THT Research - Weekly OEM/ODM Newsletter

The Latest News on Global IT Contract Manufacturing from www.THTresearch.com 

BRING ON THE ORDERS
 
Sapphire - Nvidia relationship
Sapphire, which makes ATI graphics cards, has been rumored to have been contracted by Nvidia. While Sapphire will be making cards for Nvidia partners, but they won't be sold as Sapphire branded cards.
 
Power supply demand up
LGE has placed orders for 100K/month of power supplies with SPI Electronic. Other power supply makers are seeing increased orders as well -- Delta at 200k/month and Li Shin at 300K.
 
Panasonic HD camcorder to use Xilinx FPGA
Matsushita Electric has adopted Xilinx's Virtex-4 and Spartan- 3 FPGAs for its HD camcorder, the DVCPRO HD camera recorder.
 
Ericsson - Fareastone expand cooperation in Taiwan
Ericsson has won a contract in Taiwan to deploy been HSPA and IMS for the local operator Fareastone. The network will support initial download speeds of up to 3.6mbps, the fastest available in Taiwan.
 
IBM Broadway chip in Nintendo Wii
Nintendo has selected IBM's "Broadway" microprocessor for its Wii console according to the companies' multi-year agreement. The chips are 90-nanometer Power Architecture-based chips featuring SOI technology.
 
Sony LCD panel orders
AUO has begun volume shipments of 32-inch LCD TV panels to Sony. Monthly shipments about 100-150K.
 
HTC - Vodafone KK deal
HTC has signed a deal with Vodafone KK (Japan) under which the companies will co-develop and market 3G smartphones in Japan. Volume shipments of HTC phones will begin by year-end 06. Vodafone KK will be renamed Softbank Mobile in Oct 06.
 
Amdocs and Jilin Unicom deal
Amdocs has been contracted by China Unicom division Jilin Unicom (China) to consolidate and upgrade Jilin's existing pricing and billing systems.
 
 
COMPANY NEWS AND INDUSTRY TRENDS
 
Taiwan STB market
Sometimes the Taiwan government has great, practical ideas --- like when they encouraged recycling by forcing people to use only municipal issued for-fee bags to throw out their garbage. Now Taiwan's National Communications Commission plans to require local cable-TV operators to provide their subscribers with set-top boxes free of charge as a way to transition to 100 % DTV by 2012. Not exactly the same, sure, but they do know how to get things done.
 
 
INTERNET CHINA
 
Optibase to provide video technologies to Vcom, China Netcom
Optibase has signed contracts with Vcom and China Netcom to provide them with its advanced video technologies to stream live and pre-recorded, encoded MPEG-2 satellite feeds to Vcom's vido servers.
 
 
M & A
 
Rim Semicon acquires 1021 Technologies
Rim Semiconductor has acquired most of the assets of 1021 Technologies Inc. and its Japanese subsidiary, including 16 DSL patents and patent applications. Rim will incorporate the technologies into its Embarq processor family.
 
Lucent buys Mobilitec
Lucent Technologies is buying start-up Mobilitec (Israel), a provider of content delivery and management software for carriers, for US$75M cash. Mobilitec's investors include AIG Orion, Duchossois Technology Partners, Lucent Venture Partners Inc., and SingTel.
 
eMachines ex-CEO buys Packard Bell
John Hui, the ex-CE O of eMachines who has been trying to buy Gateway's retail arm, has bought Packard Bell.
 
 
SEMICON
 
Tower to produce Ikanos DSL chip
Tower Semiconductor (Israel) has received a multi-million dollar order to produce Ikanos' new DSL chip. Tower will use 0.16-micron technology to produce the chip at its Fab 2.