HMRC guidelines likely to affect contractors

HMRC and what we must disclose

Due to new HMRC guidelines introduced in April this year, we as an agency need to now report quarterly gross payments being made to any limited company or umbrella company contractors who work with a client through IC Resources. This is the same for all agencies within the UK and if you are currently working with IC Resources you will have already been contacted for information that we now need to have on record in preparation for these audits.

How will the regulations help HMRC?

The regulations will provide HMRC with information that will enable it to decrease false self-employment and abuse of offshore working.  This will help HMRC to:

• support intermediaries that comply
• penalise intermediaries that don’t comply
• make sure the right tax and National Insurance is paid by people working through intermediaries
• reduce unfair commercial advantage

For more information on the guidelines, please read this HMRC article.

There is obviously some concern from contractors as to how this will affect them and what this means long term for contractors and protecting their business finances. Essentially only time will tell as to how this information may shape new guidelines and contractor legislation in future, however in the short term, the onus is on the recruitment agencies to provide this information, and as long as your tax deductions are in-line with financial regulations and are seen as a true contractor, there is no need for any concern.

If you have any questions about contracting, please do contact us.

DANE SMITH

PRINCIPAL CONTRACTS CONSULTANT

#recruitment #contractingjobs #electronicengineeringjobs #HMRC

Semicon 9-11 October 2012

Last week (9-11 October 2012) the Manufacturing Division of IC Resources attended Semicon in Dresden.  Semicon is the leading forum for semiconductor and microelectronics manufacturing in Europe.

Although the main exhibitor part of the show has been decreasing over the years, the vibe was still up-beat with companies producing growth and expansion plans.

New contacts and clients were made for the IC Group among IC manufacturing engineers and managers, with new connections forged throughout Europe.

Dresden and Saxony has become a major growth area for semiconductor manufacturing industry and is continuing to promote itself with new companies emerging.

The highlight once again, of course, coming from the Scottish Development International stand with the infamous Scottish Whisky Reception on Wednesday evening!

For more information on Semicon, please see their website http://www.semiconeuropa.org/

No Wires Anywhere

Will we one day live in a world with no wires? Well, that’s a long way off, but there’s currently huge demand in Europe vis a vis jobs for IC and systems designers with RF expertise. RF IC Design engineers and RF System of Board level designers are sought after by companies in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Ireland, with a particular spike in demand within the UK.

This demand springs from a number of industry trends merging around RF issues. LTE is nascent, smart grids and new health innovations demand remote or wireless monitoring, and the automotive industry wants to hook up cars to networks while they’re “on the go”. All these, and many other, applications need new RF solutions and can be vastly improved by more integrated chips.

This is good news for RF companies, and of course the test platform companies down the line. Unfortunately the number of people studying RF has been too low for too long – it’s a challenge to find people in Europe to do RF development who don’t need a work permit. To ensure these key jobs don’t go overseas, we need creative ways of attracting new employees – some of these need government cooperation!

IC Resources is a recruitment company placing semiconductor professionals with IC companies worldwide, with a focus on UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Benelux, Italy, Spain, etc. Areas covered include RF IC design jobs, analogue and mixed signal  IC design jobs, ASIC design and verification jobs, test and product IC engineering jobs, semiconductor equipment engineering jobs, IC sales jobs (account manager to VP), IC marketing and business development jobs, semiconductor FAE jobs, and executive roles (VP IC engineering, VP IC Operations, etc).

Goal-Line Technology Approved

Goal-Line Technology to be First Used in December

IC Resources is a recruitment consultancy providing jobs in the semiconductor industry. With the IFAB approval of goal-line technology, IC Resources looks at the candidates and asks: will there be any more “improvements” to the beautiful game?
With no small part played by FIFA President Sepp Blatter, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the game’s lawmakers, finally answered the calls for goal-line technology. At the meeting in Zurich, the IFAB members gave the green light to two of the proposed systems: Hawk-Eye and GoalRef.

The fact that there are two competing systems that have been approved should help keep costs down, but smaller clubs are worried about how they will afford to implement the technology.

Hawk-Eye is a system that is already familiar to fans of tennis and cricket. It uses a system of six high speed cameras that can accurately triangulate the position of the ball, with a margin of error of 3.6 millimetres. If the ball crosses the line, that information is sent to the referee’s wristwatch via an encrypted radio signal within one second.

GoalRef features a magnetic field on and behind the goal-line, with a corresponding microchip implanted in the ball itself. If there is any change in the magnetic field the chip reports it back to the referee, again within one second as per the requirements of the IFAB.

There were other contenders in the running. Cairos GLT also used a magnetic field and a sensor suspended inside the ball. It proposed having a grid of thin electrical wires buried in the penalty box and behind the goal-line. The sensor measures the magnetic grid and sends information to a computer which decides whether or not the ball has crossed the line, relaying the information to the referee.

Goalminder is a simpler system. This has high speed cameras built into the posts and crossbar recording 2000 frames per second. The referee makes his decision based on visual evidence, which is relayed to him within 5 seconds, rather than the decision being made for him.

It was decided that goal-line technology would be first used in the World Club Cup which is being held in Japan, this December. A competition featuring the current European Champions Chelsea. There is an irony that won’t be lost on Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard; it was as an England player that one of the most obvious goals ever to be ruled-out was taken from him by the officials in the match against Germany, in Bloemfontein during the 2010 World Cup.

When Marko Devich of Ukraine had a much less obvious goal ruled out, playing against England in the recent European Championships, Sepp Blatter immediately tweeted his support for goal-line technology. He was noticeably much quieter after Lampard’s goal was dismissed two years before.

The technology, if it had been in place at Euro 2012, would have caused an injustice if the referee had given the goal because it wouldn’t have shown that Artem Milevskiy was offside when the ball was played to him in the build-up.

Michel Platini of UEFA has admitted scepticism of the use of technology in football. He advocates the use of the “fifth official”, another referee’s assistant behind the goal-line. It should be noted though, in the match between Ukraine and England there was a “fifth official”, yet he failed to spot the ball had crossed the line or that there was an offside.

Platini believes that the game is on a technological slippery slope. With the introduction of goal-line technology, how long will it be before there are calls for more systems to be put in place? For instance: video replays of tackles, video evidence of offsides; all interrupting the flow of play.

Human error can cost clubs millions of pounds in lost revenue if a bad decision causes relegation, or missing out on participation of cup competitions or European football. Yet what makes this game of ours so special is the amount of debate it instigates amongst its fans. Technology can take that element out of the game and it would be a little less special because of it.


How Semiconductors Changed the World

Semiconductors, Human Evolution & the History of the Personal Computer

For semiconductor jobs, IC Resources is the first choice for professionals looking for the next step in their semiconductor career.  IC Resources offer permanent and contract semiconductor jobs such as Semiconductor Equipment Engineers, Digital CAD Flow Developers, Analog/Mixed Signal IC Design Engineers, Field Application Engineers (FAE), Project Management and many more throughout the UK, Europe, USA and Asia Pacific.

There are many examples of inventions and discoveries that academics, theologians and philosophers point to and say that they are the great moments in the history of mankind: discovering fire, inventing the wheel, language, farming, organised religion, the printing press etc. Everybody has a different point of view on this subject. Yet a contender for the title of most important invention in recent times has to be the microprocessor. Without semiconductors there would be no microprocessors, without microprocessors there would be no personal computers, laptops or tablets, no embedded systems providing digital control of appliances and industrial processes, and no mobile phones.

Before the microprocessors incorporated entire CPUs, computer processors had to be built using small and medium scale integrated circuits often containing hundreds of transistors all soldered onto printed circuit boards, several boards would then be interconnected on a chassis. The speed at which these early computers could operate was limited by the distance that signals had to travel between the integrated circuits on the boards. The computers themselves were huge, filling rooms; they were expensive to produce and therefore to buy; they used a lot of electricity to operate and thus produced a tremendous amount of heat. All of these factors made them prohibitive to individual ownership; they were owned and operated by large corporations, governments and universities.

These giants were not personal computers, there would be several terminals hooked into the mainframe or the end user's requests were filtered through operating staff. Computers became more personal with the introduction of the minicomputer such as the LINC and PDP-8 in the 1960s, but these were still roughly the size of a fridge and would cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy.

Then in the early 1970s everything changed with the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004, and with the introduction of the Kenback signalling the birth of the personal computer. Suddenly the computer could run quicker, was smaller, there were less connections meaning less could go wrong making it more efficient, they were cheaper to produce which pushed the cost of purchasing the PC down. From then on, everybody could afford to own and run a computer and that is why nearly every home in the UK has one today.

This has had a revolutionary effect on the way people live their daily lives, conduct business, learn and, most importantly, enjoy global communication and social interaction; the world has become a community. It is a leap in human evolution that cannot be underestimated in its importance and, when people in the future look back at the history of mankind, this era of technological renaissance could possibly be viewed as our most pivotal moment.

For semiconductor jobs and semiconductor recruitment services visit IC Resources.

Semiconductor Counterfeit Could Cost More than Money

Semiconductor counterfeiting means substandard parts flooding the market

Semiconductor counterfeits account for two out of every three counterfeit electronic components reported; as the semiconductor industry’s leading recruitment partner, IC Resources looks at the repercussions and rising cost of semiconductor counterfeiting.

Data gathered by Market Research Company IHS iSuppli shows that last year saw the number of reports of counterfeit electronic components rise significantly, in fact these reports have tripled in the last two years, with reports of counterfeit components in more than 100 types of device. Of these counterfeit parts, 66% were made up of five types of semiconductor: analogue ICs (integrated circuits), microprocessors, memory ICs, PLDs (programmable logic devices) and transistors, posing an annual risk of around $169billion (£106bn) for the global electronics supply chain.

According to Rory King, Director of Supply Chain Product Marketing at IHS, “The excessive cost of rework, repair, and customer returns for component failures is significant. For the global electronics supply chain, tackling the problem of counterfeit and fraudulent components has become an issue of paramount importance."

It is not just a concern in terms of money though, Analogue ICs alone make up 25% of counterfeit components reported, they are a component used in a wide variety of applications both military and commercial, and they can be found in everything from industrial and automotive devices to computers and consumer electronics. Each one of these five types of semiconductor can be found in military and commercial situations. Industrial users such as aviation, medical, military, automotive and nuclear are, in all probability, relatively minor consumers of counterfeit semiconductors but a consumer all the same. The risk to everyday consumer electronics may be nothing more than an annoying lack of reliability: a crashed computer or the loss of signal on a mobile phone; when you are considering the risk of failure to a component in a military application, or in the nuclear, medical, aerospace or automotive industries, then you are considering a possible catastrophe.

More stringent regulations should be put in place to combat this situation, something that was addressed in the US defence industry by an act signed by President Obama at the end of 2011. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 ensures that those involved at every level of its global defence supply chain “implement processes and systems to analyse, assess and act on counterfeit and suspect counterfeit parts.”

Semiconductor counterfeiting is big business; these components often appear in the form of cheap but convincing looking fakes which can sometimes be hard to differentiate from the real thing. Or they are the real thing; they can be salvaged rejects from the original manufacturers. In either case they are substandard parts that do not meet quality requirements and cannot be expected to operate to the same standard as the originals.

IC Resources is the leading recruitment consultancy serving the semiconductor industry, for an informal and confidential chat about any recruitment issue you wish to discuss, contact us now.

Semiconductor Recruitment: Global Semiconductor Industry Jobs from IC Resources

IC Resources is the Recruitment Partner for the Semiconductor Industry

The semiconductor industry is one of the fastest moving and most important markets in the world today. It is the technology enabler and key driver for economic growth behind the $5tn electronics industry. Therefore, recruitment for semiconductor industry jobs has to be handled by experts; IC Resources are the experts when it comes to semiconductor recruitment offering semiconductor jobs such as Semiconductor Equipment Engineers, Digital CAD Flow Developers, Analog/Mixed Signal IC Design Engineers, Field Application Engineers (FAE), Project Management and many more throughout the UK, Europe, USA and Asia Pacific.

Part of the multi-portfolio Intellectual Capital (IC) Group, IC Resources is Europe’s largest and longest serving semiconductor recruitment firm, with specialist USA and China consultants and an extensive Asia Pacific partner network, IC Resources have the necessary contacts within the semiconductor industry. Their overriding aim is “to be an integral, valued member of the semiconductor community, rather than an external supplier sitting on the fringes of industry.”

Semiconductor Industry Enables Electronics Industry Growth
Since the 1960’s, when the semiconductor industry grew up, there has been a constant need for innovation and flexibility as the electronics industry empires grew at a staggering rate, nothing stands still for very long in the microelectronics world; it seems that the newest device on the market is suddenly very old in a staggeringly short space of time. The electronics industry is reckoned to account for around 10% of the entire world GDP! The driving force behind this behemoth is the semiconductor industry because, put simply, without semiconductors there would be no modern electronics.

Semiconductor Recruitment
This constantly shifting market means that firms around the world need to recruit the best and brightest candidates to keep up with the myriad innovations which continue unabated. The first stop on this search for the best possible candidate should be the IC Resources, recognised as the No.1 recruitment agency for semiconductor jobs. Clients can be assured of top quality candidates because the consultants themselves are top quality; many of the consultants have joined the firm directly from the semiconductor industry, giving them vital hands-on experience and insight into what the ideal candidate should offer.

IC Resources should be the first place candidates looking for jobs in the semiconductor industry visit because they can boast specialist U.S. and China consultants and an extensive Asia Pac partner network, because they are living up to the stated aim of being the semiconductor industry’s de facto recruitment partner, and ultimately because IC Resources builds strong, lasting relationships with the very best candidates and the very best clients the semiconductor industry has to offer and puts them together.

For an informal and confidential chat about any recruitment issue you wish to discuss, contact us now.