News Briefs

In a spate of announcements released in July, Teradyne (Boston, MA) reported major sales of three of its ATE systems: the Flex, the J750, and the IP750.

Sigurd, a Taiwan-based subcontractor that hopes to target the consumer IC test and assembly market, has purchased 10 Flex systems for testing optical disk drive (ODD) devices used in CD-R/W drives and DVD players. King Yuan Electronics Co., an IC test house that is also located in Taiwan, plans to use the multiple Flex testers it purchased for multisite wafer probing; like Sigurd, King Yuan will use the testers on ODD devices. The reconfigurable Flex production tester system provides DC, AC, and digital test resources to each device core.

Marvell (Sunnyvale, CA), a manufacturer of broadband communications and storage products, has chosen to equip its Taiwan facility with multiple J750 testers. Marvell will use the J750s, which provide 1024 digital I/O channels in a zero-footprint system, for wafer-sort testing of VLSI devices.

Finally, Foveon (Santa Clara, CA) has chosen the IP750 system to test its image sensors, which are used in digital still cameras to capture color in three layers. Teradyne describes the IP750 (pictured) as a low-cost tester for CCD and CMOS image sensors. www.teradyne.com.

Communications. Venture Development Corp. (Natick, MA) reports that the market for wireless Ethernet infrastructure components and network software for industrial applications totaled $75.1 million in 2003. The research firm forecasts the the market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34.7% and will reach $183.4 million in 2006. www.vdc-corp.com.

Manufacturing. Flextronics, a Singapore-based electronics manufacturing services provider, has announced that it had sales of $3.88 billion for its first quarter, which ended June 30. This represents an increase of $773.7 million, or 25%, over the same quarter from a year ago. www.flextronics.com.

Semiconductors. Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) has reported Q2 revenue of $3.2 billion, up 10% from Q1 and up 39% from Q2 2003. The company's chip business was a major source of the increase, with semiconductor revenue increasing 8% over the previous quarter and 44% from the year-ago period. www.ti.com.

The ATM Forum and the MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance have announced their intention to join forces as a single organization. The new association will aim to advance the deployment of multivendor, multiservice, packet-based networks. The 100-plus members of the combined organizations include service providers, vendors, and enterprise end users.

Regarding the merger, Stu Elby, VP of Network Architecture and Enterprise Technology within the Verizon Technology Organization, released a statement saying, "The benefit to carriers...is that now there will be a single body creating Implementation Agreements (IAs), which will reduce the ambiguity that vendors currently face with joint ATM and MPLS technology development. Now carriers and vendors can look to a single industry forum and a common suite of IAs across ATM, FR, and MPLS, which should, in the long run, reduce the time to market for new network capabilities and services."

Members of each organization must still approve the merger, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2004. The interim board of the merged forum will include representatives from Alcatel, Agilent Technologies, Bell Canada, Ericsson, Harris Corp., Lucent Technologies, Riverstone Networks, Sprint, Tellabs, and Verizon. At press time, the organizations had not yet announced a name for the new association. ATM Forum: www.atmforum.com; MPLS & Frame Relay Alliance: www.mplsforum.org.

Sypris Test & Measurement reports that it plans to move one of its primary standards lab from Franklin, TN, to the company's headquarters in Orlando, FL. The new lab, which is scheduled to open October 1, will feature enhanced capabilities for providing calibration traceable to NIST guidelines.

The Orlando facility will have 25% more standards lab capacity, according to Derrell James, GM of Sypris's Calibration Division. Capabilities will include thermocouple calibrations from 1 to 1250°C and primary pressure capability to 60 KPSIG.

To aid customers of the Franklin lab, Sypris's Atlanta branch will provide a pick-up and delivery service and will provide onsite calibration for companies in Tennessee and Alabama. www.calibration.com.

Measurement Computing (Middleboro, MA) has discontinued the Labtech Notebook and Labtech Control data-acquisition software. Users can buy unlocked copies of the software for $500 until August 31, after which the software will no longer be available. Unlocked copies may be installed on an unlimited number of computers. Users of locked copies will need to purchase an unlocked copy for additional installations.

Developed for DOS and first released in May 1984, Labtech Notebook was once the premier software for data acquisition and control. Labtech sold the product line to Measurement Computing in January 2004. www.labtech.com.

Racal Instruments Wireless Solutions (RIWS), an Aeroflex company (Plainview, NY), has licensed the Kyocera Amber GUI for its RIWS 6204 CDMA base-station emulator, which is used in mobile phone protocol test.

Amber (Automatic and Manual Base station EmulatoR) is a Windows application that offers message creation as well as encoding and decoding capabilities. Designed primarily to meet the mobile protocol test needs of cdma2000 operators, it lets users transmit commands to a mobile handset from the base station emulator and also receive responses without the need to establish or re-establish a call. www.aeroflex.com.