NXP and Canonical have ported Ubuntu Core to NXP’s quad ARM Cortex-A53 core LS1043A SoC, aimed at IoT gateways and networking equipment.

Read full article: Ubuntu Core ported to NXP quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 SoC

When you remember the heady expectations of a few years back with the 10/100/20 EU programme to resurrect semiconductor manufacturing, the outcome is enough to make you weep. European companies held only 1% of the fabless IC company marketshare in 2016 as compared to 4% in 2010, reports IC Insights. The reason for the loss …

Read full article: Pipe-Dream

Japanese gallium oxide power device start-up Flosfia has raised Y750m (£5m) in series B funding. The firm, a spin-out from the Kyoto University, is aiming to commercialise crystalline α-Ga2O3 (corundum/sapphire/ruby structure) in power transistors and Schottky diodes – with the intention of manufacturing 600V TO-220 diodes in 2018 to compete against silicon carbide power devices. …

Read full article: Gallium oxide power device firm gets £5m in second-round funding

  Microchip has brought out a mobile app for ordering microcontrollers.   microchipDIRECT, which sells parts directly to customers, has been updated with several mobile-accessible features including high-volume quotes, custom programming, ordering flexibility, numerous languages, worldwide currency options and global support.   “microchipDIRECT is providing a B2C-like experience that allows our clients to check product …

Read full article: Microchip launches mobile ordering app

Crystals announced by Jauch Quartz (J103) – in the JXSxx-WA quartz crystal series – are designed for wireless applications in a variety of settings.

Read full article: Southern Manufacturing 2017: Quartz crystals target wireless and IoT

Four Dutch growers have deployed horticultural SSL products powered by Plessey to grow tomatoes, and a variety of flowering plants in four trials slated to run through summer.

Amazon EMR now supports a variety of new Amazon EC2 Spot instance management features with instance fleets. Instead of specifying a specific Amazon EC2 instance type for an Amazon EMR instance group or Amazon EC2 availability zone for your Amazon EMR cluster, you can now provide a list of possible choices and allow Amazon EMR to automatically select an optimal combination. When creating clusters with instance fleets, Amazon EMR can now automatically provision Spot capacity across a variety of instance types, select optimal Amazon EC2 availability zones, and blend Spot and On-Demand capacity to minimize overall cost.

AWS Device Farm now enables you to choose Appium 1.6.3 when scheduling your tests.

Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports Amazon EC2 Run Command as an event target. This allows you to route system events that describe changes in your AWS environment to Run Command for processing. Run Command, a part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, provides a simple way of remotely executing common administrative tasks like running scripts, installing software, and managing patches. Now, you can perform ad-hoc actions through Run Command on your instances based on changes in your AWS environments. For example, you can now collect instance logs when instances in an Auto Scaling group are terminated by creating a CloudWatch Events rule with Auto Scaling as the source and Run Command as the target. To learn more, see the CloudWatch Events documentation here .

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.