SAN JOSE, Oct. 4 -- EDA revenue rose 4% in the June quarter versus one year ago, reaching $993 million, the EDA Consortium said today. The rise wasn't enough to convince one chief executive of a leading EDA company that the industry was performing up to par, however.

"Despite very modest growth in the EDA industry, there are no indications of overall strength," Wally Rhines, chairman of the EDA Consortium and chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, in a statement. "Growth in services versus last year is positive but the sequential decline is not."

For the quarter, computer-aided engineering revenues were $474 million, up 4% year-on-year. License and maintenance grew 2% year-on-year. Services was up 11% to $70 million. IC physical design and verification sales fell $3 million, to $282 million.

PCB and MCM layout revenues were $84 million, down 1% from Q2 2003.

The semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) revenue rose 28%, to $84 million. The sector was helped by greater SIP participation in EDAC's data collection.

Revenues in North America and Europe increased 4% each, to $523 million and $180 million, respectively. Japan was down 5%, to $176 million. Rest-of-world, which includes China and India, was up 19%, to $115 million.

The sector employed 20,000 in Q2, up 6% vs. a year ago and a new high since EDAC began tracking employment data four years ago.

"I think the great advantage of this material is that it provides a very wide process window, which gives us tremendous flexibility," says Vahid Goudarzi, a distinguished member of the technical staff at Motorola. "From printing to reflow, we really stressed the material and it was able to meet our very rigorous technical requirements."

Multicore LF320 requires a minimum peak reflow of 229°C, about 11°C lower than standard lead-free pastes. (Higher Dt assembly designs can be reflowed in air at up to 260°C.) The difference provides a safety margin when reflowing temperature-sensitive components. According to Henkel, the paste prints at a speed range of 25-100 mms-1 (6"s-1), wets on a range of surface finishes, and has been formulated to provide high resistance to slump and solderballing.

LF320 is classified as a ROMO per J-STD-004 and meets or exceeds Bellcore GR-78-CORE tests for electromigration.

The material has been optimized for reflow in air on a range of PCB assembly applications and reflow profiles may be extended with nitrogen, Henkel said in a press statement.

"Expansion into Mexico supports our strategy to deliver globally," Kester vice president of marketing and business development David Torp said in a press statement. Torp noted the years-long migration of assembly operations into China, Mexico and Eastern Europe.

Kester plans additional plants in Suzhou, China, in 2005, and Plauen-Neuensatz, Germany, which has been operational since June.

BOSTON, Sept. 30 -- Some of the greatest technology minds gathered this week in Boston to discuss innovation, yet the talk continually turned to something much more mundane: standards.

Noted luminaries ranging from a senior R&D executive at IBM to the man credited with creating the Worldwide Web agreed that standards and innovation go hand-in-hand, and that more attention needs to be paid to ensuring standards for new technologies are open.

Speaking to an audience of about 500 at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, said it's "very important" that stakeholders protect the Web from being "tripped up by software patents." And Paul Horn, senior VP of IBM Research, called open standards "critical for speedy innovation at a company, in an ecosystem, in the country."

Horn decried those who seek IP protection, at the cost of slowing innovation. "Success in R&D requires rapid flow of innovation into the marketplace. Time to market is critical." Universities that elbow aside businesses seeking to partner on R&D because of worries over IP rights strain new products, too, he said.

Berners-Lee noted that patent licensing royalties form a barrier for companies that develop new technology. "You could never find out what patent could possibly apply to what technology," he said.

Berners-Lee now directs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an open forum of companies and organizations that develop Web standards. W3C advocates a royalty-free standards policy for patent licensing.

Most of the technology discussion over the two-day event centered on software advancements - and, as in the case of standards, potential hurdles. While there was talk of nanotechnology and outsourcing - with speakers brushing aside concerns over regional job loss as a natural result of bringing lower cost product to market, what the conference didn't cover in depth was potential new manufacturing techniques.

Solectron's Q4 Loss Narrows
10-01-2004

by Mike Buetow

MILPITAS, CA, Sept. 28 -- Solectron Corp. saw its fiscal fourth-quarter loss narrow on a strong increase in sales. The company reported a loss of $2.4 million on sales of $3 billion for the quarter ended Aug. 31.

Last year, the EMS maker reported a loss of $179 million on revenue of $2.44 billion. Excluding items, earnings from continuing operations were 4 cents a share in the latest period, reversing a loss of 6 cents a share, and in line with analysts' expectations and company guidance.

Solectron guided for November quarter earnings, before items, of 4 to 6 cents a share on sales of $2.9 billion to $3.1 billion.

Solectron chief executive Michael Cannon said company strength in the markets for networking equipment and set-top boxes, offset by weakness in computing, storage, wireline infrastructure and third-generation cellphones.

For the year, the company reported a loss of $168.9 million on revenue of $11.6 billion. In the same period last year, it reported a loss of $3.45 million on revenue of $9.83 billion.