Analog Devices (ADI) is to buy Linear Technology for about $14.8 billion. “Growth has been hard to come by in the industry over the past several years,” said ADI CEO Vincent Roche, ‘those who have the balance sheets are using them.” 58 million new ADI shares will be created and $7.3 billion borrowed to pay …

ADI to buy LTC for $14.8bn

Over the past 20 years, China has become increasingly frustrated over the gap between its IC imports and indigenous IC production, says IC Insights. China’s imports of semiconductors exceeds that of oil. In the late 1990s China began to contemplate ways to grow its indigenous IC industry and assisted in creating Hua Hong NEC, which …

China Chip Frustration Growing

Tantalum metal has been deposited with sub-nanometer control for the first time at low temperature without plasma by Wayne State University scientists Kyle Blakeney and Professor Charles Winter “This opens up the prospect of using tantalum in layers just a few nanometers thick as the liner for interconnect wiring in the complex geometries of next-generation electronic chips,” …

First low temperature tantalum deposition with fab-level accuracy

  Murata has announced the MGJ1 1Watt dc-dc converter series for driving high and low-side IGBTs and SiC mosfet gate circuits. With isolation up to 5.2kVdc, output combinations include: +15/-5, +15/-9 or +19/-5V. Input choice is +5, 12 or 24Vdc. “The MGJ1 provides optimised voltages for powering gate drives for best system performance and efficiency. …

Medical dc-dc converter drives IGBT and SiC mosfet gates

Which comes first – the drone or the loon? It looks like Google’s Project Loon will bring the internet to the internet-deprived before Facebook’s Project Aquila, but there’s many a slip ‘txixt cup and lip. Loon, of course, uses balloons and Aquila uses drones. Loon kicked off its service in New Zealand three years ago …

Loon or Drone?

The US Department of Energy has released a new Caliper Snapshot report on linear LED tubes intended as fluorescent replacements and such lamps now represent the majority of all lamps listed in the Lighting Facts database.

IDG Capital Partners, MLS, and Yiwu State-Owned Assets Operation Center pay EUR 400 million for the LEDvance lamps and lighting business that had recently been carved-out from its Osram parent.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Elasticsearch version 2.3. Amazon Elasticsearch Service makes it easy to run Elasticsearch, which is a popular tool for real-time analytics use cases such as log analytics and application monitoring. Elasticsearch 2.3 offers many new features, including support for pipeline aggregations, improved geo-point fields, and support for data compression. Elasticsearch version 2.3 also offers many benefits over version 1.5, including improved performance, memory management and resiliency, and security enhancements. Starting today, customers can choose between Elasticsearch version 1.5 or 2.3 when creating an Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain. 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Native Backup/Restore using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You can now take database level backups as SQL Server backup files (.bak) and store them in your Amazon S3 bucket. SQL Server full backups are commonly used to migrate or move databases among different SQL Server instances, whether in the cloud or on-premises, for data ingestion, disaster recovery and other backup purposes. You can export a full backup of your on-premises database, store it in S3 and then use the custom stored procedures offered by RDS to restore that backup to an existing RDS instance. You will also be able to backup an RDS database into S3 and restore the backup file later onto an on-premises or RDS database. Storing and transferring backup files into and out of AWS through S3 affords customers an added layer of protection for disaster recovery and gives customers a peace of mind that their data can be moved around easily. On RDS, you can encrypt your backup files across SQL Server Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions.

The Times of India is reporting a series of protests about a lack of drinking water by groups of hundreds of people in rural areas of southern India.