Cypress’s Industry-Leading Gen4 TrueTouch® Controller Now in Production

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ: CY) today announced that its recently introduced Gen4 family of TrueTouch^® touchscreen controllers is now in production ahead of schedule. Gen4 delivers industry-best performance in all categories, including the world’s best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and unparalleled performance in the presence of all noise sources—the biggest challenge faced by touchscreen designs. Gen4 also has the lowest active power consumption, assisting manufacturers in solving the ever increasing battery life issues common to handheld touchscreen devices.
 
“Customer reaction to the Gen 4 products has exceeded our high expectations and is expected to set new design win records for our True Touch products,” said Dhwani Vyas, Vice President of Cypress’s User Interface Business Unit. “The ability to build thinner phones with flawless touchscreen performance without additional cost is proving to be extremely attractive to manufacturers. In addition, initial customer production shipments will begin in the first quarter of 2012, ahead of our previous estimates.”

  Breakthrough Noise Elimination

 The Gen4 family was designed from the ground up to deliver the world’s highest SNR in real world applications. It is the first and only touchscreen IC that delivers built-in 10V Tx to drive the touch panel at 10V. Because SNR is directly proportional to the voltage at which the panel is driven, this feature allows Cypress to offer nearly four times the SNR of the next closest competitor.

Fujitsu Develops Industry's First Peak Power Demand Reduction Technology

Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced industry's first development of peak power demand reduction technology intended for deployment in smart cities.

In the past, peak power demand reduction has been handled by installing energy storage devices in buildings or households and using them during times of peak power consumption, then recharging them during off-peak periods. This approach, however, carries the risk of overlap between storage device recharging periods, thereby actually exacerbating the peak power demand.

With the new technology, a wide range of data—including the power consumed by each office and residence, as well as the usage patterns and charge levels of decentralized energy storage devices installed at such locations—is collected in the cloud. By enabling cloud-based integrated control of energy storage devices, peak power demand can be effectively reduced. Because the system can plan a recharging schedule that takes into consideration multiple versions of demand forecasts and user usage, it can handle a wide range of power demand fluctuation without loss of usability.

During a test study in which the technology was put into use to control the electricity consumption and recharging of batteries installed in a large number of notebook PCs dispersed around an office, the technology succeeded in reducing the peak power demand of the entire office by approximately 10% (*1). Going forward, Fujitsu aims to deploy the technology in smart cities to help bring about the creation of societies that are better able to supply their own energy needs.

Background

To address power supply shortages resulting from the impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake, revisions were made to Japan's energy conservation regulations, moving away from an emphasis on reducing overall power demand to efforts that reduced peak power demand. This, in turn, has led to expectations of the increased use of solar power generation and energy storage devices. In the smart cities of the future, it is thought that numerous energy storage devices will be placed in a wide range of locations, such as buildings and households. At the same time, it is anticipated that there will be greater need for a mechanism to enable peak power demand reduction and demand balancing by charging energy storage devices during times of low power utilization and utilizing the stored energy when power demand is high.

Technological Issues

Fujitsu Releases Packet ONP for Building 100Gbps Ultrafast, High-Capacity Networks for the Japan Market

The expansion of mobile broadband led by smartphones, and the utilization of information and communication technology (ICT) such as cloud computing and sensing have resulted in the ongoing proliferation of Internet traffic. This has mean that telecom carriers must expand their facilities and increase power consumption. It is therefore essential that telecom carriers make efforts to cut network equipment and operations costs, and to conserve energy.

To tackle these issues, Fujitsu will release a packet optical networking platform, or Packet ONP. This platform employs the latest digital coherent technology with DP-QPSK optical modulation to enable ultrafast optical transmission speeds of 100Gbps x 80W over long distances. In the first half of this fiscal year, Fujitsu successfully conducted field trials at transmission speed of 100Gbps in North America. Adopting these technologies will work to strengthen Fujitsu's FLASHWAVE 9500 multiplexed optical transport platform which is widely deployed in the global market. Moving forward, Fujitsu will make available its Packet ONP, integrated with WDM technology for optical transmission, to the domestic Japan and overseas markets.

Fujitsu's Packet ONP makes it possible to construct a single platform for an optical transport network that previously was comprised of multiple systems. The Packet ONP platform is IT infrastructure that can flexibly respond to needs that arise with increasing levels of traffic, the reduction of costs and energy conservation.

Packet ONP features:

Silicon Labs Targets Next-Generation TV Tuner IC for Massive China TV Market

Silicon Laboratories Inc. (NASDAQ: SLAB), a leader in high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs, today introduced a silicon TV tuner solution designed to provide an optimal balance of affordable cost and high performance for TV makers in China and Taiwan. The new Si2155 TV tuner IC extends Silicon Labs’ field-proven and industry-leading silicon TV tuner architecture into high-growth emerging markets for digital TVs and set-top box (STB) products.


TV makers in China have been rapidly increasing flat-panel TV production over the last three years, and cost-optimized solutions such as Silicon Labs’ Si2155 TV tuner IC will help them deliver high-quality TV models at competitive price points. According to the analyst firm DisplaySearch, China is expected to become the world’s largest market for LCD TVs this year. DisplaySearch also predicts that flat-panel TV shipments (both LCD and plasma models) in China will nearly double from the 31 million units reported in 2009 to 59 million units in 2014, reaching a compound annual growth rate of 14 percent.

Roboteq Introduces World’s First Dual Channel Brushless DC Motor Controller for Robotics and Small EVs

Roboteq, Inc. (www.roboteq.com) introduces the HBL2350, an intelligent controller capable of simultaneously driving two brushless DC motor up to 75Amps each at up to 50V.

Because they have no brushes, Brushless motors operate more quietly and have a longer life than equivalent Brushed motors. Roboteq’s HBL2350 is the world’s first dual channel, high current Brushless motor controller, allowing users to implement 2-wheel drive small electric vehicles, Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs), balancing scooters, or any other high power brushless motor control application.

The controller accepts commands from either analog pedal/joystick, standard R/C radio for simple remote controlled robot applications, USB or RS232 interface. Using the serial port, the HBL2350 can be used to design fully or semi-autonomous robots by connecting it to single board computers, wireless modems or WiFi adapters.

SiTune Corporation Unveils Low Power Single-Die Dual/Diversity Terrestrial/Cable/Analog CMOS TV Tuner

SiTune Corporation, A leader in CMOS radio-frequency (RF), mixed signal and signal processing solutions for broadcasting, cable and satellite television announced a state of the art low power and low cost Dual TV Tuner for terrestrial and cable applications. STN-55T4800 is a highly integrated 50MHz-1GHz dual Tuner with small footprint that delivers best signal reception and adjacent channel rejection performance in different digital cable and Terrestrial standards.

STN55T4800 is based on STN55T4400, the low power hybrid tuner that is sampling now with several design-wins among manufacturers of TV and set top box sets.

Customers will be able to deploy STN55T4800 in any of the T/T or C/C with integrated loop through, T/C with two independent RF input or, Diversity configurations. The Intermediate Frequency (IF) is programmable between 3MHz and 6MHz and is acceptable to all commercially available demodulators.

Freescale Drives Embedded Multicore Innovation with New QorIQ Advanced Multiprocessing Series

Freescale Semiconductor [NYSE: FSL], the market leader in embedded communications processors for networking equipment, is unveiling its next-generation QorIQ multicore platform. The Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) series incorporates a new, multithreaded 64-bit Power Architecture® core, 28-nm process technology, up to 24 virtual cores, groundbreaking acceleration engines and sophisticated power management to deliver new levels of performance and power efficiency.


Distinguished by Freescale’s hallmark of intelligent integration, the new QorIQ AMP series delivers up to 4x the performance of Freescale’s previous-generation flagship eight-core QorIQ P4080 device. The AMP series will include a broad array of next-generation control and data plane processors scaling from cost-effective, ultra-low-power single-core products, up to highly advanced SoCs targeting the most demanding networking, industrial and military/aerospace applications.

The AMP series is engineered to help network equipment OEMs and service providers meet challenging power and performance requirements driven by a worldwide explosion of network endpoints and associated IP traffic. According to Cisco, global IP traffic will quadruple by 2015 and reach 966 exabytes per year. The company also projects the increase in IP traffic between the years 2014 and 2015 alone will be 200 exabytes, which is greater than the total amount of IP traffic generated globally in 2010 (Source: Cisco Visual Networking Index Global IP Traffic Forecast, 2010-2015). Freescale’s new AMP series processors deliver precise blends of performance, power and intelligent integration to help address these networking challenges, as well as the stringent requirements of other markets including the military/aerospace, industrial, robotics, storage, medical, video systems and printing spaces.