January
Major silicon vendors and OEMs scramble to back the newly emerging interconnect standards—PCI Express, HyperTransport and RapidIO. While the design issues of satisfying three standards are more onerous than when there was only one, namely PCI, each new standard offers significant advantages over the previous “one-technology-fits-all” approach. For the desktop space, HyperTransport is a processor interconnect and PCI Express a peripheral interconnect, while RapidIO is specifically designed for the high-performance embedded market (see Electronics News 23 Jan 03 page 16).
February
NetTest closes its Australian operations immediately following a takeover in the hours leading up to the new year. Taking NewTek’s lead, previous employees form a new company, CommsForce, to continue NetTest’s presence in the Australian market.
CKW Wireless, an Australian subsidiary of US-based ArrayComm, achieves download speeds of 600 kbit/s over an 8-km distance using a new wireless broadband network in Sydney. The network uses ArrayComm’s iBURST technology, which allows broadband tranmission over the [significantly cheaper] unpaired frequencies in the 3G portion of the RF spectrum (see Electronics News 13 Feb 03 page 4).
Chip heavyweight Hitachi tells us it plans to double its microprocessor business here to $4.5 million by 2005.
March
Senator Alston denies Australia’s research environment is to blame for high-profile lab closures, such as Ericsson’s AsiaPacificLab in Melbourne. In a rare one-on-one interview Alston rules out tax breaks or other financial incentives to re-attract R&D investment into Australia.(See Electronics News 13 Mar 03 page 4).
March also marks the introduction of the processor formerly known as Banias, now called Centrino. It’s a significant change for Intel as, after years of marketing clock speed ramps, they instead try to persuade consumers that wireless capability is the real deal. But the processor package comes in criticism for only being 802.11b compliant, as its rivals extend support to the then-unratified 802.11g standard.
April
Hutchison goes live with their 3G service. The videophone calls are impressive, to say the least, and are demonstrated live by NSW Premier Bob Carr and Victorian Premier Steve Bracks. It is also the first true 3G service in Australia, with both Telstra and Vodafone trying to pass off their GPRS offerings as 3G in the weeks leading up to Hutchison’s launch. (SeeElectronics News 24 Apr 03 page 34).
SARS is also a big issue as many electronics companies shut up shop as they deal with the outbreak. Further north, Hynix is slapped with massive import duties in the US and Europe to offset multi-million dollar bailout packages and loan subsidies from the Korean Government. Australia’s test companies also deny allegations that they provide big discounts on single unit orders to maintain market share.
May
Australian companies are caught out trying to bypass local distribution channels to cut what they see as “middle-man” costs. While most suppliers will direct these people to the exclusive local distributor, a number are still managing to acquire products without involving the local channel.
AMD also brings its 64-bit Opteron processor to market to much fanfare.
May is also CeBIT time, which saw the creation of a new R&D section called futureparc. Seeing Machines made a big splash with their faceLAB technology, which tracks the head and eye movements of drivers to combat driver fatigue.
Our favourite story came from a Perth-based plumbing trade show wishing to jazz up the format by calling for “sideshow freaks”. The ads, placed in prominent publications, called for all manner of albinos, dwarves, bearded women and those with “unusual or entertaining appendages”. Disabilities groups slammed the ads.
June
The Australian photonics industry denies claims it is “living off its fat” despite admissions a return in demand could be as far as five years away. At the Technology Futures Conference in Adelaide, key figures point out the best hope for optoelectronics is to look for a future outside of the telecommunications market.
Ethernet celebrates 30 years since 3Com’s creation of the standard in 1973. The founders managed to network 100 computers using Ethernet in 1976, before IEEE began working on an open Ethernet standard in 1979, which was published in 1983 as 802.3.
But it’s a black June for the EN30 gaming giant Aristocrat Leisure, losing 50 percent of their market value in just two days following an announcement they would post a first half loss. The plunge was the first in a rollercoaster ride for the company’s share price over several months, culminating in a management shake-up.
July
Apple unleashes the long-awaited 64-bit Power Mac G5. Boasting the industry’s first 1-GHz frontside bus and expandable memory up to 8 GBytes, the G5 provides the first real look into the desktop future.
Also on the cutting edge, Griffith University unveils a new memory chip, Queensland Smart RAM, which it is further developing at a $4 million R&D centre in Brisbane. Other than the chip being silicon carbide-based and suited to non-volatile applications, little other technical details are released, pending the outcome of a worldwide patent application.
On the industry front, Professor Trevor Cole from the University of Sydney claims that electronics development is central to future wealth creation in Australia.
August
US-based Vitesse Semiconductor appoints an Asia Pacific distributor without so much as telling their current local distributor of ten years, Logic 4 Australasia. Thankfully, Vitesse takes some time to set things straight with Electronics News, reassuring Logic 4 of their full support.
AEEMA begins the “clustering” initiatives as the Action Agenda plan moves to implementation. Electronics News manages to jump the gun on the strengthening of links between AEEMA and trade associations in the US and China, ahead of the World Electronics Forum (WEF) in September. Myths about mainland China are also dispelled, proving the last thing the Chinese Government wants is to merely provide manufacturing labour to the rest of the world.
Chip giant Intel marks 35 years in the business by burying a time capsule containing a 300-mm wafer and microprocessor package among other items.
And in an echo of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Richard Samson, author of “The Human Edge ”, argues that where the industrial revolution provided the means to automate hard manual labour, the electronics revolution is threatening to replace human brain-power.
September
R&D returns in a big way with a number of new projects, including a new broadband centre from Marconi, a $230 million Mitsubishi R&D facility, and details on the AMN’s Microelectronics Resource Centre project. On the international R&D front, Bell Labs proves its credentials with the discovery that a deep sea sponge has evolved similar but more durable fibre optics than those used in modern telecommunications networks. While the fibres don’t have the ultra high transparency required for telecom, researchers found they are resilient to cracking and breakage.
The printed circuit board (PCB) turns one hundred, based on the published work of Albert Parker Hanson in Germany, 1903. Hanson described several methods for forming conductors onto dielectric to solve telephone exchange wiring issues. (See Electronics News 25 Sep 03 page 6).
October
Senator Alston retires as Communications & IT Minister, and is replaced by former Attorney-General Darryl Williams. Though one analyst accurately predicts in the AustralianIT that “this will not be a panacea for our industry and it will not give us that much more attention”.
The R&D trend continues to strengthen with Adelaide’s eLabtronics developing software that has caught the interest of US companies including Microchip. Dubbed CoreChart, the software makes microcontroller programming simple enough for eight-year olds, the company claims. Also on the local front, Lucent transitions the last of its Bell Labs researchers to Agere. The “lion’s share” of former staff now work at an Agere wireless design centre in North Ryde, Sydney. Reptechnic and SMR Electronics also form a new company providing ASIC design and development services to both local and international customers.
On the milestone front, Telstra Labs turns 80—a far cry from the one-person team that started the labs in 1923.
November
The R&D recovery is motoring. The Australian Microelectronics Network (AMN) announces it has selected Tanner EDA to fit out its Microelectronics Resource Centres. The centres, due to open in mid-2004, will work towards buying the top-tier tools from Cadence and Synopsis, but could not reach a licensing agreement at this stage.
Singapore’s FTD Technology also sets up an IC design centre in Brisbane. Nanosilicon will create 40 new engineering jobs by November next year, and will focus on developing high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) chips for use in HDTVs. In Victoria, photonics developer CEOS signs a $100 million agreement with Hitachi to customise Hitachi’s passive optical networking (PON) technology for the Australian and New Zealand markets.