Industry News
U.S. Army Awards $42.7 Million Contract to Raytheon for Excalibur Production
The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon Company a $42.7 million contract for fiscal year 2006 production of tactical Excalibur projectiles and related test articles and services.
Excalibur — a cooperative effort between Raytheon Missile Systems and BAE Systems Bofors of Sweden — is an artillery projectile that uses satellite guidance to provide precision accuracy at extended ranges for all current and future 155 mm howitzers.
Raytheon will provide Excalibur projectiles, testing, manufacturing tooling, test and inspection equipment, projectile shipping and storage containers and training support necessary to sustain early fielding (EF). Initial early fielding is to be provided by the fiscal year 2005 production contract. The fiscal year 2006 contract will provide 335 tactical Excalibur rounds in addition to other services and test articles.
This contract follows months of testing during which Excalibur demonstrated an accuracy of 4.5 meters (about 14.8 feet) in 12 successful guided flights. The tests successfully demonstrated the three fuzing modes(delay, height-of-burst, and point detonate) and warhead lethality.
Lethality has been proven against wheeled and tracked lightly armored military systems, simulated personnel targets and a steel reinforced concrete structure. Against the concrete structure, Excalibur successfully penetrated the roof, detonating inside the structure and causing impressive damage to the simulated target array.
Raytheon Missile Systems is the leading developer of guided projectiles, including Excalibur and the Navy's Extended-Range Guided Munition (ERGM). These projectiles will provide U.S. forces with precision munitions capability that is required on the battlefield. Both systems will provide enhanced lethality and accuracy, while minimizing collateral damage in the complex urban environment.
Excalibur and ERGM leverage many common components and supplier partnerships and apply industry best practices to produce two low-cost and reliable weapon systems that will meet or exceed all customer-defined requirements.
[ FYI Index ]
Nortel Appoints John J. Roese as Chief Technology Officer
Representatives of Nortel announced the appointment of John J. Roese as Chief Technology Officer.
Roese, a respected industry visionary and recognized authority on network convergence and emerging technologies, will be responsible for the Company's overall R&D strategy and execution, directing future research across all product portfolios. In addition, he will work closely with the Chief Strategy Officer on emerging technologies, market opportunities and strategic partnerships.
Roese has almost two decades of experience in networking and security, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), wireless technology and machine-to-machine communications. In addition, Roese is the inventor on 16 granted and pending patents in the area of policy management, location based networking and other areas of communications.
Roese joins Nortel from Broadcom Corporation, where he was vice president and CTO for networking technologies with a focus on unified communications. Previously, as executive vice president and CTO at Enterasys Networks, he was the principal architect of Enterasys' User Personalized Networking and Secure Networking, and oversaw both long-term and tactical technology strategy. As CTO and Deputy CTO of Cabletron, Roese was one of the key architects of Cabletron's SecureFast Switching.
At Nortel, Roese will lead technology innovation for a company with a rich innovation heritage and a considerable wealth of technology assets. Nortel has more than 12,000 engineers and developers, more than 3,500 issued U.S. patents and consistently ranks among the Top 50 companies globally for newly issued U.S. patents, as reported by IFI Claims, an established source of U.S. patent data. Nortel has been a major contributor to important recent industry standards for WiMAX, carrier Ethernet, security standards, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), packet-optical convergence and others.
Roese holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from the University of New Hampshire. He will report directly to the President and CEO and will be based in Nortel's R&D headquarters in Ottawa, Canada. His appointment is effective June 28, 2006.
[ FYI Index ]
Claire Pedini Appointed Senior Vice President Human Resources and Communications of Alcatel
Claire Pedini, member of the Alcatel Executive Committee, is appointed Senior Vice President of Corporate Human Resources and Communications, a newly created position, as of July 1, 2006. Prior to this, she was Senior Vice President Human Resources. She replaces, at the head of the Communications Department, Caroline Mille who is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities.
Claire Pedini started her career in the financial department of Total where she held various positions in financial control and treasury. From 1992 to 1994, she was in charge of investor relations and was then responsible for the press office until March 1997. From 1997 to 1998, she was in charge of the new information systems introduction and organizational changes at Total Exploration Production. She joined Alcatel in 1998 as Director of Financial Services and Investor Relations. She then became Vice President, Investor Relations and Public Affairs until February 2004, when she took the deputy CFO position. In December 2005, she was appointed Senior Vice President Human Resources and became a member of the Alcatel Executive Committee. She graduated from the HEC business school and has a master's degree in media management from Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP).
[ FYI Index ]
EDS Completes Acquisition of Majority Stake in MphasiS
Representatives of EDS announced the company has completed the acquisition of a majority stake in MphasiS BFL Limited, a leading applications and business process outsourcing (BPO) services company based in Bangalore, India. EDS acquired 83 million shares (approximately 52%) of MphasiS for approximately US$380 million in cash.
MphasiS will operate as an independent EDS company. With the addition of MphasiS and current expansion plans, EDS' total India work force is projected to exceed 20,000 by year end.
MphasiS BFL Limited, a leading applications and business process outsourcing (BPO) services company based in Bangalore, India, currently has 12,000 employees, including 11,000 in India. MphasiS serves clients in multiple industries, including financial services, transportation, technology and healthcare, and is particularly strong in the retail banking sector serving the world's top five banks.
[ FYI Index ]
BP and DuPont to Develop Biofuels
Representatives of BP and DuPont announced Tuesday the creation of a partnership to develop, produce and market a next generation of biofuels to help meet increasing global demand for renewable transport fuels.
BP and DuPont have been working together since 2003 to develop advanced biofuels with properties that can help overcome the limitations of existing biofuels. That work has now progressed to the point where they are able to bring the first jointly developed product to market. The companies' joint strategy is to deliver advanced biofuels that will provide improved options for expanding energy supplies and accelerate the move to renewable transportation fuels which lower overall greenhouse gas emissions.
The companies are leveraging DuPont's world-class biotechnology and bio-manufacturing capabilities with BP's fuels technology expertise and market know-how. By pooling their knowledge and expertise, the two companies aim to be the world leaders in the development and production of advanced biofuels, driving the growth of biofuels, which today account for less than two percent of global transportation fuels. Current projections show that biofuels could become a significant part of the transport fuel mix in the future – possibly up to 20-30 per cent in key markets.
The first product to market will be biobutanol, which will be introduced in the United Kingdom as a gasoline bio-component. Initial introduction is targeted in the UK in 2007 where BP and DuPont are working with British Sugar, a subsidiary of Associated British Foods plc, to convert the country's first ethanol fermentation facility to produce biobutanol. Additional global capacity will be introduced as market conditions dictate and a feasibility study in conjunction with British Sugar is already underway to examine the possibility of constructing larger facilities in the UK.
Both companies recognize that while existing biocomponents have proven to be an excellent starting point for the introduction of biofuels and will continue to play a role in the future, there are issues that needed to be addressed to increase market penetration. In particular, compatibility with existing fuel supply and distribution systems, the ability to blend in higher concentrations without requiring vehicle modifications, and fuel economy were identified as areas where improvements are needed.
This next generation of biofuels will help deliver on these targets. Biobutanol's low vapour pressure and its tolerance to water contamination in gasoline blends facilitate its use in existing gasoline supply and distribution channels. It has the potential to be blended into gasoline at larger concentrations than existing biofuels without the need to retrofit vehicles and it offers better fuel economy than gasoline-ethanol blends, improving a car's fuel efficiency and mileage.
Biobutanol also enhances the performance of ethanol blends in gasoline by, amongst other things, reducing ethanol's impact on vapor pressure, one of the issues which hampers a wider use of ethanol in existing gasoline distribution channels.
Initial production of biobutanol will be based on an existing technology, enabling early commercial market introduction. In addition, development work on a new biotechnology process which aims to produce biobutanol competitively with ethanol is already underway. Production is planned to utilize a range of feedstocks such as sugar cane or beet, corn, wheat, or cassava and, in the future, cellulosic feedstocks from fast growing "energy crops" such as grasses or agricultural byproducts such as straw and corn stalks. Since production of biobutanol is similar to ethanol and uses similar feedstocks, existing ethanol capacity can be retrofitted to produce biobutanol.
Like most biofuels, biobutanol will provide significant environmental benefits over petroleum-derived transportation fuels, reducing overall environmental emissions of greenhouse gases. Biofuels reduce the overall volume of carbon dioxide emissions entering the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide as agricultural crops grow, while emitting roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as conventional fuels when they are burned. While greenhouse gases are also generated in the production of biofuels, the net effect is still lower than using conventional fossil fuels.
[ FYI Index ]
Intel Opens Third High-Volume 65nm Manufacturing Facility
Extending its leadership in chip making technology, Intel Corporation opened an advanced, high-volume semiconductor manufacturing facility in Leixlip, Ireland on Tuesday. The event marks Intel's third chip factory using its advanced 65nm process technology and the industry's first chip factory in Europe producing 65nm chips in high volume.
The US$2 billion factory has begun high-volume production using 65nm process technology produced on the industry's largest wafer size (300mm), which provides the Intel fab with the potential to generate the world's highest microprocessor output at the lowest cost. Along with Intel's Fab 12 in Arizona and D1D fab in Oregon, the new facility (called Fab 24-2) is the most technologically advanced, high-volume semiconductor manufacturing plant in the world building multi-core microprocessors.
Demonstrating the speed of its 65nm volume ramp, Intel has achieved an important manufacturing milestone with its three 65nm factories. Known as manufacturing “cross-over,” it means that Intel is currently producing more than half its PC and server microprocessors using this industry-leading process technology. During a ceremony to officially open the Ireland factory, Otellini said that the 300mm wafers that began running through the new facility three months ago helped the company reach this milestone.
The Intel achievement comes at a time when most chip firms have not yet shipped products based on 65nm.
During the summer Intel will introduce Intel® Core™2 Duo processors for desktop (formerly codenamed Conroe) and notebooks (formerly codenamed Merom) and the Dual-Core Intel® Xeon processor 5100 series (formerly codenamed Woodcrest).
While Intel has a leadership position on 65nm process technology, it is also on track to begin production using its next-generation 45nm process technology by the end of 2007 – just two years after it started production using its 65nm process technology.
[ FYI Index ]
NNSA Announces New Mark for World's Fastest Supercomputer
Thursday , the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and IBM teamed up to announce that a new mark was achieved on the world's fastest supercomputer named BlueGene/L (BG/L). This world record for a scientific application was set by achieving a sustained performance of 207.3 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraFLOPS) on the "Qbox" computer code for conducting materials science simulations critical to national security.
BG/L is an IBM supercomputer housed at NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and is ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer by the Top500. It is used to conduct materials science simulations for NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program, which unites the scientific computing know-how of NNSA's Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. The computer simulation capabilities developed by the ASC program provide the nuclear weapons analysis that NNSA needs to keep the nuclear weapons stockpile safe, secure and reliable without underground nuclear testing.
Qbox is a first-principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) code, designed to predict the properties of metals under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure — a longstanding goal for researchers in materials science and high energy-density physics. FPMD codes are used for complex simulations at the atomic level in a number of scientific areas, including metallurgy, solid-state physics, chemistry, biology and nanotechnology.
The "Q" in Qbox is for "quantum," a reference to the quantum mechanical descriptions of electrons that are the principal focus of this type of simulation code. The ability to accurately model changes to the electronic structure of atoms distinguishes FPMD codes from classical molecular dynamics codes.
The three-dimensional code run, studying how molybdenum (a transition metal) atoms behave under pressure, represents one of only a handful of "predictive science" simulations achieving this size: 1,000 molybdenum atoms. While classical molecular dynamics calculations are frequently run with billions of atoms because the interactions between the atoms are relatively easily computed, routine quantum runs, which are both very complex and accurate, have been restricted to around 50 atoms until now. The difference between 50 and a 1000 makes the difference between being able to explore new classes of chemical systems using first-principles methods, including heterogeneous environments (considering interactions between unlike molecules) and extreme chemistry (including shocks). Such a step is important to NNSA's stockpile stewardship program, and also has important implications for biological systems, including the study of proteins.
Predictive simulations allow researchers to understand how complex physical, chemical and biological systems behave over time, where it was previously only possible to get brief snapshots at a smaller scale. This capability to do predictive science is important to NNSA's national security mission, as its researchers try to understand how the materials in nuclear weapons age, particularly for those warheads that have aged beyond their intended life. Furthermore, the performance of the Qbox code, specially designed to run on large-scale platforms such as BG/L, has implications for the broader research community and will likely enable the development of new materials of interest to many industries.
" Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, reliability and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing; works to reduce global danger from weapons of mass destruction; provides the U.S. Navy with safe and effective nuclear propulsion; and responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the U.S. and abroad.
