The Swedish java chip developer Imsys Technologies AB has entered a distribution agreement with 2001 Electronics for Ireland and U.

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K.
May 03, 2006 05:05 (Elektronik i Norden)
by: Jesper Olsson
Imsys is a Swedish fabless java chip developer developing microprocessors, modules, development kits and development tools. Their products are built on their own embedded java platform for machine-to-machine m2m communication.

The holding company of the largest distributor of electronic components in Central Europe, Spoerle Electronic GmbH, has a new name.
May 02, 2006 16:33 (evertiq)
The group of companies is now registered with the Commercial Registry under the name "Arrow Central Europe GmbH". This step is a move taken within the Arrow Group to create a more open and transparent internal structure.

The name is new, but everything else remains the same!" reassures Heinz-Walter Wiegand, General Manager of Arrow Central Europe GmbH. „SPOERLE, now as a division of Arrow Central Europe, has, for 39 years, stood for competence and know-how in the electronics processing industry in Germany and played a leading role in building and shaping distribition to become the business it is today."

La société de réparation A Novo (4500 personnes, 282 millions d'euros de chiffre d'affaires) vient d'acquérir Engström Telecom (8 millions d'euros de CA), réparateur de téléphones portables et société de logistique opérant en Suède. Avec entre 275 000 et 300 000 interventions par an, Engström Telecom détiendrait près de 45% du marché suédois de la réparation de téléphones portables. La société s'appuie sur un réseau de 540 points de vente. Pour financer cette acquisition ainsi que le rachat (en cours de finalisation) d'un réparateur allemand d'écrans plats et d'équipements informatiques, A Novo vient d'émettre 10 millions d'actions nouvelles pour un montant net de 7,8 millions d'euros.

LONDON — 2001 Electronic Components has extended its European activities into Finland with its parent company, Torst Holdings, acquiring a majority stake in Fintronic Oy based in Helsinki.
Fintronic was founded in 1974 and is a design led sales operation with a strong line up of suppliers headed by Linear Technology. Most of the sales team are degree qualified electronics engineers.
"The new structure of Fintronic under the Torst umbrella has allowed us to increase our investment with our suppliers and partners utilising upgraded systems, broader products profile and additional staff," said Janne Vasama, managing director of Fintronic. "We are also expanding our operations in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia which is already yielding some very promising opportunities and our Russian sales activity is, unsurprisingly, developing some extremely significant market opportunities."

LONDON — Oxford Semiconductor has appointed ActiveComp GmbH as its representative agent in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The company will support Oxford’s complete range of USB interface ICs, serial communication bridges, FireWire and USB storage ICs and FireWire audio controllers.

LONDON — Abacus Group has set up an Embedded Systems Group as a group-wide, pan-European centre of excellence to support customers in the development of embedded computing solutions based around Microsoft Embedded operating systems.
The group, which is focussed specifically on the retail, gaming, industrial automation and hospitality sectors, will work with customers in the U.K., Scandinavia, Benelux and Italy and provide a local single point of contact in their local market that unites the display and embedded computing expertise of Trident, the wireless communication technology of recently-acquired TDC and the Microsoft knowledge of Abacus Polar’s team.

Conformément aux anticipations formulées par le groupe Dane-Elec début mars, l'activité du 1er trimestre a été ralentie par une baisse significative du prix des mémoires Flash et a ainsi créé un phénomène d'attente chez les grands donneurs d'ordres, notamment aux Etats-Unis.Malgré ce contexte perturbé, l'activité Flash de Dane-Elec a enregistré sur cette période une croissance de 22 % et a représenté 65 % des ventes. L'activité DRAM a connu une baisse sur le trimestre de 59 % de son chiffre d'affaires, comparable à celle enregistrée au cours des trois trimestres précédents. Pour mémoire, l'activité DRAM au 1er trimestre 2005 avait été particulièrement élevée et constitue ainsi une base de comparaison défavorable.Enfin, le repositionnement depuis plusieurs trimestres d'Intervalle, l'activité de grossiste en France, semble porter ses fruits avec une croissance des ventes de 21 %.Au total, le groupe a ainsi réalisé un chiffre d'affaires de 47,9 M€ en recul de 13 % .Par zone géographique, l'Europe a connu une baisse limitée de ses ventes de - 1,8 %, les Etats-Unis - 24,7 % et l'Asie - 41,1 %.

The Swedish EMS provider NOTE reported strong sales and results turned to profit for its first quarter 2006.
April 26, 2006 11:34 (evertiq)
by: Jesper Olsson
The smaller sized Swedish EMS providers have during the last year reported tremendous results and now it seems like the larger ones is back in the game to. NOTE´s sales for its first quarter rose by 22.6% to reach 43 MEUR and the company´s result landed on a profit of about 1.3 MEUR which can be compared to the loss of nearly 5 MEUR for the same period last year.

Swedish EMS provider PartnerTech almost doubled its profit for its first quarter 2006. PartnerTech´s net turnover increased 35.9 percent to reach 69 MEUR and gave a profit of 2.33 MEUR after taxes.
April 26, 2006 16:39 (evertiq)
by: Jesper Olsson
PartnerTech´s international sales grew to reach 40 percent of the company´s total revenue which is a significant increase from last year´s 17 percent of total sales. PartnerTech saw a growth in all of the company´s business units but especially within medical that grew 105.4 percent from the last year. The largest increase was shown in the "Terminals/Machine Solutions" that in value grew by almost 15 MEUR.
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Foxconn today closed its staff negotiations in Finland that started in March. 295 employees will lose their jobs.

Some of the employees in Finland have agreed on moving to other of Foxconns plants abroad. Therefore the number of redundancies was lower than expected. Initially 400 jobs were planned to be removed. That number has now been adjusted to 295. The reason why Foxconn needed to reduce its staff in Finland was because a large part of the European mobile phone industry has transferred operations to Asia

L'an passé, le sous-traitant français Cofidur a réalisé un chiffre d'affaires de 81,7 millions d'euros en baisse de 5% par rapport à 2004. Le résultat net part du groupe est tombé à 0,297 million d'euros, contre 1,923 million en 2004 en partie à cause d'une charge de personnel exceptionnelle de 800 000 euros. Par contre, au 1er trimestre 2006, les ventes de Cofidur ont progressé de 10,8% par rapport à la même période de 2005, à 25,7 millions d'euros. Cette croissance serait en grande partie la résultante de l'activité de Laval dans le secteur aéronautique. En fin d'année dernière, Cofidur a en effet racheté Flextronics Laval et a repris 93 personnes du site. Le sous-traitant y a constitué un pôle dédié à l'aéronautique, au militaire et à l'industriel, pôle fort de 250 personnes.
Le conseil d’administration de COFIDUR, réuni sous la présidence de M. H.TRANDUC
le 20 Avril 2006 a arrêté les comptes consolidés et sociaux de l’exercice clos le 31/12/2005, dont il ressort les éléments suivants:
La société COFIDUR S.A. a réalisé en 2005 un chiffre d'affaires de 2 517 K€ et généré un résultat net de 1 058 K€.

Le Chiffre d’affaires consolidé à 81,7 M€ est en repli de près de 5% par rapport à un exercice 2004 qui avait été particulièrement soutenu. Cette baisse, principalement due à des affaires moins consommatrices en composants achetés, n’a pratiquement pas eu d’incidence sur le résultat opérationnel courant.

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 24, 2006--Solectron Corporation (NYSE:SLR), a leading provider of electronics manufacturing and integrated supply chain services, today announced the successful certification for the Solectron Bordeaux plant in France to EN 9100:2003 (equivalent to AS 9100 Rev B) standards. This quality management system is specific to the aerospace industry for its design, new product introduction, manufacturing and test activities

Elcoteq SE's personnel negotiations that were started in the beginning of March have been concluded. The negotiations concerned the personnel at the Lohja manufacturing plant, the company's product development unit and the NPI (new product introduction) unit in Finland. As a result of the negotiations altogether 65 employment contracts will be terminated and 15 persons will be temporarily laid-off on production or financial grounds. At the start of the negotiations, the company estimated that the possible actions would affect at most approximately 120 people.

With these measures the company aims to assure the long-term competitiveness and profitability of the units. The terminations of work contracts do not create any significant one-time costs.

Elcoteq currently employs roughly 20,000 employees worldwide, approximately 870 of whom work in the company's units in Finland.

TH ZVEI professional association electronics Components and of system raised its growth prognosis somewhat. So the German market for electronic elements is to grow in the current year now by 5 per cent. 10. May 2006 12:02 (ZVEI) of: Herbert Hoenle In the next year the speed is to again add, whereby however the Rohstoffpreise could provide for unpleasant surprises. So far the professional association had proceeded from a growth from 4,5 per cent to 18.3 billion euro. For the year 2007 professional association chairman Peter Bauer counts on a further plus of more than 6 per cent. The demand for semiconductors is to add superproportionally. The ZVEI experts count in the current year within the range of the semiconductors on 6 per cent higher conversions, after the year 2005 could exhibit only a moderate growth of scarcely 3 per cent (on 11.6 billion euro). The growth of the data processing technology, the industrial electronics and Kfz electronics is driven. For the coming year with far rising market of the semiconductor components one goes out. Thus an increase in sales is expected by scarcely 9 per cent on 13.4 billion euro.

MUNICH, Germany — Chip Microelectronica SA, a provider of analog and mixed-signal semiconductor circuits in the form of intellectual property, designed a key part of the Livanto mobile communications baseband chip offered to the market by Icera Inc.
The Livanto baseband, which can process HSDPA multimedia signals at up to 7.2-Mbits per second, in fact comprises two die in a single package. While Icera's engineering team designed the digital chip ChipIdea (Lisbon, Portugal) designed the analog baseband chip included in the same package, according to Stan Boland, president and chief executive officer of Icera Inc. (Bristol, England).
Boland named ChipIdea as Icera’s baseband partner during a presentation at a conference organized by the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Fabless Semiconductor Association here. He also added Renesas Technology Corp. to Infineon Technologies AG as a radio frequency chip partner and said that Icera is working with RF Micro Devices Inc. and Skyworks Solutions Inc. as providers of discrete RF interface components such as power amplifiers and low-noise amplifier.

ZICHRON YAACOV, Israel — Wafer inspection equipment company Negevtech Inc. has received $36 million in a fourth financing round at a company value of $54.5 million. Investors in this round include Intel Capital and Lehman Brothers, Munich-based Wellington Partners and a group of Israeli venture funds.
Arnon Gat, Negevtech’s chief executive officer, said he hoped it would be the last round of investment before an initial public offering of shares in the company in 2007.
Founded in 1999, Negevtech (Rehovot, Israel) has produced the 3100 high-resolution wafer defect inspection system that combines Negevtech's Step & Image technology with a high-resolution optical system. The company claims it is also the only system on the market today offering both high resolution brightfield and darkfield capabilities on the same platform. This dual-technology platform enables users to routinely find unique defects and smaller defects missed by competitors' systems, Negevtech claimed.

Europelectronics learned today that Jean-Michel Lamure, executive VP and general manager of Soitec passed away Thursday after battling a long illness. He was 58.
Lamure co-founded Soitec in 1992 with André Auberton-Hervé and had been serving as executive VP and general manager for the company.
He was also the president of Picogiga International, a new division of the Soitec Group concentrated on the development and manufacture of compound-semiconductor products.
Lamure had 15 years of experience in SOI wafer production and development.
From 1977 to 1987, he was in charge of a succession of mask shops in the semiconductor industry, including both Thomson-CSF for device production, and CEA-LETI for device research and development.
Prior to that, Lamure worked at Thomson-CSF where he developed equipment for microelectronics device production.
Lamure graduated with a master’s degree in engineering from the Ecole Catholique des Arts et Métiers in Lyon, France.

SANTA ANA, Calif. & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 5, 2006--Filtronic plc ("Filtronic") (LSE:FTC), a leading global designer and manufacturer of customized microwave electronic subsystems for the wireless telecommunications and defense industries, and Powerwave Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:PWAV), a global supplier of end-to-end wireless solutions for wireless networks, today announced that the companies have entered into a period of exclusive negotiations for the disposal of Filtronic's filter-based transmit receive module and power amplifier businesses of its Wireless Infrastructure Division. For the avoidance of doubt, there can be no certainty that these negotiations will result in any transaction being completed. We will have no further comment until an agreement is reached or the discussions are terminated.
LONDON — After posting annual gains of 18.7 percent in 2004 and 9.7 percent in 2005, the semiconductor photomask market will grow 4.3 percent in 2006, reaching sales of $3.2 billion, according to The Information Network, a market research company.
“While the semiconductor market is anticipated to grow strongly in 2006, demand for photomasks is directly a function of design activity rather than sales volume from products using photomasks. Therefore, an increase in the semiconductor market does not necessarily translate to an increase in photomask sales,” said Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network (New Tripoli, Pa.).

Scientists from Philips Research and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands say they have for the first time fabricated arrays of molecular diodes on standard substrates with high yields that could be a promising next step in plastic electronics.
The molecular diodes are as thin as one molecule, 1.5nm, and suitable for integration into standard plastic electronics circuits, according to the researchers. Based on construction principles known as molecular self-organization, molecular electronics is a promising new approach for manufacturing electronics circuits in addition to conventional semiconductor processing, they claim.
Although still a relatively new field, molecular electronics can be regarded as the next evolutionary stage for plastic electronics. Molecular electronics holds the potential to fabricate elements for electronics circuits with a functionality that is embedded in just a single layer of molecules, according to the technology‘s proponents.
Instead of using lithography or printing techniques to etch or print nanoscale circuit features, molecular electronics can be engineered to use organic molecules that spontaneously form the correct structures via self-organization.

Analog Devices acquires UK based TTPCom's GSM/GPRS mobile phone modem software business for 23 million US Dollars.
May 03, 2006 13:08 (ElectronicsWeekly)
This deal gives Analog Devices the right to sub-license TTPCom software, allowing Analog Devices to sell a complete software and silicon package. 45 employees based in Cambridge, England will transfer from TTPCom to Analog Devices. The deal leaves around 600 staff at TTPCom.