Front End I News
Innovation Centre boosts sensor and imaging systems industrial engagement
The University of Glasgow has received funding to create a world-leading sensor and imaging systems centre which is being seen as a major boost to the economy in Scotland. The Scottish Funding Council has pledged £10m over the next five years to support the Innovation Centre – Sensor and Imaging Systems (IC-SIS), which will engage in industrially collaborative projects to develop new technologies and form links with industry to bring new products to market. Eleven other Scottish universities and 22 industry partners are supporting IC-SIS from the outset. The IC-SIS is one of three Innovation
Centres officially announced by First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond MSP at an event at the South Glasgow Hospitals Campus. The others are the University of Glasgow’s Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre.
IC-SIS is looking to deliver 150 collaborative research and development projects and bring new products to market over the course of its initial funding period. Economic projections suggest an investment of £10m from SFC will encourage industry to invest in innovation and the work of the Centre could add up to £596m to the Scottish economy.
Sensor systems are found in every
modern and estimates place the number of wireless connected devices currently in use around the world at 10 billion, with projections suggesting the number will reach 50 billion within 10 years. Specialist high-value sensors and imaging systems are routinely used in scientific equipment oil and gas recovery, machine tools, and
Raspberry Pi: Cyntech Components, a specialist supplier of electro-mechanical components and power supplies, has announced that first production samples of its Pi-themed, USB Hub design have completed formal evaluation and approval by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Cyntech is now ramping production and will have units in stock from May.
Cyntech’s powered, 4-Port USB Hub addresses a problem commonly encountered when trying to add peripherals to the Raspberry Pi computer, namely the number of USB ports.
environmental monitoring. In medical equipment, imaging sensors can facilitate early medical interventions by screening for disease even before symptoms become apparent.
IC-SIS will build on the University of Glasgow’s existing expertise in the field, and will advance the successful work of the Scottish Sensor Systems Centre (S3C), a collaborative programme funded by SFC and led by the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, to support small scale collaborative projects between academia and industry in sensors and sensor systems. Professor Steve Beaumont, Vice- Principal Research and Enterprise at the University, said: “Scotland has a very strong high-tech sector in areas such as aerospace, energy and biotechnology, all of which rely on advanced sensing, sensor systems and processing to develop new
Custom Interconnected Limited secures funding to bolster growth ambitions
Electronics manufacturer, Custom Interconnect Limited, has announced that it has secured funding from the Government-backed Growth Accelerator scheme to assist with its plans for future growth. The funds will be used to support the firm’s investment in leadership development training.
Commenting John Boston, managing
director at the Andover-based firm said: “This is an important step in helping us realise the ambitious growth targets we have set ourselves. Following significant investment in our business over the past few years, including a separately located 8,000 sq ft secure Box Build and Hubbing facility complete with class 10,000 cleanroom for medical device build, we are now expanding the scope of our business by entering new markets. Investing in management and leadership skills will be a critical step in delivering the potential our business has.” Custom Interconnect Limited designs, tests and manufacturers a wide range of safety critical and high reliability
4 May 2013
electronics including secure radio frequency devices and specialised LED based products. The business was awarded ISO 13485 approval for the manufacture of medical devices including full product build. Craig Wright, who was appointed Executive Chairman in December last year, said: “Leadership skills are a fundamental aspect of any growth agenda. Being able to provide clear leadership backed up by strategic thinking will see teams being run more effectively and efficiently. This is at the core of securing a competitive position across a multitude of territories. “ Boston concluded: “The UK has significant capability across the full spectrum of the electronics industry but the concern for many businesses is the ability to access highly skilled employees, both at management and technical level. This is slowing growth and causing stagnation, with many companies not being able to realise their full potential because they simply can’t find the right people.”
Components in Electronics
products and secure their economic growth.
“Our aim is for IC-SIS to become the
predominant source of expertise in sensor and imaging system research and development in Scotland and beyond. We’ve already made inroads into partnerships with a number of public and private organisations who have identified projects which would benefit from input from the IC-SIS.” IC-SIS has received industrial support
from large multinationals including Freescale, Texas Instruments, IBM, SELEX ES, ST Microelectronics, Thales Optronics, BAE Systems, BP, and FMC Technologies. Other confirmed industry partners include Scottish and Southern Energy, and Scottish Water, as well as globally leading companies Optos and Toshiba Medical, and high-technology Scottish SMEs Gas Sensing Solutions Ltd.
Russell Group universities
join UKESF The UK Electronics Skills Foundation has added three further Russell Group Universities to its programme, which seeks to reverse a significant decline in the number of British electronic engineering degree students. The addition of the universities, Glasgow, Newcastle and Nottingham takes the total number of UKESF partner universities to 11. The UKESF simplifies the process of university liaison for employers and enables companies to reach a stronger pool of talented undergraduates.
The UKESF was established in 2010 to help
reverse a significant decline in UK students applying to electrical and electronic engineering (EEE) degrees. Industrial scholarships with work placements lie at the heart of the programme, allowing UKESF participating companies to reach out to the most talented EEE university students. While there was a significant drop in British EEE applicants between 2002 and 2012, UKESF analysis of 2007 to 2012 UCAS data has shown increased demand for vocational courses with the proportion of students applying to courses such as engineering, medicine and law rising and now standing at 37%.
The three universities join Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Imperial College, Manchester, Southampton, Surrey and York.
Profits boost: Samsung Electronics has posted a record quarterly profit of $6.4bn, boosted mainly by growing sales of its smartphones. The firm's results are in sharp contrast to rival Apple, which reported a drop in quarterly profits for the first time in a decade. Samsung displaced Apple as the world's biggest smartphone maker in 2012. The key factor behind Samsung's success, according to analysists, is that it offers a much broader range of models than its rival, Apple, which sells only the iPhone. By offering a cheaper range of smartphones Samsung had been able to tap into a bigger share of consumers, especially in the emerging markets. The new Galaxy S4 is expected to further boost Samsung's profits. The phone allows users to control its screen using only their eyes and has the ability to take two different pictures at once.
BeagleBoard: Digi-Key Corporation has announced its continuing support of the BeagleBoard line - a series of low-power, open- source, hardware expandable single-board computer development boards - with the addition of the newly-released BeagleBone Black from
BeagleBoard.org. The latest development boards, the BeagleBone
Black, features numerous improvements over the previous iteration. Sleeker and more efficient the new board features an upgraded 1-GHz Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor from Texas Instruments (TI), 512 MB DDR3 system memory, reduced power consumption, and the addition of HDMI connectivity, among other improvements.
Smart glasses: Initiated by the arrival of Google Glass and given a boost by the company's efforts to promote application development for the product, the global market for smart glasses could reach almost 10 million units from 2012 through
2016. According to IMS Research shipments of smart glasses could top 6.6 million units in 2016, up from just 50,000 in 2012, for a total of 9.4 million units for the five-year period. Growth this year is expected to climb 150 percent to 124,000 shipments, mostly driven by sales to developers.
Sales jump: ARM Holdings saw first quarter sales jump 28 percent to over £170m, with profits up 31 percent at £67m. According to the company’s retiring chief executive Warren East, the company has outperformed the wider chip market. Revenues from licensing rose by a quarter while big growth markets were internet-connected TV sets and microcontrollers. East fuelled market rumours that some of the leading industry players, Google and Apple among others, were developing smartphone styled watches which would have the ability to make calls and show videos when he revealed that “people are starting to experiment with that form factor”.
www.cieonline.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64