Fortive saw its first quarter revenues grow 4.1% year-over-year to $1.5 billion, with net earnings of $199.7 million. Its figures exceeded its guidance, and company President and CEO James Lico called Fortive’s performance “a strong start to 2017.”
Fortive, one of the largest test companies by revenue, was spun out from Danaher last year and its test brands include Tektronix, Fluke and Keithley instruments. Fortive reported that its professional instrumentation unit saw its revenues grow 2.7% year-over-year to more than $716 million.
In other test news:
–Anritsu says its ME7834LA mobile device test system, is being used by an unnamed “major North American carrier” for carrier acceptance testing to support Licensed-Assisted Access deployments.
–National Instruments released test software for the new 802.11ax standard. NI said that its WLAN Test Toolkit 17.0 now support draft 1.1 of 802.1ax, and that when combined with NI’s second-generation vector signal transceiver, will support waveform generation and analysis for the new Wi-Fi standard. Qualcomm is among the companies that hope to be first to market with new 802.11ax support, and it plans to have chipsets available this year.
–Tektronix launched a USB-based vector network analyzer. The TTR500 series is aimed at supporting internet of things development and educational institutions with a low-cost VNA (up to 40% cheaper than alternatives, Tektronix claims). The VNA has a range from 100kHz to 6 GHz, two ports, a 122 dB dynamic range and a compact form factor: it weighs in at about 3.5 pounds and is 8.125 inches by 11.25 inches by 1.75 inches.
-Macom reported first quarter revenues of $186.1 million, up almost 40% year-over-year. However, its losses from continuing operations widened from about $12 million to $134 million, which the company said was due to its acquisition of Applied Micro Circuits as well as a deferred tax asset valuation allowance of $88.0 million.
Macom also this week introduced a wideband low noise amplifier for use in test equipment, which operates from DC to 28 GHz. The company noted that “next generation test and measurement systems require higher performance wideband components offering ease of use and smaller footprints to allow for smaller modular solutions that accelerate time to market.”
–Procera Networks recently won a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with Vodafone Egypt that is focused on a virtualized vsibility solution for analyzing subscriber experience for fixed and mobile users. Lyn Cantor, president and CEO of Procera, said in a statement that the company’s “strategic focus on virtualization use cases for fixed and mobile network will enable both operators and subscribers to benefit from their broadband networks.” Hashem Eid, Procera’s managing director of sales for the Middle East, added that “virtualization of analytics is a key initiative for the Middle East region,” said Hashem Eid, Procera’s Managing Director of Sales for Middle East. “With regional operators competing on network quality, reducing the cost and increasing the deployment flexibility of analytics through virtualization is a business imperative.”
–Teledyne LeCroy and Protocol Insight have teamed up to supply protocol test tools for UniPro/Universal Flash Storage devices, including UFS as used in mobile systems between host processors and memory storage. Teledyne LeCroy noted that UFS devices are expected to soon migrate to higher speeds and therefore require more comprehensive test tools.
–MIPI Alliance held its first plugfest for companies that are adopting the new MIPI 13C interface for simplified sensor connection to an application processor, for use in mobile products including IoT devices. The plugfest, held in late March in Barcelona, Spain, focused on design interoperability for smartphones, IoT and automotive applications, among others and participants included NXP, Qualcomm, Intel, Synopsis, Tektronix and STMicroelectronics.
