Interviews & Comments

In a Q&A with CiE Bernd Gessner, general manager automotive at ams, talks to Neil Tyler. Covering standards and compliance to new products, Gessner looks at how the automotive industry is changing and how ams is looking to adapt to meet the challenges ahead.

Flexible displays powered by plastic electronics are now commercially available and could see the development of a host of new truly unique products, as Mike Banach explains to CIE.

Eric Braddom, Director of Global Strategic Marketing, TE Circuit Protection and Consumer Devices asks whether the next winning OEM could be a Chinese company. If that proves to be the case then successful component suppliers will need to be able to identify those companies that could become tomorrow’s leaders, and understand that each OEM will have its own unique business model with which they’ll have to work.

The EDA industry is having to adapt and change moving beyond its historical hardware-only focus and developing new capabilities for hardware and software co-development and integration, as Lip-Bu Tan, the CEO of Cadence Design Systems, explains.

The centre of the much-vaunted Internet of Things is the edge. Whilst the network connectivity that transmits data, the cloud based servers that collate and process it and the applications that they drive are undoubtedly key, none would exist without the distributed infrastructure of sensors and control systems on the factory floor, at the roadside, in the office, at home or quite literally in the field detecting and collecting the information.

Migration to 40/100Gbit Ethernet is presenting the telecommunications industry with a way of achieving the bandwidth levels now being expected by data hungry consumers, while at the same time benefiting from the added functionality and enhanced flexibility of an all-IP network architecture. However, this advanced optical networking technology will also require a more sophisticated approach testing, so that communications infrastructure using it is fully effective. This is due to the fact that client interfaces are based on multi-wavelength parallel optical transmission, rather than the conventional serial transmission employed in current network infrastructure.

Graham McBeth, President of Avnet Abacus, talks to CIE about the importance of adapting to change in the distribution market which in 2012 is a very different picture to the one of thirty years ago when the industry was awash with small dealers knocking on customers’ doors. 

The competitive advantages derived from having a presence on the web are well documented, but there are a growing number of executives beginning to question the on-going costs and, according to Adam Fletcher, are beginning to wonder if re-directing investment into inventory and people wouldn"t yield a better return.

AVX"s Solutions for Hope ethical tantalum sourcing scheme in the Congo"s Katanga region has demonstrated its sustainability and the company is now looking at potential expansion into eastern DRC. AVX launched its ‘Solutions for Hope’ project in July 2011 with Motorola Solutions, signing a supply agreement with DRC concession holder MMR and the CDMC mining co-operative in Katanga.

Over the last five years the electronic components market in the UK has enjoyed a positive underlying sales revenue trend, but this year expectations are of a 4% decline in sales revenues. Adam Fletcher discusses how organisations should plan, prepare and implement change in order to best manage this decline.