Bandwidth 9 Cuts Way Back and Goes Shopping for New VCSEL PartnersFebruary 12, 2003...Silicon Valley, which has taken an especially hard hit during the telecom downturn,
is the home of a VCSEL pioneering company called Bandwidth9 of Fremont, California
USA. Bandwidth9 issued a news release this week that announces their plans to
" substantially reduce its operations and product offering," and,
in addition, announced its intent to "seek long-term opportunities to integrate
its industry leading VCSEL-based products with interested companies." Bandwidth9
did not specifically state they were seeking a buyout. Specific wording
was that Bandwidth9 "intends to seek long-term opportunities to integrate
its industry leading VCSEL-based products with interested companies."
Included in that portfolio is Bandwidth9's recently deployed 2nd generation
OC-48 tunable transmitter, proven capable of transmitting to distances beyond
600km, and their fixed-wavelength VCSEL technology, which showed "strong
evidence" of being able to achieve 10 Gbps operation at 1310 nm. According
to Hatch Graham, CEO and chairman of Bandwidth9, "Not unlike other Tunable
Laser companies, Bandwidth9 has observed limited revenue potential for tunable
transmitters in the foreseeable future, but while required to incur ongoing
costs of nearly $1M monthly to manufacture and deploy its products. This economic
discrepancy is not an attractive recipe for suitable investment return for our
shareholders. Accordingly, we have taken measures to dramatically reduce the
operational costs, while seeking opportunities for success with strategic partners."
More details are included in their company
news release.
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IC Insights 2003 McClean Report Puts Compound Semi IC Market in PerspectiveFebruary 12, 2003...The market forecast for compound semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs...
versus discrete devices) is looking surprisingly strong, especially when compared
to their silicon counterparts. According to this year's McClean Report, just
out from IC Insights of
Scottsdale, Arizona USA, the compound semi IC market can expect to experience
an average annual growth rate of 22 percent from 2002 through 2007 as compared
to a 10 percent rate forecast for the total IC market over the same time period.
We are asked often what percentage of the total semiconductor market do the
compounds command, but that answer is difficult to assess, given compound semi
components cross over a number of application areas that silicon sometimes doesn't
share, such as LEDs. Thanks to IC Insights, at least we now have some solid
numbers for the IC sector. Trevor Yancey, a co-founder of IC Insights and the
firm's VP of Technology shared with us that "The compound semiconductor
IC market represented only 1.4% of the total IC market in 2002, but is forecast
to increase its share to 2.4% in 2007." In dollars, the total 2007
compound semi IC marketshare forecast (including SiGe, GaAs and other compounds)
is $4.7 Billion. That's very good news, especially in such a trying economic
climate. Although the compound sector, which grew tremendously in 2000, suffered
along with the rest of the industry in '01 and '02, but IC Insights expects
a rebound to begin this year and gain momentum in 2004. Trevor Yancey shared
with us the Technology Trends portion of the McClean report and we were most
impressed that a fair portion of the report, 10 pages, in fact, addressed the
compound semi IC market and after reading those pages carefully, we find the
information to be very comprehensive and accurate. Interestingly, GaAs commanded
87% of the compound semi IC market in 2003, but SiGe is expected to chew away
at that lead and achieve a marketshare of 33% by 2007, and the primary reason
is due to process similarities to silicon CMOS. Comparative details are included
in IC Insights' company
news release. The report also confirmed that the leading compound semi IC
suppliers were (in order of rank, based on 2001/2002 sales): RF Micro Devices
which enjoyed a 40% growth rate, Skyworks Solutions weighing in at +29%, IBM
Microelectronics at +4%, and then came those which experienced a negative growth
rate: TriQuint at -24%, Fujitsu Quantum Devices at -39%, Anadigics at -2%, and
Vitesse which had a -70% growth rate. For more information, contact Trevor
Yancey at +1-480-348-1133. SemiSouth Laboratories Announces DoD Development ContractsFebruary 12, 2003...SemiSouth Laboratories, Inc. of Starkville, Missouri USA has announced two DoD SBIR Phase I contracts. In the first, monitored by the Office of Naval Research, the company is developing high-current and high-voltage SiC diodes for power rectification in on-board ship energy conversion. The second contract, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, concerns SiC RF transistors in RADAR applications. J.B. Casady, President and CTO of SemiSouth, stated that "We are excited about the possibilities of this contract to explore proprietary SemiSouth technology as a way to accelerate the technology readiness of SiC for several key near-term RADAR system programs." Company news release WIN Semiconductors and ACCO Announce AllianceFebruary 12, 2003...WIN Semiconductors Corporation of Taiwan, a GaAs RFICs/MMICs foundry services provider, and ACCO, a design service provider, have announced the formation of a strategic alliance. "We are very pleased to be associated with ACCO. With our state-of-the-art leading-edge process technologies and ACCO's expertise in MMIC designs, two companies together will create another great opportunities for customers of both companies in designing advanced products and systems", said Simon Yu, an associate vice president at WIN. The two companies intend to provide a complete solution for analog, RF, and microwave product fabrication with a rapid turnaround. Company news release Cree Announces SiC-based 1200V Schottky RectifierFebruary 12, 2003...Cree, Inc. of Durham, North Carolina USA has announced the release of its new silicon carbide-based 1200V Schottky rectifier, adding to its current production of 600V rectifiers. The new products are a 5A Schottky diode in a TO-220 package and a 10A Schottky diode in a TO-247 package. These diodes are targeted for applications such as anti-parallel diode for high frequency inverters, snubber diodes for high current IGBT inverters, the boost diode for 480V input Power Factor Correction (PFC), and high voltage multipliers. "We believe our new 1200V, Zero Recovery Rectifier is superior to existing silicon-based products presently available in the marketplace due to the faster switching capabilities of the device. Also, we believe these devices will be the first 1200V SiC Schottky Diodes available to the general power electronics market," said Chuck Swoboda, President and CEO of Cree. Company news release Asian Technology Competitiveness Survey Shows China Overtaking KoreaFebruary 12, 2003...In a recent Korea Times article, titled China
to Overtake Korea in Tech Competitiveness Within 4 Years by Seo
Jee-yeon Staff Reporter, an interesting Asian technology competitiveness
survey was conducted. Of the 245 companies surveyed, out of which 146 were conglomerates,
comparisons of technological competitiveness were made between South Korea,
China and Japan, Conclusions, as reported, included the expectation that Korea
is gradually losing out to China in almost every key industry. Addressing the
reason for the shift, the answer was "the faster-than-expected technology
development of Chinese firms. The federation conducting the analysis, "FKI,"
concluded that "fast technology transfer from multinational companies that
entered the Chinese market is the most important factor, coupled with government-led
technology development, securing efforts and excellent research pools."
To keep Korea in the running, the FKI stressed increased investment in research
and development and the building of a legal frame to ban a technology drain
from Korea to China. Wondering What NItride Material Is Selling For These Days?February 12, 2003...Technologies and Devices International Inc. (TDI) of Silver Spring, Maryland
USA is one of the few leading edge substrate suppliers to address things totally
upfront, and let everyone know when there's a good sale going on, and using
classic "blue plate specials" type advertising to do so, which is
actually a rather refreshing distraction from the usual tech product promos
we see these days. The reason we call your attention to it is because, with
the growing interest in the Group III Nitrides, especially, we get a significant
number of inquiries asking about the merchant suppliers of "GaN."
TDI's team has pioneered widebandgap materials so their "specials this
month" might help answer just where the state of the art actually is in
GaN. The flavor of the month appears to be templates up to 4 inches in diameter
of n-type GaN-on-Sapphire (in various thicknesses and flavors). Second are AlGaN
templates and AlN templates, both flavors available on either sapphire or SiC,
and in a variety of sizes. And if you're in a quandary what the going prices
look like, they "start" at $149 per wafer.... but the good prices
end Feb 28th, so contact Katie Tsvetkov:
USA tel +1-301-572 7834 Way Out Research Underway on "Smart Dust" SensorsFebruary 12, 2003...Not since Tinkerbell scattered fairy dust on Peter Pan and friends so they
could fly have we heard of "smart dust" but EE Times' intrepid ace
reporter on anything in the biz that smacks of "really far out notions,"
Colin Johnson, found one for the books. Title of his very interesting advanced
R&D piece is: Companies
Test Prototype Wireless-Sensor Nets. It seems the USA's DoD started the
"smart dust" concept... at DARPA, of course, and what it is are self-organizing
wireless-sensor networks. They've reached the prototype stage and are actually
called "Motes." The were created by a team from the University of
California at Berkeley and Intel, and they're actually being tested. DARPA proposed
the smart-dust concept four years ago using the basic idea of sprinkling thousands
of tiny wireless sensors on a battlefield to monitor enemy movements without
alerting the enemy to their presence. Hmmmm.... Colin goes on to report
that... "By self-organizing into a sensor network, smart dust would filter
raw data for relevance before relaying only the important findings to central
command. The prototype Motes consist of an application-specific sensor array
board married to a generic wireless controller board, both in a hermetically
sealed enclosure." Since news from the advanced sensor sector is generally
scarce, we look forward to hearing more details from those working on this type
"way out" sensor application. One can envision SiC as a starting compound
semi material for this type mini-droid warriors on the battleground since SiC
has long proven it can "take the heat." Our news features are reported
by the CompoundSemi News staff writers.
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editor -at - compoundsemi.com
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