Any approval of Charter Communications' buy of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks should ensure New Charter doesn't impose data caps on broadband subscribers, especially since the growth of streaming as a primary means of video consumption means data caps will be a more significant issue three to seven years after the transaction, Roku officials including General Counsel Stephen Kay told FCC staff including Owen Kendler, who's overseeing the Charter review team. An ex parte filing Friday in docket 15-149 said Roku also talked about ensuring New Charter didn't put in place zero-rating schemes if it does impose data caps, and the need for anti-circumvention provisions to make sure New Charter abides with data cap and zero-rating requirements. In a statement, Charter said it "offers its customers a superior broadband product that does not include data caps, usage based billing, a modem fee or an early termination fee." Charter also said it's "committed to this consumer-friendly approach and [we] have no plans to change our practices.” During the FCC's open Internet proceedings, Roku also pushed for restrictions on data caps.

Qualcomm gave a progress report Wednesday on adoption of its Quick Charge 3.0 technology since the launch of its Snapdragon 820 processor. Qualcomm highlighted the HTC 10 as one smartphone to incorporate Quick Charge 3.0 and said more compatible devices and accessories will be announced over the coming months. The company didn’t break out how many products include the latest version of Quick Charge, only saying more than 70 devices and 200 accessories support “one of the two most recent versions" of the technology, with more in development. Additional products that use Quick Charge technology are the LeEco Le Max Pro, LG G5 and Xiaomi Mi 5 smartphones and power banks from APE Technology, Shenzhen DBK, Elecjar, RAVPower and Voxlink, Qualcomm said. HP’s Elite x3 smartphone is the first Windows-based device to support Quick Charge, it said. Quick Charge 3.0 incorporates Qualcomm’s Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage algorithm that allows portable devices to maximize efficiency by requesting the optimum power level. With Quick Charge 3.0, a typical smartphone can charge from zero to 80 percent in roughly 35 minutes, 27 percent faster than the previous version of Quick Charge, the company said. The technology is forward and backward compatible and can be implemented in USB Type-A, USB micro, USB Type-C and proprietary connectors.

Any enforcement mechanisms the FCC adopts in its set-top box proceeding “would not adequately assure adherence to the terms governing the distribution of content" to multichannel video programming distributors, Disney officials told Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel in a meeting Wednesday, according to an ex parte filing posted Monday in docket 97-80. The FCC couldn't enforce its rules because Disney wouldn't have contracts with the third-party set-top makers, the company said.

Panasonic commercialized an encapsulation material with a “high dielectric constant” for fashioning smaller and thinner fingerprint recognition sensors to be embedded in mobile devices, the company said in a Tuesday announcement. Panasonic will start “full-scale mass production” of the material next month, it said. Panasonic sees fingerprint recognition features being embedded in more and more smartphones, it said. Sapphire glass conventionally has been used in the fingerprint contact part of packages for existing capacitive fingerprint recognition sensors due to its high dielectric constant, Panasonic said. But that has “drawbacks,” including the difficulty of making the sensor packages smaller and thinner to fit sleeker smartphone form factors, it said. Sapphire glass-based sensors also require complex “manufacturing processes,” it said. There’s a “booming market” for fingerprint sensors in smartphones, tablets and notebook computers, IHS said in a December report. “Their use in the iPhone 5 in 2013 was followed by adoption by many other OEMs in 2014 and 2015,” IHS said. “These sensors are becoming a standard feature in high-end smart phones, with further growth expected.”

MediaTek’s new Helio X20 processor supports DTS Headphone:X, DTS said Wednesday. A high-performance codec on the Helio X20 delivers a 110-decibel signal-to-noise ratio, said DTS. The partnership with MediaTek furthers DTS’ goal to deliver a “premium sound experience to as many people as possible on every imaginable platform,” said CEO Jon Kirchner.

LG Uplus has adopted Conexant Systems’ CX2092x SoC for voice control in the LG tvG woofer set-top box and LG IoT Hub, Conexant said Tuesday. Conexant's technology eliminates background noise in real-world environments and allows users to issue speech commands from anywhere in a room without interference from sounds, including barking dogs or children’s voices, the company said. The CX2092x is available in a 60-QFN package, and evaluation kits are available to qualified customers, it said.

The “universal set-top box” will open up “unfettered opportunity for hundreds of minority programming aspirants” as opposed to set-tops leased from multichannel video programming distributors, said BET founder and current RLJ Entertainment Chairman Robert Johnson in an emailed statement Wednesday. TV One CEO Alfred Liggins during a press call Tuesday singled out Johnson (see 1602160072) as a supporter of the FCC's upcoming NPRM on set-tops. Liggins' view of the NPRM is incorrect, Johnson said. “There is nothing in the FCC's proposed rulemaking that would allow technology companies to infringe on TV One’s advertising revenue and relationships.” The FCC “should not protect minority incumbents, but should encourage new minority entrants,” he said. "Most minority programmers I know, unlike TV One, are not asking the FCC to protect them from competition but are simply seeking an opportunity for a fair chance and a fair shot to have their content seen and their voices heard!”

Qualcomm, which announced LG as a launch partner for the Snapdragon Wear platform last week (see 1602110034), said Wednesday that ODMs Borqs, Compal Electronics and Infomark have begun offering reference designs based on the Wear 2100 SoC (system on chip). Borqs is offering connected (3G/4G) and tethered (Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) smartwatch and kid watch reference designs based on Snapdragon Wear 2100, while Compal is delivering Wear 2100-based reference designs and device production supporting Android Wear and Android operating systems for connected and tethered use cases, Qualcomm said. Infomark’s Wear 2100 reference design targets kid and elderly watch segments, Qualcomm said. In smartphone solutions, Qualcomm bowed a suite of RF360 technologies for premium and entry-level design tiers. The RF360 antenna tuners and switches and a RF front-end allow OEMs to build “sleeker” phones with superior battery life, call reliability and quality, data speeds and network coverage, said Qualcomm. Meanwhile, Qualcomm said it’s the first company to support hardware-backed biometric fingerprint authentication for Tencent’s WeChat mobile payment service. With fingerprint authentication enabled by Qualcomm’s Haven security platform framework, users will be able to do secure online transactions on their mobile devices without PIN codes or passwords, said Qualcomm. The framework supports Tencent’s security authentication protocol fingerprint matching, processing, local storage and communication to Tencent servers in the cloud. The technology is shipping in the Vivo X6 device in China and will be available in “multiple smartphones” over the coming months, Qualcomm said. Qualcomm will demonstrate support for Tencent’s WeChat payment service on the Vivo X6 at Mobile World Congress (MWC) next week. Also at MWC, Qualcomm will demonstrate the Snapdragon X16 LTE modem capable of gigabit data transfer speeds, 4-layer MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) in a smartphone and 5G connectivity, Qualcomm said. In a demo with Ericsson, Qualcomm will show 1-Gbps download speeds using a combination of 3x carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO on two aggregated carriers and high-order modulation using 256-QAM. Qualcomm will demonstrate with Sony 4x4 MIMO capability for the first time in a smartphone along with Ultra HD Voice, which it called the next generation of voice call quality. Two IoT demonstrations using low-power LTE with 4G connectivity will show how LTE-connected IoT devices can achieve longer battery life, Qualcomm said.

Lobbying over a coming FCC NPRM to untie set-top boxes (see 1602100036) from mostly being provided only by multichannel video programming distributors continued, filings Wednesday and Thursday in docket 15-64 and other statements showed. Allowing consumers to access content from multiple sources on one device would "limit the power of traditional content gatekeepers,” the Writer’s Guild of America, West said about coming FCC set-top box proposals in meetings this week with Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel and aides to Chairman Tom Wheeler, an ex parte filing posted Thursday said. “Seven companies (CBS, Disney, Discovery, Fox, NBCU, Time Warner and Viacom) control almost all television programming and a handful of MVPDs control how that content is distributed to consumers.” The proposals would increase consumer costs, and threaten security and copyright, NCTA said in meetings with aides to Commissioner Ajit Pai. TiVo has been providing consumers with “a competitive set-top box option for over a decade without any of the parade of horribles” listed by NCTA, TiVo said in meetings with Rosenworcel, Pai, Clyburn and aides to Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, according to an ex parte filing. Also Thursday, the Future of TV Coalition, which unveiled itself the day the FCC said the NPRM was coming, said broadcasters are opposing what the rulemaking would seek. "Big news in the AllVid debate" as NAB "went on record with deep concerns about the FCC’s AllVid proposal," the MVPD- and programmer-backed group said, citing NAB CEO Gordon Smith's comments to be shown this weekend on C-SPAN (see 1602100066). "This development is critical because the organization that is so deeply rooted in the local broadcast TV ecosystem is pulling the curtain back on the real motives and hidden costs of the AllVid rule." AllVid was something the previous FCC chairman pursued to try to let consumers access encrypted MVPD programming from sources other than pay-TV-provided set-tops, which the current FCC has said is off the table.

Global semiconductor sales slipped 0.2 percent in 2015 to $335.2 billion, the Semiconductor Industry Association said. December sales fell 4.4 percent from November to $27.6 billion and 5.2 percent versus December 2014, SIA said. Q4 sales dropped 5.2 percent to $82.9 billion, it said. Factors affecting sales: softening demand, strength of the dollar and normal market trends, SIA CEO John Neuffer said. Among segments, logic was the largest semiconductor category with 27 percent market share, or $90.8 billion in revenue, in 2015. Memory devices had $77.2 billion in sales, followed by micro-ICs, including microprocessors, at $61.3 billion, sensors and actuators ($8.8 billion), NAND flash ($28.8 billion) and analog ($45.2 billion). Optoelectronics was the fastest growing category with 11.3 percent growth, it said.