Finance

‘Graphene Week’ will run from 22-26 June at Manchester’s £61m National Graphene Institute, to help business leaders discover how graphene could boost their businesses. The workshops, taking place across the week, will bring together world-leading scientists from the University of Manchester, as well as businesses already benefitting from the use of graphene, to share knowledge and encourage greater collaboration, the ...

IDT has agreed a long-term collaboration with ZMDI to develop energy-efficient power management solutions. Integrating the two companies’ technologies and incorporating ZMDI’s leading-edge higher-current architectures will allow IDT to address new market segments, said IDT. “Digital power products from ZMDI will complement IDT’s existing scalable power solutions currently being used in enterprise computing and processor ecosystems,” said IDT’s Sailesh Chittipeddi, ...

Q1 billings for semiconductor manufacturing equipment were 7% up on Q4 at $9.52 billion which was 6% down on Q1 2014, reports SEMI. Korean billings were $2.69 billion – 29% up q-o-q and 33% up y-o-y Taiwan billings were $1.81 billion – down 11% q-o-q and down 30% y-o-y. American billings were $1.47 billion – down 19% q-o-q and down ...

Ultrahaptics, the Bristol-based developer of ultrasonic free-space haptics technology, has announced that it is to receive a grant of €1.49m in the latest round of Horizon 2020 SME Instrument Phase 2. The company applied for the grant under the commission’s Open Disruptive Innovation Scheme which aims to foster the development of fast-growing, innovative SMEs with promising, close-to market ideas bearing ...

One of Silicon Valley’s finest CEOs is to take over the chairmanship of Applied Materials. Wim Roelandts, a hugely successful and respected CEO at Xilinx, will succeed Mike Splinter as chairman of the Applied board with immediate effect. Roelandts brought the old HP management touch to Xilinx. He spent 29 years at HP in its glory years when it was ...

Fab equipment spending is forecast to depart from the typical historic trend over the past 15 years of two years of spending growth followed by one of decline, says SEMI, for the first time equipment spending could grow every year for three years in a row: 2014, 2015, and 2016. Spending in fab equipment will rise 11% to $38.7 billion ...

April semiconductor sales were $27.6 billion which was 0.4% down on March but 4.8% up on April 2014, says the SIA. “Year-to-year semiconductor sales increased for the 24th straight month in April, thanks largely to continued growth in the Americas and Asia Pacific regional markets,” says SIA CEO John Neuffer, “the global industry has posted higher sales through April than ...

Skeleton Technologies, the German-Estonian manufacturer of ultracapacitors, has raised €9.8 million to ramp production of graphene-based ultracapacitors.

NXP is to raise $1 billion to help pay for its Freescale acquisition. It will offer $500 million senior notes due 2020 and $500 million senior notes due 2022. $2 billion of the $11.8 billion purchase price for Freescale is payable in cash. NXP has $1.4 billion in cash and is selling its RF power business for $1.88 billion. NXP ...

GloFo, working with Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor, has developed new digital design flows for RTL to GDS implementation for its 14nm finfet process. Integrated with a technology-proven process design kit (PDK) and early-access standard cell libraries, the flows create a digital design “starter kit” that provides designers with a built-in test case for out-of-the-box physical implementation testing and analysis of ...