Finance

British microwave engineer Professor Peter Clarricoats is to receive the Sir Frank Whittle Medal, one of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s highest accolades. Clarricoats, CBE FREng FRS, gets the Whittle Medal for influential achievements spanning more than half a century. According to the Academy, these achievements include: Research with Sir Charles Kao optical fibre technology – Kao got a Nobel prize ...

TSMC is exiting solar by the end of the month. Steve Tsu, chairman of TSM Solar, says the company couldn’t turn a profit with its solar manufacturing and that even the most aggressive cost-reduction plan wouldn’t make the solar subsidiary viable. “TSMC continues to believe that solar power is an important source of green energy and that solar module manufacturing ...

Cavendish Kinetics, the RF MEMS specialist, has completed its final funding round with a strategic raise of $36 million, to accelerate the development of its next generation RF components. The company’s new generation of RF components adds a range of virtually loss-less RF MEMS switches to its portfolio of RF MEMS tuners. Together the new components will enable  radio front-end applications, ...

The SEMI book-to-bill went positive in July after a 0.98 in June and a 0.99 in May. July’s ratio of 1.02 represented bookings of $1.59 billion and $1.56 billion of billings. The $1.59 billion bookings figure is 5.1% higher than the final June 2015 level of $1.52 billion, and is 12.5% higher than the July 2014 order level of $1.42 ...

Smart-meter chips were worth $1.2 billion last year, says IHS, at an ASP of $11. They went into 132 million meters. “The semiconductor industry for electric meters is moving toward a single-chip solution for measuring and communicating with the grid station, which is an important industry trend to watch,” says IHS’ Robbie Galoso. “Water and gas meters require fewer semiconductor ...

Toshiba is shipping a wireless power receiver IC that will enable mobile devices to be charged wirelessly as fast as if they were connected to the charger via a cable. The TC7764WBG is compliant with Qi V.1.1.2, the wireless low power charging standard defined by the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which includes a dedicated specification for smartphones and mobile accessories. ...

Rambus is going fabless. After 25 years as an IP supplier it will start selling ICs under its own name. The first products will be for communications in data centres and will be on sale by the end of the year. Data buffers are expected to be among the the first products. Rambus has had to resort to extensive and ...

Applied Materials has delivered a ‘flat to down’ forecast for calendar Q3 saying that the foundries are being cautious about spending because of high inventories. Applied reported a 10% rise in its calendar Q2 revenue and a 17% rise in orders. It saw calendar Q2 profits rise 9% to $329 million, and Q2 revenues rise to to $2.49 billion from $2.27 ...

Loss-making flash-based storage company Pure Storage has filed for an IPO. Last year the company lost $182 million on sales of $174 million. According to IDC, Pure is the second largest supplier of flash-based storage behind EMC and ahead of IBM and HP. The market for all-flash storage systems was $1.6 billion last year and will be $2.24 billion this ...

Intepro Systems has brought out electronic DC loads with an integral, grid-synchronized inverter designed to return up to 94% of the load test energy back to the grid. The rack-mounted unit has output ratings of 3.5 kW, 7 kW and 10.5 kW — scalable to 105 kW. It costs $8000 and is available on an 8-12 week lead-time. The ELR9000 ...