PASSIVES ARE POWERING THE COMPONENT DISTRIBUTION MARKET IN GERMANY
he German component distribution market reported solid but sluggish growth for the
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third quarter of 2018. According to the distribution companies registered with the Fachverband Bauelemente Distribution (FBDi e.V.), sales during the period July to September 2018 grew by 4.7% to reach 980 million euros. The pattern of orders continued the trend of previous quarters, with orders growing significantly faster than sales – by 9.5% to 1.08 billion euros. The book-to-bill rate (the ratio of incoming orders to sales)
rose to 1.1. Broken down by technology,
passive components recorded the highest increase of 12.1% (to 141 million euros), followed by semiconductors (up 3.5% to 682 million euros) and electromechanics (up 2.4% to 99 million euros). Power supplies climbed 8% to reach 27 million euros and displays 1.9% to reach 21 million euros. With regard to the distribution of sales, the parameters remain unchanged:
semiconductors accounted for 69.6%, passives 14.4%, electromechanics 10.1%, power supplies 2.8%, and the rest 3.2%. Consequently, the sales reported
by the FBDi during the first nine months reveal an optimistic picture with an increase of 5.5% taking the overall figure to 2.9 billion euros and a healthy order backlog across all areas, but particularly for passive components – where order growth reached 21.6%.
www.fbdi.de
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SUCCESSFUL TECHNICAL TRIAL OF 5G MMWAVE PROTOTYPE TERMINAL
XTest and measurement specialist Rohde & Schwarz, telecommunications service provider China Mobile and mobile platform provider MediaTek have successfully carried out a technical trial of a 5G prototype terminal. The main purpose was to verify the signal characteristics and propagation of the mmWave terminal in different environments, both indoors and outdoors, and to investigate the effect that beam tracking and array antenna switching have on maintaining the stability of the mmWave signal. In the technical trials, an R&S SMW200A vector signal
generator by Rohde & Schwarz simulated the downlink signal of the base stations. The device under test (DUT) was an MTK mmWave prototype terminal. This prototype terminal, roughly the size as a normal mobile phone, uses a highly integrated
antenna array technology with beam tracking and beam forming capabilities. Shielding effect is a phenomenon used to describe how
different materials, placed in the path of transmitted mmWave signals, interfere with the reception of the signals. The result of the trial indicates that the mmWave signal can
be seriously affected by the shielding effect of objects. The human body shielding can cause the signal attenuation to be as high as 10-20dB. To solve this problem, further optimisation of both the terminal and the network is required. For example, antenna designers may need to introduce more flexible solutions, such as multiple antenna arrays that enable discovering the strongest signal by switching between antennas.
www.rohde-schwarz.com/5G
Anglia Components has announced it now stocks the most popular ranges of inductors from Taiwanese manufacturer Chilisin to help it gain growth in the UK market, following its appointment as distributor for the UK and Ireland. Chilisin is a rapidly growing global inductor manufacturer. It is a ‘one-stop shop’ offering a complete range of inductive components including power inductors and chokes, EMI suppression filters, general purpose inductors and RF inductors.
www.Anglia-Live.com
NEURAL NETWORK-BASED SPEECH RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY FOR VOICE ASSISTANTS AND IOT DEVICES
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elcome to the joint December/January 2019 issue. In this issue we focus on advanced testing for the next generation of automotive on p8. A look at the cutting-edge capabilities of the latest mixed-signal oscilloscope, targeted at advanced automotive testing is on p15. A focus on how the latest handheld directional antenna offers portability and
functionality in a compact light weight form factor is on p15. Find out how digital
experimentation with the IoT can lead to innovation on p18. Smart solutions can prolong battery lifetime, find out how on p21, plus much more. Michelle Winny Editor
4 DECEMBER/JANUARY 2019 | ELECTRONICS
Neural Network based speech recognition technology, that is rapidly being adopted as a primary human interface for intelligent cloud-based services and edge devices has been released by CEVA. The company’s latest WhisPro
offering is an always-listening multi- trigger phrase technology allowing users to interact with cloud-based voice assistant services, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Baidu DuerOS and others. CEVA ofers a trigger phrase customisation service to enable voice control for a range of use cases and end markets, including automotive, smart home, and enterprise. The company’s latest offering
operates in tandem with its ClearVox front-end voice processing software technology. This holistic integration of voice pre-processing and neural network algorithms is claimed to deliver
a high recognition rate of more than 95%, while consuming minimal computing resources and power. The technology shows resilience
even in noisy environments in both near field and far field use-cases. This technology operates locally on the edge device, without the need for cloud back-up thereby maintaining user privacy and providing instantaneous response with minimal latency. Erez Bar-Niv, chief technology
officer at CEVA, says: “Voice has rapidly become the human interface of choice for the intelligent device revolution, yet is one of the most complex technologies to implement. In designing WhisPro, we have capitalised on our low power DSP cores and our in-house noise reduction and echo cancelation algorithms to provide a complete speech recognition technology that is cost-efficient, highly-accurate and noise-immune. It supports edge and cloud-based
voice assistant services and also enables customers to implement their own trigger phrases to control their devices.”
www.ceva-dsp.com
Bosch Sensortec has released an Interactive Projection Module that is supposed to enrich smart homes with a virtual touchscreen on every surface – turning ordinary shelves into personal assistants. The BML100PI module offers an interactive projection, enabling highly flexible virtual touchscreens. A generated laser beam creates a focus-free image on any surface and then scans it line-by-line to detect any gestures or finger movements. No calibration or adjustment is required for accurate gesture and touch recognition. Bosch Sensortec’s Interactive Projection Module provides a touchscreen with a highly intuitive user experience for any smart home appliances as a fully flexible alternative compared to a static, physical screen.
www.bosch-sensortec.com
A complete portfolio of VR sensors has been launched by TDK Corporation enabling a new class of highly accurate and affordable all-in-one VR solutions. The key sensor requirement for any VR system is the precise alignment between the head-mounted-display (HMD) and the handheld controllers. This means that even the slightest head or the most extreme hand movement needs to be measured fast and accurately, to allow the immediate rendering of the changed VR scenery.
www.invensense.com / ELECTRONICS
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