Omron Electronic Components Europe has made 2D and 3D CAD drawings for the overwhelming majority of its electromechanical solid state relays and switches as well as its connectors and sensors available for instant download online.

Altium has announced the release of a new range of board-level components for ARM Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4 & Cortex-M0 based microcontrollers from NXP Semiconductors to their subscription customers through AltiumLive.

The University of Manchester has announced that it has joined the UK Electronics Skills Foundation, a body set up to help reverse the long-term decline in the number of UK graduates entering the electronics industry by linking talented electronic engineering degree students with companies for scholarships with work experience.

Link Microtek, industrial partner to Emisens, has announced that the EMILI 2 liquid identification system has achieved ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference) Performance Standard 2, following independent laboratory testing carried out under ECAC's common evaluation process for liquid explosive detection systems.

Strong consumer demand for wireless products like cellphones and media tablets has prompted a 1 percentage point upgrade in the growth outlook for the overall semiconductor industry in 2012, according to an IHS iSuppli. Revenues this year are now expected to reach an estimated $324.6 billion in 2012, up 4.3 percent from $311.4 billion last year and represents a significant improve on the 1 percent expansion of 2011, with all indications pointing to an industry poised to regain its footing as the overall global economy stabilizes.

Neul has announced the deployment in Cambridge of the world’s first city-wide, fully-functional wireless network in white space, enabling a whole host of Smart City applications. To demonstrate this network Neul, in collaboration with Bglobal Metering, has been showcasing the world’s first-ever smart electricity meter reading over a white space network. This is the first step towards smart electricity grids that will allow electricity supply to be more efficiently matched to real-time demand.

Tensilica has reached several important milestones with its HiFi Audio/Voice DSPs (digital signal processors), currently the most widely-used audio/voice DSP IP cores on the market. Customers have now shipped over 300 million of its audio/voice DSP cores for use in digital consumer electronics equipment. However, speaking at the Globalpress Electronics Summit in Santa Cruz, Chris Rowen, the company’s founder and CTO,  said that the market for audio/voice DSPs had “only just started and an explosion in demand still lay ahead of the industry.”

Teseq, a provider of instrumentation and systems for EMC emission and immunity testing, has now got UKAS accreditation for on-site calibration of all EFT, PQT, Surge, pulse generators, Harmonic & Flickers analysers and offers “no down time” antenna calibration in its new purpose built chamber, avoiding delays caused by weather on open-field test sites.

Increasing electronics content in popular tablet and smartphone devices like the iPad and iPhone and in Ultrabook PCs are expected to drive accelerated growth for the global semiconductor foundry business in 2012, according to an IHS iSuppli Semiconductor Manufacturing and Supply Market Tracker report. Revenue in 2012 for pure-play foundry suppliers is forecast to grow to $29.6 billion, up 12 percent from $26.5 billion in 2011. This is about triple the level expected for the overall semiconductor industry. Foundry suppliers started to see a steady increase in demand starting late in the first quarter, with revenue expected to peak in the traditionally strong third quarter.

A new Android app from STMicroelectronics looks to provide a modern, fast and spontaneous way for customers to design circuits using their smartphones or tablets. The new app, called “ST op-amps”, is available free from the Google Play Store (formerly Android Market) to help engineers design circuits using operational amplifiers (op-amps); frequently designed into audio, control, monitoring and communication systems. Engineers can use this app to start designing circuits with any of ST’s op-amps inside 15 seconds of activating their phone.

The five most prevalent types of semiconductors reported as counterfeits that have widespread commercial and military use represent $169 billion in potential annual risk for the global electronics supply chain, according to IHS iSuppli. The five most commonly counterfeited semiconductor types are analogue integrated circuits (ICs), microprocessors, memory ICs, programmable logic devices and transistors, based on data from IHS. Together, these five commodity groups accounted for slightly more than two-thirds of all counterfeit incidents reported in 2011.

Recent news of acquisitions and divestments in the U.S. cable market, most notably Cisco’s $5 billion purchase of NDS, underscore the industry’s shift in focus away from set-top box (STB) hardware and toward software and services that are designed to accommodate the booming opportunity for pay-TV multiscreen devices.

ARM, Gemalto and Giesecke & Devrient are creating a joint venture dedicated to delivering a secure, accessible environment for advanced services running on the growing range of connected devices such as tablets, smart-TVs, games consoles and smartphones. All three companies said that they were looking to accelerate the adoption of a common security standard and to create a viable ecosystem that will enable a new generation of innovative services.

Kaohsiung Opto-Electronics (KOE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Display Inc (JDI), has been formed to continue the design, development and manufacture of market leading TFT LCD display modules previously established by Hitachi.

Yesterday’s Budget saw the Chancellor, George Osborne, announce that London, Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle would benefit from £100m in government money aimed at making them "super-connected". A further £50m was to be allocated to improve net access in an additional, but as yet unnamed, number of smaller cities.

The Chancellor also said he planned to introduce corporation tax relief from April 2013 for the video games, animation and high-end television industries - a move that has been urged for some time.

One year ago, Japan’s semiconductor industry was rocked by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. However, the real disaster for Japan’s chip industry occurred during the years before the earthquake, according to IHS iSuppli, when the country lost its status as one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturing regions.

According to new research from Semicast, Renesas Electronics was the leading supplier of semiconductors to the OE automotive sector in 2011, ahead of Infineon Technologies. Freescale Semiconductor, for many years the leading supplier of automotive semiconductors, dropped to fourth position behind STMicroelectronics, while NXP Semiconductor retained its position as fifth ranked supplier.

Despite the impact of the Japanese earthquake one year ago, the country’s NAND flash memory industry has managed to pull off a rapid rebound from the disaster, as strong demand and other factors have allowed Toshiba to regain lost market share. The earthquake’s timing impacted the company’s second-quarter 2011 financial results, causing it to lose more than 6 percentage points of market share. Corresponding share increases went to competitors Samsung, Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor.

Molex Incorporated and TE Connectivity have announced second source agreements under which TE Connectivity will have the right to manufacture, market and sell worldwide several Molex high-speed interconnect solutions including the z-Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable Plus (zQSFP+) and the Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (zSFP+), among others.  Molex will have the right to manufacture, market and sell worldwide TE Connectivity’s Quadra High-Speed I/O Connector.

Test equipment sourcing specialist Livingston has been chosen as the global rental partner for telco contractor Teligence. Through this partnership Teligence’s operations throughout EMEA and APAC will be able to utilise the rental capabilities offered by Livingston, giving them access to an extensive inventory of optical time domain reflectometers (OTDRs) and optical spectrum analysers (OSAs), as well as chromatic dispersion (CD), polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) and 1/10Gbit Ethernet testers from key manufacturers like EXFO, JDSU and Noyes.