Martin Kunz looks at how to intelligently compete against the low-cost Asian electronic suppliers! Following a acute oversupply in 2004, materials and components used for the manufacturing of large-sized LCD panels are likely to enter a state of shortage in the second half of 2005, iSuppli Corp predicts. Researchers at Toshiba Research Europe Ltd (TREL) in Cambridge, UK, have announced that they have developed a light source that can be used to send single photons in a regular stream through optical fibre over long distances. NAND-type flash reached a major milestone in the first quarter of 2005 as its shipment revenue grew to be roughly equivalent to that of NOR-type flash-the first time in the history of the flash market this has occurred. Quicklogic has admitted defeat and sees itself moving from an FPGA vendor to a provider of aintelligent bridges' over the next five years, says chief executive Tom Hart. Thermo Electron Corporation has evolved its Theta300 thin film research tool to manage the transition of new gate dielectrics and other thin structures from development into production. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology has created a new high-speed board that liberates DSP system designers, engineers and research specialists from having to custom-design their own boards or interconnections. During the past 10 years the clock frequencies of CPUs has increased by a factor of almost 100 and correspondingly the frequency spectrum of interference voltages has shifted to a higher level. With the exception of some solder paste and conductive silver materials, dispensed fluids are seldom electrically functional parts of the devices; rather, they increase reliability or are structural. The government mandates are in force, the products are in the stores, the consumers are starting to buy: Everything seems to have fallen in place for the digital television (DTV) market -- everything but adequate availability of high-definition (HD) broadcasts, that is. Marking (or coding) lasers are used in a huge variety of applications to add traceable information such as use by dates and batch codes to packaging and products. Examples of these applications are marking bottles in a beverage plant, batch coding of medical devices, marking printed circuit boards (PCBs) and components in the electronics industry, adding data to cables and pipes and many others where permanent information needs to be added to a product. LPKF Laser & Electronics AG's new ProtoLaser100 is an easy-to-operate high-performance laser structuring system for printed circuit board prototyping. Ursula Meyer and James D Getty look at the use of gas plasma in semiconductor packaging and assembly. Axon has developed Axojump flat flexible cables with 0.3mm pitch in response to the need for miniaturisation in the manufacture of electronic equipment -- such as DVD players, car radios, barcode readers, mobile telephones and notebook computers. Sick's ultra-fast DME 5000 laser measurement system now benefits from an increased range of 300m, making this latest version suitable for a wide variety of storage and retrieval systems, transfer systems and overhead gantry cranes. prev    next