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

The Californian technocracy love to witter on about the impending redundancy of a large proportion of the human race as machines take over their work functions. A McKinsey report has looked at 2,000+ work functions for over 800 jobs and the feasibility of automating them. It concludes that: 86% of the functions performed by book …

Read full article: Feel Threatened By Automation?

Automotive systems are expected to have the strongest CAGR of the six main electronic systems markets through 2020 – at 4.9%, says IC Insights. Automatic emergency braking, lane departure/blind spot detection systems, and backup cameras are among the most desired systems. For semiconductor suppliers, this is good news as analogue ICs, MCUs, and a great …

Read full article: Automotive To Lead Systems Growth Through 2020

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

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.

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 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.

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