Touch user interfaces have made significant advances in the consumer electronics market particularly for mobile phones and notebook computers, opening the door for adoption in other applications including white goods, computer peripherals, medical equipment, and instrumentation. Synaptics made its debut in the home appliance market earlier this year with the launch of the Samsung Hauzen ZERO air conditioner.
The standout products on day three of the SID 2010 conference is Universal Display's new PHOLED display architecture with a unique four-color, sub-pixel design, which promises to drive commercial development of all-phosphorescent active-matrix OLEDs and Sony's tiny rollable OLED display that can wrap around a pencil.
Smaller distributors were the only ones to post sales gains in 2009. Interestingly, two of the five distributors that posted growth last year -- Interstate Connecting Components and Sherburn Electronics -- derive 100 percent of their sales from interconnect products. Both of them also target the military/aerospace industry. Here are the top 10 sales leaders by ICs, passives/electromechanical devices, interconnects and computer products as well as sales growth.
Samsung ultra-thin multi-chip packaging cuts size in half
Seoul, Korea — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is claiming the industry’s thinnest multi-die package that measures 0.6 mm in height. Designed initially for 32-gigabyte (GB) densities, the new memory package is half the thickness of a conventional memory package of eight stacked chips (or dies). The advanced packaging technology delivers a 40 percent thinner and lighter memory solution for high-density multimedia handsets and other mobile devices.
The new ultra-thin 0.6-mm thick package, which consists of eight identical dies (called an octa-die package), uses 30-nanometer-class, 32 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash chips, each measuring 15 um, to deliver a 32-GB NAND solution.
Samsung says the 15-um thickness represents a significant achievement as it can allow for double the density of previous multi-chip packages. The thinner die also dramatically reduces chip weight.
The “ultra-thinning” technology overcomes the conventional technology limits of a chip’s resistance to external pressure when under 30 um in height, said Samsung. The productivity decline resulting from this thickness limitation has been directly attributed to a drop in production yields during mass production.
In addition, the new package technology can be adapted to other existing MCPs, configured as system in packages (SiPs), or package on packages (PoPs). The breakthrough technique for 15 um-and-under chip thicknesses will allow for the design of very high-density solutions with the smallest of form factors, which is an attractive feature for mobile designs, said Samsung.
iSuppli forecasts 310 million units of memory cards at 2-GB densities and higher will be produced in 2009 (60 percent of total production). The market researcher expects the number to reach 7.7 billion units by 2012 (89 percent of total production).
iSuppli also estimates the portion of memory cards at 16 GB and higher to reach 35 million units (16-GB equivalents) this year, a number expected to reach 530 million units by 2012, representing 15-fold growth. This portion of the overall card production is expected to climb from 33 percent to 74 percent during the same period.
NXP offers a low-power IC aimed at MPPT applications using PV cells or fuel cells. 
C&K Components offers a series of low-cost, miniature slide switches. The OS Series of RoHS-compliant switches feature a new high-temperature option for lead-free soldering.