CES 2021 as an all-virtual event has pre-show registrations “into six figures,” CTA President Gary Shapiro told us Wednesday. A stickler for years for physical CES independent attendance audits, CTA has no methodology for measuring or verifying its such digital participation, he conceded. “The challenge that we’re facing is that we’d love to audit that, but there’s no established auditing procedures for doing who attends. We do have a reputation for honesty that’s well-deserved, and we bolstered it by having an independent audit. The numbers should be clean in terms of what we finally get.” CTA originally planned to do the virtual CES 2021 on the same Jan. 6-10 dates as the canceled physical Las Vegas show before moving it to Jan. 11-14.

Qualcomm introduced SoCs designed to provide flexible and cost-effective options for implementing rich audio over a range of true wireless earbuds, said the company Wednesday. The true wireless earbud category is entering a new era that will bring new use cases and features to products in all tiers, said James Chapman, general manager-voice, music and wearables. Use cases made possible by the new SoC are audio sharing from one smartphone to multiple wireless listeners, voice service support, adaptive active noise cancellation, 96 kHz audio resolution and support for Qualcomm’s aptX Voice and cVc echo cancellation and noise suppression technologies. The QCC305x SoCs will also support the forthcoming Bluetooth Low Energy Audio standard and offer improved connectivity and power optimization, said the company.

Gokhale Method received FCC approval for its PostureTracker, a wearable sensor designed to alleviate back pain. The tracker, which comes with a wireless charging pad based on Energous’ WattUp charging technology, is expected to ship in Q1, Energous announced Tuesday. The two sensors charge simultaneously on the pad.

Q4 industry OLED panel revenue will increase 49% sequentially, reaching an all-time high of nearly $12 billion, projected Display Supply Chain Consultants Monday. The iPhone 12's later-than-expected release dates “depressed OLED panel shipment sales in Q3 and accelerated sales in Q4,” said DSCC. Q3 OLED panel revenue totaled $8 billion, down 3.3% from the 2019 quarter, but DSCC’s Q4 OLED revenue forecast of $11.9 billion would be up 46% from Q4 2019. The “pattern” of OLED panel revenue is “heavily weighted by smartphones, by far the largest application” for OLED technology in monetary terms, it said. Q3 OLED smartphone revenue was down 9% from a year earlier with the iPhone launch delay, but a 51% Q4 revenue increase to $9.8 billion is expected.

Hyundai will pay SoftBank $1.1 billion for an 80% interest in mobile robotics firm Boston Dynamics, said the companies Friday. SoftBank will keep a 20% interest through one of its subsidiaries, they said. Hyundai said the acquisition will be “another major step” toward its “strategic transformation” into a smart mobility solution provider. Hyundai “has invested substantially in development of future technologies,” including autonomous driving and vehicle connectivity, it said. The transaction is expected to close by June, said Hyundai and SoftBank.

Twenty-one CES 2021 exhibitors plan half-hour news conferences Jan. 11, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, said CTA’s Media Day schedule released Thursday. Hisense, Intel/Mobileye and Sony have their time slots to themselves, but the others will need to compete with one or two companies with events scheduled concurrently. “Top exhibitors will break news to a media-only audience, just as they would normally do at CES Media Days in Las Vegas,” said CTA. Media Day news conferences at the physical Las Vegas show typically run 45 minutes each, not 30. CES 2021 listed 862 exhibitors as signed on through midday Thursday, up from 806 a day earlier. CTA said 4,400 exhibitors participated in the physical CES 2020 January in Las Vegas.

True wireless designs were 45% of Q3 headphone shipments, but supply side issues with Bluetooth chips inhibited availability of new models, leaving brands to delay product launches until 2021, reported Futuresource. Global headphone shipments grew 19% year on year following two quarters of decline. True wireless featured in most new product launches, covering a range of price points. The $50-$99 segment is “highly competitive and overcrowded,” analyst Adriana Blanco said Tuesday.

After staking a commanding lead in the true wireless earbud category with two versions of in-ear AirPods ($159 and $249), Apple took an old-school turn with Tuesday’s announcement of the $549 AirPods Max over-ear headphones. AirPods Max have an Apple H1 chip built into each ear cup and use “computational audio” from the chips’ 10 audio cores -- capable of 9 billion operations per second -- to provide adaptive equalization, active noise cancellation, a transparency mode and spatial audio, said the company. It didn’t respond to questions on whether it’s continuing to develop the company's Beats by Dre headphones line.

Investcorp will sell German consumer cybersecurity company Avira to NortonLifeLock for about $360 million in a transaction expected to close in Q1, said the institutional investment firm Monday (see also personals section, this issue). Buying Avira will speed NortonLifeLock’s expansion in Europe and emerging markets and gives it access to more than 30 million "active" devices, it said.

“Rapid recovery” in the semiconductor industry “appears to be stressing significant portions of the supply chain,” said Marvell Technology Group CEO Matt Murphy on a fiscal Q3 investor call Thursday. “These supply challenges are currently limiting our ability to fully satisfy the increase in demand for some of our networking products.” Marvell’s quarter ended Oct. 31. Marvell customarily enters every quarter with “a fairly steady level of delinquency,” defined as the volume of orders on hand that it “can't supply within the quarter,” he said. “Heading into Q4, that number is significantly larger than we've had.” That Marvell customers are adapting to the constraints by placing “longer lead times on us” is only exacerbating the delinquency, said Murphy. The stock closed 4.7% lower Friday at $43.38. When Marvell talks to its supply-chain partners, “there is an anticipation that certainly within the first quarter or two in calendar '21, that we will see some improvements there,” said Murphy. It’s forecasting $785 million in revenue for Q4 ending early February, plus or minus 5%. Marvell would end the quarter up 9% from the year earlier at the midrange of that guidance. Revenue in Marvell’s networking business in Q3 was $445 million, up 10% sequentially from fiscal Q2 and 35% from the year-earlier quarter, said Murphy. Q3 was Marvell’s fifth-straight quarter of sequential revenue growth in 5G, he said. In the fiscal first half, Marvell’s application-specific IC business drove much of the 5G growth, “benefiting from the rapid deployments in China,” he said. Though the wireless infrastructure ASIC business remained strong in Q3, “the sequential growth was driven primarily by standard and semi-custom product shipments to Samsung,” he said. 5G rollout outside China “is starting to pick up,” said Murphy. “We expect consumer demand for 5G services will continue to grow worldwide,” especially following the launch of new Apple 5G phones, he said. If Qualcomm's forecast comes to pass that 500 million 5G-enabled smartphones will ship globally next year, “I think that's going to drive a lot of demand for networks,” he said. Marvell’s 5G customer base “continues to expand,” said Murphy. A second regional 5G infrastructure customer picked Marvell's Octeon microprocessors to power its new 5G base stations, he said. The unnamed customer plans to “engage” with Marvell on a “variety” of radio access network architectures for 5G, including “emerging” open RAN initiatives. By adding ORAN and virtualized RAN capabilities to its existing 5G offerings, “Marvell will be the ideal semiconductor partner with a complete 5G platform capable of supporting all RAN architectures on a common hardware and software framework,” said Murphy. “This is a critical differentiator for Marvell,” he said. “Most 5G networks will have a complex hybrid architecture to support a diverse set of deployment scenarios.”