OmniVision Technologies is sampling the OV13A10 and OV13A1Q 13-megapixel PureCel Plus-S stacked-die image sensors that bring an 18:9 aspect ratio, low-light capability and 2x optical zoom to front- and rear-facing smartphone cameras, said the company. Volume production is slated for Q4.

Consumer electronics will make up the largest share of the sensor hub market, projected to reach $32.5 billion by 2023, said a Friday ReportsnReports.com study. Driving growth factors are a rising need for low-power solutions, and CE applications require devices that can run for extended periods on a single battery charge, said the report. Sensor hubs are used extensively in smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, wearables and gaming consoles for varied uses, including gesture recognition, image stabilization, navigation, motion-based gaming and health monitoring, the report said. The automotive market holds the second-largest share of the sensor hub market due to the increasing importance of active safety features, it said. Key players in the market are Microchip Technology, STMicroelectronics, Bosch, NXP Semiconductors, Rohm Semiconductor, Analog Devices, InvenSense, Infineon Technologies and Memsic, it said.

Beyond implementation of the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, FCC efforts at expanding digital opportunities for people with disabilities included improving video relay services and implementing rules to improve video captioning quality, Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the M-Enabling Summit in Arlington, Virginia, according to provided material. The FCC announced winners of the Chairman's Awards for Advancement in Accessibility: the Ava app for transcribing multiparty conversations on smart phones; Facebook's automatic alternative text feature, which describes on-screen images for people with visual impairments; Accessible Media's Integrated Described Video Best Practices Guide; and Amazon's VoiceView feature, which speaks on-screen text as a user navigates menu options.

At SoC supplier Sigma Designs, “some of our top customers” in the smart TV space “have been dealing with their own demand challenges, which, of course, translate into lower unit volume in the short term for Sigma," CEO Thinh Tran said on a Tuesday earnings call. Though smart TV sales among the top Sigma customers “appear to be flattish in the near term, we remain confident our customers will gain traction in the market and that Sigma smart TV revenues should rebound accordingly,” he said. Sigma’s “visibility” into the smart TV business in 2017's second half is “limited at this point in time,” said Ken Lowe, vice president-strategic marketing, in Q&A: “There is a lot of flux at some of our largest customers,” Lowe said. “Expectations” are that the TV makers will “revisit their go-to-market plans and regain traction,” he said. When that happens, revenue for Sigma “will resume appropriately,” he said.

Toshiba and Western Digital each are showing next-generation solid-state drive (SSD) technologies at Computex in Taipei this week. Western Digital’s WD Blue SSDs, using 64-layer 3D NAND technology, are targeted to do-it-yourself customers and will be available in 250 GB, 500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB capacities, said the company. Western Digital’s SanDisk brand SSDs, in the same capacities, are targeted at gamers and “creative enthusiasts" and billed as an upgrade option with improved endurance, instant boot-up, shorter application load times and quicker data transfer speeds. Pricing starts at $99, said the company. Toshiba’s XG5 series of NVM Express SSDs, meanwhile, integrate 64-layer, 3D flash memories with capacities of 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB in a single-sided form factor, said the company. The series is said to reduce standby power mode power consumption by more than 50 percent. Limited samples are available, with production quantities due in Q3, said Toshiba.

The ATSC 3.0 receiver chipsets that Saankhya Labs is developing on the “fast track” with Sinclair’s One Media (see 1703280044) should be available in time to be deployed in smartphones and other consumer products for the 2018 holiday selling season, Saankhya CEO Parag Naik told us Friday. “We’re discussing the scale,” and will know the timetable “in about a month’s time,” said Naik. Saankhya’s software-defined radio platform will allow for chips that can accommodate other global broadcast standards, he said. “Depending on the application, depending on the customer, we could have a different product mix” based on variations of the same chipset design, he said. “For example, the same chip could be used for fixed receivers,” like large-screen TVs, and “also gateways,” in addition to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, he said. Naik sees the U.S. as hosting the first worldwide commercial deployment of the Saankhya chipsets for ATSC 3.0. In South Korea, which is scheduled to formally launch ATSC 3.0 services in a matter of days, “we are talking to OEMs there as well,” he said. Sinclair’s offer at last week’s ATSC conference to give out the receiver chips for free (see 1705170033) is part of an effort “to seed the market,” said Naik. Component costs are “a function of the volume,” he said. “Once the market gets seeded and critical mass is achieved, your costs will drop and it becomes ubiquitous, and almost everyone then will probably start to put it in his phones or TVs.”

At Advanced Micro Devices, “we really like PCs,” CEO Lisa Su told the company’s analyst day conference Tuesday. “We think PCs are an important market for us. It's a high-volume market. It's one of the few markets where you really ship over 250 million units a year, and although it has been volatile at times, it is actually the way many of us connect as both consumers and commercial applications to the cloud into the rest of the infrastructure.” AMD sees “sub-segments” within the PC market that are “very profitable and growing, and so those are some of the areas that we're going to focus within PCs,” Su said. Immersive devices for virtual and augmented reality and other implementations is “a very exciting area” for AMD, she said. “There is a constant demand for more pixels on every screen, whether you're talking about game consoles, or embedded devices, or high-end graphics cards. The idea is you can always make it more beautiful, you can always make it more realistic, and you can always have more resolution.” The company sees the market for immersive devices increasing at a 7 percent compound annual growth rate through 2020, Su said. “There are certain segments of this market that we think will grow well into the double digits.” Those include “high-end gaming, as well as VR and AR, and some of those applications,” she said.

Global semiconductor revenue totaled $343.5 billion in 2016, a 2.6 percent increase from 2015, Gartner said in a Monday report. Combined revenue from the world’s top 25 semiconductor vendors increased 10.5 percent, a “significantly better performance than the overall industry's growth,” though most of that increase resulted from merger and acquisition activity, Gartner said: “The semiconductor industry rebounded in 2016, with a weak start to the year, characterized by inventory correction, giving way to strengthening demand and an improving pricing environment in the second half." Intel remained the world’s top semiconductor maker in 2016 with a 15.7 percent share, followed by Samsung with 11.7 percent, said the report. Qualcomm, with a 4.5 percent share, overtook SK hynix (formerly Hyundai Electronics) for third place, it said.

Sex toy maker Svakom Design USA emailed that it stopped selling the internet-connected Siime Eye vibrator, which Access Now alleged in a complaint filed with the FTC (see 1704260007) can be easily compromised by a third party. But the product appeared to be available for sale Thursday on the company's site. A Svakom spokesperson said in the email sent Wednesday night that the company still has to review the complaint, which seeks a commission investigation, but it has responded to vulnerability testing and security firm Pen Test Partners that presented research that the complaint is based on. "We have taken some measure based on their report and already posted instruction among the users of Siime Eye on official Social Media and Website," wrote the spokesperson. Among the measures, the spokesperson said, Svakom will provide an updated smartphone app that provides more secure access to the vibrator's embedded camera. The company also said hardware changes will be made so the device can be used only with a smartphone and not with a personal computer.

Samsung Electronics said Wednesday its second-generation 10-nanometer FinFET process technology, 10LPP, has been qualified and is expected to be ready for production by Q4. The 10LPP process, geared to high-performance mobile, computing and network applications, is said to offer 10 percent higher performance or 15 percent lower power consumption than the first-generation 10LPE process with the same area scaling. Some of Samsung’s Galaxy S8 smartphones use 10LPE SoCs, which went into mass production in October, said the company.