ICs & Semiconductors

Texas Instruments (TI) reinforced its lead in the fast-growing industrial electronics semiconductor market last year, with the company’s purchase of National Semiconductor boosting its market share, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli . Already the market leader in 2010, TI further enhanced its market dominance in 2011 as its revenue from the industrial electronics chip space grew to $2.2 billion, up 24.9 percent from $1.8 billion a year earlier. TI’s market share last year now stands at 7.3 percent, up from 6.4 percent in 2010.

Honeywell is rounding out its SMART position sensor portfolio with the new Rotary Configuration that provides 360° non-contact angular position sensing. With this product, Honeywell will be able to offer a SMART Position Sensor that encompasses the most basic geometric configurations: lines, angles, and circles.

Melexis has launched the latest product in its position sensor IC portfolio, based on the company’s proprietary Triaxis technology. The MLX90365 is a 12-bit resolution device that can be used in either linear or rotary position sensing systems. It features fully programmable transfer functionality, selectable analogue and pulse width modulation (PWM) output modes, open/short diagnostics and on-board diagnostics.

Semtech Corporation, a supplier of analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors, has unvield the SX9300, an ultra-low power capacitive proximity sensor with on-chip Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) engine for human body detection.

Maxim Integrated Products has launched the MAX36025, a tamper-reactive cryptographic-node controller with two hardware Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) engines making encryption both easier and more secure.

Analog Devices, a provider of data-conversion technology and longtime collaborator with the medical imaging industry, has introduced what it claims is the first octal (eight-channel) ultrasound receiver with on-chip digital I/Q demodulation and decimation filtering. Because of the embedded demodulation and decimation feature, the AD9670 is the first ultrasound receiver able to condition eight channels of data from RF to a baseband frequency, reducing the processing load on the system FPGA by at least 50 percent when compared to other receivers.

TSMC and ARM have announced a multi-year agreement that will extend their collaboration beyond 20-nanometer (nm) technology to deliver ARM processors on FinFET transistors, enabling the fabless industry to extend its market leadership in application processors.  The collaboration is intended to optimise the next generation of 64-bit ARM processors based on the ARMv8 architecture, ARM Artisan physical intellectual property (IP), and TSMC’s FinFET process technology for use in mobile and enterprise markets that require both high performance and energy efficiency.  

NXP Semiconductors has announced the introduction of the UJA1018, an integrated solution that looks to support cost-efficient and flexible LED ambient lighting applications in vehicles. The UJA1018 has been designed for LIN networks (Local Interconnect Networks) and is the first ASSP (Application Specific Standard Product) for ambient lighting with Node Position Detection. This enables LIN addresses of LED modules to be individually programmed after being installed in the car, rather than during module manufacturing.

Xilinx has begun shipments of it Artix-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) family. The new devices extend the reach of FPGA technology to applications requiring performance capabilities traditionally served by Virtex FPGAs, but the form factor of small, low-cost programmable devices.

Silicon Laboratories has a new family of advanced AM/FM receivers tuned for the high-end consumer and professional audio equipment market. The Si477x AM/FM receivers provide leading RF performance and exceptional configurability while reducing system cost and complexity for consumer audio/video receivers (AVRs), FM receiver monitors and pro-audio receivers.