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.
SiliconBlue to demo iCE65 mobileFPGA at MWC
Santa Clara, Calif. — SiliconBlue Technologies will showcase the newest members of its iCE65 mobileFPGA family at Mobile World Congress (MWC), February 15-18 in Barcelona. The company also plans to demo several products showing how mobileFPGA devices enable seamless feature integration for mobile applications including smartphones, eBooks/ePaper, netbooks, MIDs and digital still cameras.
SiliconBlue recently expanded its iCE65 mobileFPGA family with the introduction of its iCE65L01 device that provides a programmable, ultra-low power, high logic-capacity alternative to fixed function ASSPs and small ASICs, says the company. The device, with 1,280 logic cells and up to 93 user I/O pins, is well-suited to support functions such as intelligent battery-life management and interrupt offload (to keep the application processor in a low-power mode as long as possible) in battery-operated handheld products.
“Battery life management is a huge challenge for designers,” said Kapil Shankar, CEO of SiliconBlue, in a statement. “Standard, fixed-function devices are insufficient to meet their needs. The iCE65L01 mobileFPGA device is the latest example in our strategy to provide a comprehensive family of devices offering the benefits of programmability and time-to-market to handheld, mobile product designers. The ASIC-like cost, high logic capacity, ultra-low power, and advanced-package technology of the iCE65 devices is a winning combination that provides the scalability required for our customers to implement features that differentiate their products.”
The iCE65L01 mobileFPGA device is available now in three packages:
VQ100, CB132 and QN84. Customers can design with these new product/package combinations using the iCEcube VHDL/Verilog-based development software.
Pricing: The iCE65L01 device in a QN84 package is priced at $0.99 for 1M units in annual volume. ES samples and software support are available now.
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.