Semiconductor executives will have much to talk about after two years of big changes which they gather in the bars of Munich when Electronica 2016 opens this week, writes David Manners

Read full article: Electronica 2016: Times they are a-changing

To power wearables, Panasonic will be showing a ‘pin’-style Li-ion cell at Electronica, claiming it to be the “smallest cylindrical lithium-ion rechargeable battery.” Called CG-320A, it is 3.65mm in diameter and 20mm long – one-seventeenth the volume of an AAA battery. Foreseen applications are legion, including: smart watches, fitness trackers, virtual reality glasses and digital …

Read full article: Electronica: Panasonic updates ‘smallest’ Li-ion battery

Omron is launching a signage technology that makes images appear to float in space, aiming it at shopping centres and transport terminals. Branded Spatial Projection Display, images can be projected anywhere. “Earlier space projection technologies have required a large number of distinct components and are relatively large systems requiring substantial space to install,” said the …

Read full article: Omron ‘floats’ images in space

Cadence, Coventor, X-FAB and Reutlingen University are launching a MEMS design contest to encourage the development of innovative MEMS and mixed-signal designs. The first-prize winner will receive a $5000 cash award, have their design manufactured at X-FAB’s wafer production facilities and get a free one-year license of Coventor’s MEMS design software. The second and third …

Read full article: MEMS design contest open for entries.

It is being reported that Broadcom will buy Brocade Communications. The motivation for the deal, it is being said, is that Broadcom wants Brocade’s $1.5 billion annual revenue fibre channel and storage business. Broadcom owns fibre channel specialist Emulex and acquiring Brocade’s fibre business would give it a more integrated product offering for data centre …

Read full article: Broadcom said to be buying Brocade

In today’s LED business roundup, it’s “not so fast” on the LEDvance to China sale — while Silvair gets showered with dollars, Philips Lighting adds licensees, and IoT partnerships flourish.

The new Wacoal Holdings building in Kyoto is lit with a mesh of white and color packaged LEDs that are based on a violet emitter or pump, and red, green, and blue phosphors.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports major version upgrade from 11g to 12c.

We are pleased to announce we have added HP Data Protector 9.07 to the AWS Storage Gateway-Virtual Tape Library (VTL) compatibility list. You can backup and archive from HP Data Protector using Gateway-VTL to scalable, cost-effective, secure Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now enables you to track your bounce, complaint, sent, and rejected email metrics with fine-grained granularity. Previously, Amazon SES provided your email sending metrics at an AWS account level. Now, you can access your metrics based on characteristics you define. For example, you can track metrics for a particular email campaign, a particular subset of recipients, or whatever aspect of email sending is important to your business operations and analytics. You can choose to publish the metrics to either Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Kinesis Firehose.