Analysis

Maxwell Technologies has announced that Alain Riedo, general manager of the company's Maxwell Technologies SA subsidiary, has been promoted to senior vice president and appointed a corporate officer.

Texas Instruments has announced it has made substantial updates to its gateway software solution, the Network Support Package (NSP) 3.7.1, enabling manufacturers to quickly and easily make improvements across product lines and realize faster time-to-market and return on investment.

picoChip has announced that it has been nominated as a double finalist at the Wireless Broadband Innovation (WBI) Awards 2006. picoChip is in contention for both Most Innovative Wireless Broadband Company and Best WiMAX / Wireless Broadband Product award categories. This follows last week¹s announcement that it won Frost & Sullivan¹s prestigious 2006 Semiconductors Industry Innovation & Advancement of the Year Award.

STMicroelectronics will demonstrate state-of-the-art product solutions that can address a variety of digital-consumer electronics market segments at MEDC (Mobile & Embedded DevCon), Las Vegas, May 8-11, 2006.

Acte Components has announced its appointment by QinetiQ as their European commercial sales partner for a range of highly Sensitive GPS modules, which are suitable for markets requiring tracking indoors.

CoWare has announced that Hubert Wolters has joined the company as senior sales director for Central and Northern Europe reporting to Mike Faust, CoWare's vice president of North America and Europe sales.

The family of Geode processors from AMD has been highly successful as longlife, low power, fanless computing solutions. To extend the Geode roadmap, Arcom has introduced a next generation board based on the AMD Geode GX CPU clocked at 400MHz but with performance equivalent to a similar class of CPU running at 533MHz.

Triteq Ltd has designed the electronics in an advanced location-tracking unit developed by Geonix Tracking Ltd for the Thuraya satphone handset. The UK-developed clip-on unit is designated as GT2000 and was introduced by Geonix to the Thuraya Service Providers at a conference and exhibition held in Dubai from 24-25 April.

Advanced Analogic Technologies Incorporated (AnalogicTech), a developer of power management semiconductors for mobile consumer electronic devices, and Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation (VIS), a leading specialty IC foundry service provider, have announced plans to integrate AnalogicTech’s 0.35micron multi-voltage mixed-signal ModularBCD process technology into VIS’ advanced 200mm submicron fabrication facilities in Taiwan.

In a recent report by The Information Network, the market for silicon microphones and speakers made using MEMS technology is expected to grow from 100 million units in 2005 to 491 million units in 2008. Representing 6.1% of the 1.6 billion microphones sold worldwide in 2005, the market is geared to grow to 18.9% of the 2.6 billion units in 2008.