform is based on Lime Microsystems' integrated single chip RF transceiver, the LMS6002, and Blue Wonder's advanced baseband solutio...

The world’s first RFID-based scheme for single-journey reusable ticketing in mass transportation has recently gone live in Seoul, South Korea, and is expected to save some 3 billion Won (over US$2.4 million) per year using a robust solution based on RFID technology from STMicroelectronics.

ARM has announced that Samsung Electronics has licensed its Mali-SVG-t software for use in a wide range of mobile handsets, enabling clear graphical rendering of 2D objects and easy scaling for different display resolutions and zoom factors. Samsung joins a group of leading handset manufacturers who are leveraging ARM Mali hardware and software technology to deliver their next-generation mobile devices.