Front End I News
satisfy. But just when you think you’ve got it cracked with a strong order book, you get the next challenge of making it all happen.
Just when things started to look better…….
…along comes the problem of extended lead times for a host of electronic components. Phil Innes, Managing Director of Axis Electronics, urges companies to be more open in their discussions with customers when discussing lead times
One of the main benefits of being involved in EMSA (the Electronic Manufacturing Service Association, part of Intellect trade association) is that you get to meet many of the UK leaders in contract electronics manufacturing, in one place at one time, and you hear it from the horse’s mouth what is going on. You are able to aggregate all these views and come up with a good idea of what’s happening across the country. At the last meeting there were two messages that came across loud and clear. The EMSA sector is busy and because getting hold of components is a massive headache there is a risk of disappointed customers with severely prolonged lead-times for finished products.
The fact all the members at the meeting were busy, with two posting record billing months, indicates a
number of things. Firstly, the attendees of these meetings tend to be the companies that are in control, prepared to spend on membership, prepared to take time to attend meetings and contribute to the industry. So it is no surprise that these are the type of companies that customers tend to gravitate towards and hence see the benefits of an upturn when it does happen. Secondly, the general feeling of pessimism and doom and gloom that started end of 2008 had to eventually pass, and this combined, with losing a few contract manufactures and a dry supply chain has had to eventually create demand. And finally there have been a few EMS companies that believe that the incessant migration of work offshore has slowed, with the realisation that with increasing offshore labour rates, varying exchange rates and a long product pipeline, offshore manufacturing is not what it was cracked up to be.
All of this is good news for electronics manufacturing in the UK and adds up to a nice increase in demand that the leading EMS companies are doing their best to
Games and navigation driving rapid gyroscope growth in mobile handsets
The market for gyroscopes in mobile handsets is forecast to grow by 150% between 2010 and 2011 according to a new study from IMS Research. Mobile games and applications are likely to be the first use case to leverage gyroscopes in mobile handsets, but more complex use cases, such as indoor navigation, are expected to follow by 2013. In handsets, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) gyroscopes are used to detect a device’s orientation. Gyroscopes were recently thrust into the limelight following the announcement that Apple’s iPhone 4 would feature a MEMS gyroscope. According to analyst Chris Schrek, “Accelerometers have really validated the
4 July/August 2010
use case for motion sensing in handsets, and I believe numerous handset vendors are interested in the more sophisticated motion sensing possible with both an accelerometer and gyroscope. Further to the point, I expect the fight for application developer loyalties to push software platforms and handset OEMs to adopt gyros quickly.”
Early use cases for gyroscopes in mobile handsets have been games that also leverage the presence of an accelerometer to sense motion along 6 axes. This allows a user to interact with a handset by moving the device left or right, backwards or forwards, or up or down, in addition to the tilting users have grown accustomed to
Components in Electronics
In the past skilled labour had been the major issue with regard to growth, but the recent downturn seems to have fixed that problem for us, with at the moment, people out there looking for jobs. There is no doubt that will change and the skills shortage will be back, but that is a problem for tomorrow! (But now is the time for us all to get our training programmes up and running!) Today the problem in switching on production is getting hold of components. Let me give you a few examples. We are seeing tantalum capacitor lead time extending up to 31 weeks, many logic families on allocation and micro controller units on a lead time extending up to 24 weeks. So today, in August 2010, if you order a product using these parts, you will be getting them about the same time as your Easter egg next year! That is how desperate the issue of these extended lead-times for electronic components is becoming.
There are of course often options to fix some of these issues but often, with the economics of rarity, there is an additional cost to pay. We are where we are and we have to make the best of the situation. Magically fixing the lead time problem is not an option. So we have to pragmatic and the first step in going somewhere to solve the problem is getting a handle on it. This is where a truthful and clear discussion with regard to the bigger picture of longer term future demand with your customer is very important. And of course this is the most difficult part, because no one wants to stick their neck out and it will be painful! But it has to be done. This then can start a dialogue with the rest of the supply chain to identify the parts that are impacting the end product supply. Understanding the challenge faced by the supply chain we can look to agree a strategy for sharing the risk across all parties and managing the lead times to within a forecasted period. It is a long and painful slog but there aren’t many other options.
The last thing anyone needs is a slowdown now!
with accelerometers. This opens up a range of new gaming and application possibilities. The 6 axis motion sensing gyroscopes and accelerometers enable makes more sophisticated use cases possible as well. “In 2013, expect to see motion sensors playing a role in indoor navigation,” Schreck continued. “In places where a GPS signal can’t provide high enough accuracy, the presence of an accelerometer and gyroscope would allow a device to effectively sense your steps and their direction.”
Location based augmented reality and user interface innovations are some of the other expected applications of gyroscopes in mobile handsets noted by Schreck. IMS Research forecasts that annual shipments of gyroscopes in mobile handsets will increase to over 200 million by 2014, capturing over one third of the smartphone market.
Research: Leading power supply manufacturer TDK-Lambda has entered into a collaborative research and development agreement with Thermastrate, a provider of advanced solutions in thermally efficient substrates for power electronic packaging applications. The aim of the project will be to commercialise the use of advanced thermal materials for power supply magnetics.
MAGALI chip: CEA-Leti has developed a digital baseband circuit for software-defined- radio and cognitive-radio applications that features less than 50 microseconds (µs) for full reconfiguration and multi-applications support.
The MAGALI chip, developed for fourth- generation mobile phones, is based on CEA- Leti’s powerful mesh asynchronous network- on-chip (ANOC) infrastructure delivering 2.2GB/s/link. The chip includes 23 integrated processors dedicated to signal processing and bit-level processing
associated with an ARM1176 processor for medium access control.
Digikey iPhone app: Design engineers and purchasers in Europe will be able to conduct business with Digi-Key wirelessly with the launch of the distributor’s application for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users. The new application is currently available in English and allows customers to make Digi-Key purchases in local, Digi-Key supported currencies. “With an increase in sales of more than 136% in Europe for the first half of 2010 over the first half of 2009, we believe now is the time to expand our reach to our customers in Europe, and their access to Digi-Key, by introducing our innovative mobile application,” said Mark Larson, Digi-Key’s president and COO. “We believe our customers worldwide will find it is a useful and essential tool for their designing, sourcing, and purchasing needs.”
NAND specification: Samsung Electronics and the Toshiba Corporation have announced their commitment to the development of the most advanced high-performance NAND flash memory technology available today - a double data rate (DDR) NAND flash memory with a 400 megabit-per-second (Mbps) interface, toggle DDR 2.0 specification. The high-performance NAND memory is expected to be of immediate benefit to a host of NAND-based mobile and consumer electronics applications, especially where there is consumer demand for an extra stretch in performance. Both companies will support a standard industry specification to enable broad-scale acceptance of this new high-speed technology.
Distribution: Arrow Electronics has signed a pan-European distribution agreement with Exar Corporation to distribute Exar’s entire product portfolio consisting of solutions from the Datacom and Storage, Power, Communications, and Interface product lines. Arrow Electronics will support a wide range
of Exar’s products, such as transceivers and UARTs; a variety of power management ICs, such as boost and buck regulators, charge pumps, LED drivers, LDO regulators, and programmable power solutions; and communications products supporting SDH, PDH, and OTN data transmission speeds for the networking equipment infrastructure, as well as Datacom and Storage semiconductors and board-level systems including applied service processors, express cards and 10G Ethernet cards.
www.cieonline.co.uk
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