- 12 March 2006 -

CeBIT overflows with gadgets

The past week was notable for what has been billed as the "world’s most famous exhibition for IT & computer technologies", CeBIT-2006. While not much III-Vs was conspicuous many of the new gadgets rely on III-Vs in some form or another - especially the optical data storage and wireless.

Perhaps the only western rival is CES but CeBIT, in Hannover, Germany, drew comparable crowds to experience firsthand the gadgets which we will be adding to our Xmas wish lists later in the year.

Attended by more than 700,000 people there were over 6,000 exhibitors from worldwide including no less than 70 Russian ones. The weather was apparently awful but few could complain about the 'hot' products on show inside the pavilions.

Gilded displays

There were many displays on show - Panasonic had the world's biggest plasma display measuring 103-diagonal inches. Also hitting the headlines was the L.G.Philips 100-inch TFT-LCD, again the largest ever. Centrepiece of its stand was a gold-rimmed 71-inch plasma TV - the most expensive TV in the world needless to say.

The television is just part of the company's stand which also features moving walls consisting of thirty 50-inch plasma TVs and eight 42-inch plasma TVs.

Blu-ray vs HD

In optical storage Blu-Ray and HD were high profile. Samsung provided further details of its new BD-P1000 Blu-ray disc (BD) player. It will let consumers take full advantage of high-definition displays, playing content at native 720p or 1080i video resolutions. In a statement, it will start selling the player in the US in early Spring with a retail price of approximately $1,000. For European Customers, BD-P1000 will be available in the Autumn of this year with a retail price around £700.

“Samsung’s Blu-ray player will be the first available to consumers, and we will continue to innovate with our introduction of a Blu-ray recorder later this year”, said President Geesung Choi of Samsung’s Digital Media Business.

This comes after Toshiba announcing its first HD DVD player would be built into one of its laptops. Called the Qosimo G30 it will be available next month. Qosmio is Toshiba's multimedia PC range and the laptop also features a TV tuner and Dolby Home Theatre support. The HD-DVD drive in the Qosmio will only read HD-DVD media, but Toshiba expects to have HD-DVD writers in its laptops by the end of this year.

TDK was boasting that it would be the first company to bring blank media to market and is already shipping single-layer 25GB write-once and rewritable Blu-ray Disc media across Europe with dual-layer 50GB equivalents to follow in April.

LG Electronics, which is one of the biggest optical drive makers, said it is going to support HD DVD as well as Blu-ray as the next DVD standard. Up until now LG Electronics was in the Blu-ray camp, and is now the second high-profile Blu-ray supporter to change position; Hewlett-Packard, the second biggest PC maker, said last month it would also support HD DVD and Blu-ray.

Handsets get even smarter

There were of course many many handset launches timed for the show. Among the highlights was Samsung unveiling a new phone compatible with the GSM, GPRS and EDGE technologies which runs the Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone operating system. It measures 112 x 48 x 20 mm and weighs 120 grams.

LG showcased its wide range of mobile TV Phones: DVB-H, Satellite and Terrestrial DMB Phone. The V9000 features a wide-swing screen so you can watch TV for up to 3 h and even record programs for up to 1 h. The phone also features a 3D surround sound system, megapixel AF CMOS camera, MP3, TV capture and Bluetooth.

BenQ announced a further six handsets including the EL71, an ultra slim mobile phone with an OLED display. Samsung launched a Windows Mobile cell-phone with an 8 Gbyte hard-drive for the European market in the second half of 2006. Cornice, the US maker of 1-in drives as used in portable music players and cellphones, reckons the cellphone disk drive market is going to be growing at a whopping 325% between 2004 and 2009. About 72 m cellphones with embedded drives will be shipped in 2009 out of a global total of around a billion handsets. This translates into the cellphone market becoming larger than the personal storage and portable audio player markets – these it expects will be some 10- and 43-m shipments, respectively, in 2009.

Handset MEMS

STMicroelectronics said it has expanded its portfolio of three-axis accelerometers with the thinnest digital-output sensor on the market. Embedding high performance and smart functionality in a 1-mm-high package, ST's LIS3LV02DL opens new possibilities for advanced motion-based applications in ever-more popular, thin-profiled clamshell mobile phones.

MEMS-based accelerometers have enabled the introduction of high-performance, cost-effective motion-based user interfaces in mobile applications, including gesture recognition, motion-activated scrolling, and navigation on the phone display. ST's new ultra-slim 3D sensor with digital output extends these advanced capabilities to the clamshell form factor, which is expected to account for 41% of the estimated 750 m handsets sold worldwide in 2006, and represent the majority of mobile phone sales by 2008.

The LIS3LV02DL is the newest member in STMicroelectronics 's market-unique family of three-axis accelerometers with a standard SPI/I2C digital interface. The digital output streamlines communication with the baseband chip; it eliminates the need for a dedicated A/D converter on each input channel and enables the sensor to share interfaces with other devices, thereby saving further space in slim-form-factor systems.

STMicroelectronics has also launched a new multi-chip package memory portfolio for multimedia applications used in 3G and CDMA mobile phones and other portable devices.

Project GOLLUM

Finally, a consortium of seven partners, comprised of universities and R&D units from industry from four European countries, this week has presented the first implementation of an embedded, open, operating-system-independent link-layer API (Application Programming Interface) to unify the various methods for accessing different wired and especially wireless links. Termed "GOLLUM" (Generic Open Link-Layer API for Unified Media access), the project has been sponsored by the European Commission with a total contribution of 1.8 Million Euros.