TechEye |  |
- Semiconductor sales to hit $347 billion this year
- Confusion reigns over Windows 10 licensing
- Personal storage shipments fall
- Samsung, others shell out money
- 3M spends more on R&D
- Foxconn’s electric car business expands
- Macs vulnerable to a new root kit
- Google bashes on glass ceiling
- Semiconductor sales show April decline
- ARM intros internet of things module
| Semiconductor sales to hit $347 billion this year Posted: 02 Jun 2015 03:49 AM PDT
The WSTS forecasts the worth of the market worldwide to be $347 billion, a rise of 3.4 percent over 2014. The WSTS predicts that all product categories will have positive growth rate, the outstanding sectors being Optoelectronics at 8.3 percent and Analogue at 5.6 percent. But that's not true for all territories, with Europe and Japan predicted to show declines, largely due to the exchange rate between the US dollar, the Euro and the Yen. Most of the growth will be due to the smartphones and automotive markets. The WSTS also predicts there will be growth in the semiconductor markets in 2016 and 2017. By 2017, it forecasts that the market will be worth $370 billion. The strongest region by growth will be Asia Pacific, and will be worth $216 billion by 2016, representing 60 percent of the total worldwide market. Here, in detail, is how the WSTS believes the market will pan out.
|
| Confusion reigns over Windows 10 licensing Posted: 02 Jun 2015 02:44 AM PDT
Windows 10 is being offered free to users of Windows 7 and the benighted Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 – but reports suggest that the picture is far from clear on how Microsoft will tackle the OEM end of the market. According to a report in Taiwanese wire Digitimes, Microsoft has muddied the waters by offering discounts in a failed bit to compete with Google Chromebooks. The report suggests that Microsoft is now offering discounts depending on the specifications of the hardware with the cheapest charge being $15. And that's discouraging some vendors of high end machines. Nevertheless, it's believed that Microsoft will encourage vendors like Acer and Lenovo to supply Windows 10 notebooks costing no more than $250. These are supposed to compete with Chromebooks but it could be the move is too little, too late. |
| Personal storage shipments fall Posted: 02 Jun 2015 02:30 AM PDT
According to IDC, the decline in shipments was 8.8 percent, compared to the same quarter last year. However, there's a greater decline in revenues with a fall of 14.7 percent. Revenues in the EMEA region amounted to $512 million. IDC said that hard drive vendors dominate the sector, with shipments of 1TB to 3TB accounting for 70.28 percent of the entire sector. Here are IDC's figures for the sector for the first quarter.
|
| Samsung, others shell out money Posted: 02 Jun 2015 02:15 AM PDT
That much is clear after five of the biggest display companies in the world agreed to pay over half a billion dollars to settle a US class action. Samsung, Philips, Panasonic, Hitachi and Toshiba all agreed to pay a total of $528 million. The companies had conspired to price fix CRTs in the marketplace. Four years ago, antitrust authorities looked into the price fixing allegations. Samsung put its hands up in the air then and pleaded guilty to the charges. Samsung's share of the bill amounts to $225 million, which will be doled out to people in the USA who joined the class action. |
| Posted: 02 Jun 2015 01:12 AM PDT
3M's Chief Technology Officer Ashish Khandpur has more to spend, about six percent of the company revenue by 2017 from about 5.5 percent in 2012. That equates to about $160 million in additional spending annually. Khandpur is targeting the cash to create “disruptive platforms”, which sounds to us like he wants to build a Dalek, but is apparently less interesting. So far, 3M, which posted $31.8 billion in revenue last year, says it has 30 such programmes in various stages of development, with $250 million in sales expected this year from those already commercialised. One of the sorts of things he has been looking at is Crystal Silk, a new surface material that is smooth to the touch, yet also designed to be scratch- and stain-resistant. It is used for computer touchpads, a new market for 3M, and also could have applications in appliances and other areas. Another idea is developing sensors that can be embedded in cable splices to monitor power lines, and Khandpur envisions respirators that can track the wearer's vital signs or detect if the device is being worn incorrectly. These are all nice ideas but we suspect a Dalek or a Cyberman would be a little more destructive. Already, 3M invests more than double the average 2.3 percent spent last year by 190 industrial companies tracked by Strategy&. Of other large industrial companies, United Technologies reported spending 4.1 percent of revenue on R&D in 2014, while General Electric’s research budget amounted to 4.8 percent of its industrial revenue. For GE, that budget compares to 5.3 percent in 2013, and 5.1 percent in 2012. 3M is also expanding efforts to get outside ideas. The company has roughly 50 technical centers globally that are designed to expose customers to 3M's technology. In March, 3M unveiled plans for a new centre in western China. One avenue Khandpur is exploring is creating products with digital capabilities. He is hiring people with experience in electronics, software and mathematics to augment the company's traditional strengths in materials sciences. |
| Foxconn’s electric car business expands Posted: 02 Jun 2015 01:11 AM PDT
The company has been partnered with Chinese automaker BAIC in the electric-car rental business in Beijing since last year. Now they have 200 charging stations offering more than 150 electric vehicles for rent in the city. Since the beginning of this year, Hon Hai has launched similar services in Hangzhou and Changzhou in the eastern provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu respectively. Guiyang in southwest Guizhou province will start operations with 100 electric vehicles in July. The goal is to set up more than ten operation sites around the country before the end of this year. Candidate cities include the megacities of Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Wuzhou in southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. The electric-car rental service is activated through the company’s smartphone app, website and the WeChat platform. Customers can use the car with a QR code sent to their smartphones after orders are confirmed. The company works with Alipay for online payment. The electric vehicles are equipped with internet connectivity which warns drivers of low battery and shows the nearest charging station beforehand. The first priority is to solve charging problems for users, the company said. So far electric-car rental business has yet to contribute much revenue for the company as the market is still in early-development in China. Hon Hai is aiming for the bigger contract manufacturing market behind it, one unnamed market analyst said. |
| Macs vulnerable to a new root kit Posted: 02 Jun 2015 01:10 AM PDT
For years, Apple users smugly claimed that there were was no malware for the Mac because of Jobs' Mob's superior technology, while saner types suggested that there were too few macs out there for Malware writers to bother with. There was little point doing all that coding to break into a computer which only had a Coldplay collection and a Safari web browser. That appears to be changing with hackers keener to draft Mac users into botnets on the safe basis that they will never actually believe it has happened to them. A security researcher has discovered a new vulnerability in Apple Mac computers could be used to remotely inject persistent rootkit malware into users’ computers, providing attackers with full-system level control, The zero day appears to be due to a bug in Apple’s sleep-mode energy conservation implementation that can leave areas of memory in the extensible firmware interface (EFI) (which provides low-level hardware control and access) writeable from user accounts on the computer. Putting some late-model Macs to sleep for around 20 seconds and then waking them up unlocks the EFI memory for writing. Pedro Vilaça, said the vulnerability can be used to remotely plant rootkits or persistent malware that is invisible to the operating system in the writeable flash memory, by using Apple's Safari browser. “A remote exploit could simply deliver a payload that will either wait or test if a previous sleep existed and machine is vulnerable, or force a sleep and wait for a wakeup to resume its work,” Vilaça told iTnews. “After the BIOS protections are unlocked it can simply overwrite the BIOS firmware with something that contains an EFI rootkit and that’s it.” Some extra steps may be required to achieve superuser privilege escalation to load kernel modules, but that’s not particularly complicated to do, Vilaça said. Vilaça believes Apple knew of the issue because his testing shows the flaw is not found in the firmware of Macs made after mid-2014. If he is right it means that Apple does not really care about those who do not upgrade their hardware every year.
|
| Google bashes on glass ceiling Posted: 02 Jun 2015 01:08 AM PDT
Google said 21 percent of tech hires last year were women, boosting overall number of women in technical roles by one percent, as part of efforts to increase diversity. The company recently began disclosing the makeup of its workforce after admitting that it was “wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues”. The tech industry has problems in that it tends to hire only white men in its industry and lacks any sense of inclusiveness towards minorities. Google said that the numbers of Black and Hispanic employees hired outpaced the company’s overall hiring growth, but made up for only two percent and three percent of total workforce, respectively. Writing it in its bog, Google said that it had a long way to go, we’re seeing some early progress. |
| Semiconductor sales show April decline Posted: 01 Jun 2015 08:17 AM PDT
That, said ESIA, is in line with sales in other regions worldwide with the exception of Asia Pacific. Semiconductor sales worldwide amounted to $27.026 in April, a decline of 0.4 percent from March. Different segments performed differently. The European market showed growth in diodes, up 2.7 percent; optoelectronics, up 4.1 percent; and sensors and actuators, up by 2.9 percent. Wireless devices for the consumer market did particularly well, up by 3.2 percent. However, April exchange rate developments skewed the European picture. Measured in Euro, ESIA said that sales were up 18.3 percent compared to April 2014. |
| ARM intros internet of things module Posted: 01 Jun 2015 06:56 AM PDT
The internet of things (IoT) subsystem for ARM Cortex-M microprocessors is optimised to use with the company's processor and radio technologies, physical intellectual property (IP) and ARM's mbed operating system. ARM said it will license the IP block individually and with the other elements will provide an IoT endpoint chip design, which its customers can use to integrate sensors and other peripherals to make complete systems on a chips (SOCs). This may all sound like gobbledygook to the average Jane or Joe on the street, but there's method behind ARM"s mad words. The industry, said ARM general manager James McNiven, expects hundreds of billions of smart connected sensors by 2030. That gives ARM an opportunity to help companies simplify the design and marketing and bring products out quicker. The subsystem has been developed in cooperation with the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) – the world's biggest semiconductor foundry. TSMC is providing 55 nanometre ultra low power tech with embedded flash memory – the whole bundle means that people will be able to make smaller, more power efficient and cheaper chips, operating at below one volt. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechEye To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.