EET-i Top of the News

Week of Jan. 9, 1995

Thursday, Jan. 12, 1995

TCSI signs two licensees for new DSP core
Computer industry hones `user friendliness' at CES
Davic preps reference model
Siemens, GDC forge ATM deal
British Telecom, Viag in venture

Wednesday, Jan. 11, 1995

TI economist: Rising interest rates could imperil '96 economy
Samsung grabs majority stake in IgT
Growth seen in multimedia
NeoCad supports Actel, TI
Hitachi eyes NT-based network for EDA

Tuesday, Jan. 10, 1995

EE Times to host interactive satellite-TV ESDA conference
Quantum wells can be used for bistable logic
Opti solves heat problem to create Pentium notebook chip set
Casio gives fresh picture of videophone, digital camera
PADS upgrades pc-board tools

Monday, Jan. 9, 1995

More players fielding voice recognition systems
EDA industry shaken further by IBM retrenchment
BiCMOS tempts Motorola to buy Alpha fab
Sun considers an asynchronous Sparc
Thomas Jefferson, Newt go on-line

TCSI signs two licensees for new DSP core

By Ashok Bindra

BERKELEY, Calif. -- Taking a belated plunge into the DSP-core licensing business, digital-signal-processing software vendor TCSI Corp. has signed on two major licensees in Asia for its new low-power DSP engine, or Lode, the company has announced.

One is Anam Semiconductor & Technology Co. Ltd. (Seoul, South Korea), which will use the Lode core to develop ASIC chips for telecommunications applications. The other is a Japanese semiconductor maker that TCSI (formerly Teknekron Communications Systems) would not identify.

"The Lode architecture marks a new phase in the design of DSP chips," said Gary Kelson, senior vice president and general manager of TCSI's Personal Communications Group, here. Unlike general-purpose DSP cores, he said, Lode was tailored to implement quickl y and efficiently algorithms such as voice compression, channel coding, modulation and filtering.

The first ASIC to result from the agreement between TCSI and Anam will be a chip set for the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) market, said Anam president Stephen M. Kim.

Computer industry hones `user friendliness' at CES

By Rick Boyd-Merritt and Junko Yoshida

LAS VEGAS -- Efforts to convince consumers that there's more to technology than the remote control got a new twist at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, here, earlier this week. As Microsoft Corp. took the wraps off its "social interface"--a graphical user interface (GUI) named "Bob" that features cartoon characters instead of icons and menus--the buzz on the show floor centered on new concepts in user interface designs.

A handful of other companies--including AT&T, Packard Bell and an alliance of Sun Microsystems and Thomson Consumer Electronics--had interface entries of their own. At stake is the shape of home electronics devices of the future, as hardware and software vendors strive to find the right level of interactivity to lure the technology-shy.

In Bob--which sits atop Windows and lets users toggle to that program at any time--a cat, parrot or other friendly critter offers assistance in a series of colorful, on-screen "rooms" that represent basic aspects of the program, such as word processing and e-mail.

Microsoft announced that several OEMs, including Gateway 2000, Micron and NEC Technologies, will bundle Bob with their home PCs. The package will also be sold beginning in March for $99 retail.

Packard Bell showed a 3-D version of the Navigator from software house Ark Interfaces. Like Bob, the 3-D Navigator moves users through various rooms of a house to reach different functions. Soon to be added is a living room, where users will manipulate a TV, telephone ans wering machine, fax and stereo.

Another interface, Media Pilot, developed in-house for Compaq Computer Corp.'s Presario line, uses a graphical phone and television to let users access those functions. The Houston PC maker uses yet another entry--TabWorks, from Xsoft--on other machines, and might also bundle Bob.

At CES, AT&T Consumer Products rolled out its "Sage" set-top box. It initially brings a visual display of voice messages to the TV and, ultimately, is intended to deliver fax, e-mail, banking and other services. Sage's interface, called Touchtone II, relies on nested, text-based menus of numbered choices and a standard TV remote-control device.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and Thomson Consumer Electronics Inc. showed Open TV, a set-top box with a run-time environment that can also reside in a media server. The interface is simple: an MTV-style logo and a simple icon that appear at the bottom corner of the TV screen. Instead of a lengthy menu, it gives a few basic interactive functiona lities that include home shopping, requesting information (from advertising sources) and video-on-demand.

Davic preps reference model

By Junko Yoshida

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The sputtering interactive-TV industry could get a jump-start here on Monday, when the Digital Audio-Visual Council (Davic) kicks off a weeklong series of meetings intended to craft an industry-standard reference model for interoperable digital interactive applications and services.

"This is going to be a key meeting," said Robert Luff, chief technology officer of broadband communications group at Scientific-Atlanta Inc. Draft "strawmen" defining interfaces and protocols across networks, servers and set-top units will be presented for the first time at the meeting to Davic's international membership.

Davic received 80 responses to its first call for proposals and also reviewed existing specs and standards man aged by the International Telecommunications Union, ATM Forum and Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The council's technical committees sorted through the proposals and assembled skeleton specs.

In its request for proposals, Davic identified 17 "critical interfaces," including software/logical interfaces, physical interfaces and signaling protocols between such entities as content providers and value-added-service providers (VASPs); application-programming interfaces/set-top units (ASPs/STUs) and VASPs; management/operating systems and delivery services; network interface units (NIUs) and STUs; NIUs and transport services; VASP and VASP; and STUs and transport services.

Siemens, GDC forge ATM deal

MUNICH, Germany -- Siemens AG will serve as a global systems integrator for General DataComm Inc.'s (GDC; Middlebury, Conn.) line of public and private Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches. GDC's Apex switch family, picked up when GDC acquired NetComm Ltd., of Great Britain, has proven popular in the last two years in public-network applications, becoming a major part of GDC's business.

The link with Siemens's Public Communication Network Group could push the Apex architecture even further. Siemens recently formed an IMMX multimedia alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc. and Scientific-Atlanta to sell end-to-end ATM solutions to phone and cable companies, and the link with Siemens could put GDC's Apex in the center of those efforts.

British Telecom, Viag in venture

Munich, Germany -- British Telecommunications plc, the United Kingdom's dominant telecom operator, is forming a joint venture with Viag, one of Germany's top 10 industrial groups. The two companies will each own 37.5 percent of Viag InterKom KG, which, like Viag, will be based here. The remaining 25 percent will be o wned by as many as five other German partners.

The move is seen as an attempt to gain a key position ahead of deregulation of the German telecom market. At its current worth of $45 billion, the market is the largest in Europe.

For now, the state-owned Deutsche Telekom is the monopoly supplier of public voice services, but European Union directives decree the market must be opened to competition by Jan. 1, 1998. The German Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications has said that licenses could be awarded before 1998 if there is evidence that new networks would introduce technical innovation.

Viag InterKom plans to offer private voice and data services to national and international business customers in April and eventually seek a license to offer a full range of services, including public voice.

Viag is already present in the German telecommunications market through a subsidiary called Telekommunikation Gesellschaft fur Betrieb & Dienstleistung. The new company will also have acce ss to 4,000 kilometers of optical fiber owned by a sister company within the Viag group, Bayernwerk AG, a Bavarian electric utility.

TI economist: Rising interest rates could imperil '96 economy

By Brian Fuller

MONTEREY, Calif. -- After three years of robust growth that has regained for it the title of most productive country in the world, the United States could experience another recession next year, said Texas Instruments chief economist Vladi Catto.

Though 1995 should be an excellent year, he warned that too many interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve would strangle economic growth. Catto kicked off the annual International Strategy Symposium here earlier this week.

Catto coupled that scenario with a forecast that short-term interest-rate boosts of 0.50 to 0.75 percent that could come this month and next will help keep the economy from overheating. But anything more than that -- increases that could push the Fed discount rate to 8 percent or higher -- "will prompt a U.S. recession. It won't happen in 1995 but in 1996," Catto told about 300 attendees from the semiconductor-equipment and fab-management community.

Catto's model calls for the gross domestic product to grow a healthy 3.1 percent in 1995 and then sag to 2.2 percent next year. That would be accompanied by a capital-spending increase of 10.2 percent this year, dropping by 6.8 percent in 1996, he added.

"If enough of you worry about '96, we won't have a recession in 1996," he added.

Catto's comments came against a backdrop of whopping 42 percent revenue growth in the equipment industry, to $14.7 billion, in 1994, well beyond the most optimistic estimates of early in the year. Analysts credited the increase to the rise in demand for equipment thanks to new 8-inch fabs coming on-line around the world.

In his non-recession scenari o -- with no crippling interest-rate increases -- Catto foresees the gross domestic product rising 3 percent in 1995 and 2.8 percent in 1996. That compares with a better-than-expected 4 percent jump in 1994, the peak of the post-recession recovery so far and the best year in the United States economy since as far back as 1988.

In Europe, the economic recovery has been better than predicted. Output rose 2.9 percent last year and is expected to advance another 3.3 percent in 1995.

In Japan, the recovery continues slowly, and "there are substantial hurdles to be overcome." The yen should weaken to approximately 110 to 115 to the dollar, compared with the present 100, and the country's government, which has been unstable lately, must settle down.

Regarding China, Catto echoed increasingly mainstream concerns about the country's economy and the potential risks of doing business there. Inflation last year soared to nearly 25 percent -- 40 percent in Shanghai and Beijing. What's more, growth sl owed in 1994 to below 12 percent and should drop below 9 percent this year, he said.

Samsung grabs majority stake in IgT

By Loring Wirbel

GAITHERSBURG, Md. -- Samsung Electronics Co. (Seoul) last week made an $8.62 million equity investment in Integrated Telecom Technology Inc. (IgT), a startup that has gained a high profile in Asynchronous Transfer Mode ICs for Sonet transceiver and ATM switching functions. The investment gives Samsung majority ownership, said IgT president Ken Lee, and the right to increase its stake over the next five years up to 100-percent ownership.

The deal mirrors in some ways the means by which two other ATM startups, Pacific Microelectronics Centre Inc. and Base2 Systems Inc., were taken over by Sierra Semiconductor Inc. and Brooktree Corp., respectively. Samsung's investment in IgT leaves TranSwitch Corp. (Shelton, Conn.) as the last of the ATM IC ind ependents.

Lee of IgT said that Samsung has pledged to keep IgT running as a fully independent affiliate in the United States. IgT gains access to Samsung Semiconductor's foundry resources, but there is no deal so far to have Samsung Semiconductor second-source IgT products.

Growth seen in multimedia

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Worldwide revenue for multimedia computing platforms will show steady growth from 1995 to 1999 before slipping slightly in 2000, predicts the research firm Frost & Sullivan. During that period, the researchers said, the concentration of revenue will shift from PCs to workstations. The forecasts were contained in a report on "World Multimedia Hardware and Software Markets."

According to the study, platform revenue will jump from $5.72 billion in 1995 to $13.08 billion in 1999. By 2000, revenue will fall back to $12.65 billion as prices for such platforms dec rease. Meanwhile, the bulk of multimedia platform sales will shift from PCs to workstations.

What will account for the change? PC multimedia platforms will be cheaper and so represent a smaller percentage of platform revenue and power users of multimedia will move on to more powerful machines.

The study concludes that by the end of the decade most computer platforms should include multimedia elements and that those elements will likely be integrated on the motherboard, or included as add-on components.

NeoCad supports Actel, TI

By Richard Goering

BOULDER, Colo. -- By adding support for antifuse devices from Actel and Texas Instruments, NeoCad Inc. has taken a big step toward becoming a provider of truly universal FPGA layout tools. Also, seeking to expand its market, NeoCad has reconfigured its entire product line, dropping prices on a single-vendor system to as low as $9 95.

Though device independence has always been a stated goal of NeoCad, the company has so far focused primarily on Xilinx support, with the recent addition of SRAM architectures from AT&T and Motorola. In its FPGA Foundry release 7 slated for this quarter, NeoCad will add support for the Actel Act-2 device and for its second source, the TI TPC12.

Support for other Actel-family devices will follow. While Xilinx dominates the FPGA marketplace, Actel is the second-ranked supplier.

Hitachi eyes NT-based network for EDA

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- An IC design network based on personal computers and the kanji -capable version 3.5 of the Windows NT operating system is being developed together by Intergraph Corp. and Hitachi Ltd.'s Technology Development Operation.

James Meadlock, Intergraph's founder and CEO, said the two will create the network, supporting 500 to 700 seats for Hitachi semiconductor designers, by the end of 1996. Intergraph also may supply the specially configured Intel-based hardware.

Toshiaki Masuhara, general manager of the Technology Development Operation at Hitachi, said Hitachi's plans are being driven by a cost-savings push. "Right now we use workstations, mainframes and supercomputers. But if we use NT running on lower-cost personal computers, we will have more money to spend on software, for more seats."

Hitachi will use an FDDI-based network to connect the new design network to its existing EWS-based design teams.

The current thinking at Hitachi is to use a Windows NT client-server architecture to integrate Intergraph-supported design tools and Hitachi proprietary tools for certain portions of its 0.5-micron IC designs. Hitachi's long-range plan is to finish quickly the first generation of the Hitachi ASIC design framework (called FFF for Fast, Friendly and Flexible), which is based on Unix, and then develop a second -generation tool suite that would operate on NT-based networks.

EE Times to host interactive satellite-TV ESDA conference

MANHASSET, N.Y. -- Electronic Engineering Times, along with cosponsors Mentor Graphics and Hewlett-Packard, will host an interactive conference on Jan. 26 that will explore the status and future of Electronic Systems Design Automation (ESDA). The conference will be televised via satellite to about 40 locations in the United States. Attendance is free.

Panelists participating in the broadcast include:

Richard Wallace, editor in chief, EE Times;

Richard Goering, senior EDA editor, EE Times;

Mark Noneman, system architect/CAD manager, TRW;

Bill Dittenhofer, senior engineer, Storage Technology;

Rita Glover, industry analyst, EDA Today.

The broadcast will als o provide four ESDA users' perspectives on the system-design requirements of the computer and telecommunications industries. The perspectives will come from AT&T, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard's Computer Division and Italian radar-communications company Alenia Spazio.

Register by calling (800) 274-0924 or by sending an e-mail message with Your Full Name, Company, Address and Phone Number to annaleonard@kvo.com. We will then reserve a space at the location nearest you.

Quantum wells can be used for bistable logic

By Chappell Brown

NOTRE DAME, Ind. -- While circuit designers look forward to ever smaller, faster transistors, at some point the inability of wires to scale down with the devices will force a radical shift in fundamental circuit-design principles.

Today's circuit designers may find it difficult to imagine a design methodology without wires, but theorists at the Unive rsity of Notre Dame have devised a digital-logic scenario for that eventuality: the Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) model, which easily could be implemented with sub-0.1-micron technology. Surprisingly, the methodology would not be much different from designing with current field-programmable gate arrays.

By solving the equations governing an array of five one-dimensional quantum wells, Craig Lent, Douglas Tougaw and Wolfgang Porod at Notre Dame's department of electrical engineering discovered that the system could operate in a strongly bistable mode. That discovery alone signaled a breakthrough; previously, researchers could not find any bistable mode for quantum-level devices that would be robust enough for logic design.

Bistable logic is created by trapping two electrons in an array of five one-dimensional quantum wells. The electrons are free to tunnel between corner and center wells but lack the energy to leave the cell itself. Because the electrons repel one another, only two stable confi gurations are possible.

Opti solves heat problem to create Pentium notebook chip set

By Ron Wilson

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- A Pentium CPU, a PCI bus and a fast synchronous cache might seem an odd formula for a winning notebook computer. After all, the Pentium -- even the 3.3-V, P54C incarnation -- is more famous for generating heat than for conserving power. The Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus still lacks a clearly defined 3.3-V version and has virtually no provision for power management. And a synchronous SRAM cache clocked at 66 MHz sounds like a battery eater for sure.

Yet that unlikely configuration is exactly the target respected core-logic vendor Opti Inc. has chosen for its latest chip set, the Viper-N. The central problem is, of course, the CPU. The P54C processor is fast, but no one has accused it of being miserly. In fact, in the limited airflow typical of notebo ok-computer housings, the chip could well damage itself with its own heat. Active CPU thermal management is a necessity.

Opti has attacked the problem with a version of the circuitry designed for its 486 core logic. It includes full support for Pentium's System Management Interrupt (SMI); clock throttling, to make on-the-run trade-offs between execution speed and power dissipation; and hardware to estimate CPU-die temperature.

In essence, the core logic estimates, based on recent activity, how hot the CPU probably has become. When the estimate starts creeping up toward the danger zone, the core logic reduces the clock frequency a bit, transparently to the user. The logic also provides for a temperature probe, replacing estimates with actual case-temperature measurements.

Casio gives fresh picture of videophone, digital camera

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

LAS VEGAS -- Offering a diffe rent picture of the videophone, Casio Computer Co. Ltd. showed a set-top box for sharing video frames, still images and graphics at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here earlier this week. The LT-70P videophone fit in well with the conservative product trend at CES, where vendors generally focused on near-term opportunities in the convergence of the telephone, television and computer.

Separately, Casio (Tokyo) showed a $700 digital still camera that links to a personal computer and has a built-in liquid crystal display.

Both products are based on Hitachi's SH-1 32-bit RISC CPU.

The Casio set-top is designed to use analog phone lines. However, rather than push the limits of the video frame rates possible over plain old telephone service (POTS) lines, the product focuses on sending up to four images with interleaved sound.

The Casio set top can send one full screen image or as many as four images on a screen split into quadrants or using a picture-in-picture display. The sy stem transmits low-resolution images of 128 by 112 pixels with 8-bit color depth and a 3.5-second delay. High-resolution images of 512 by 224 pixels have 8-bit color depth with delays of 30 seconds.

To smooth the jerky flow of refreshed images as much as possible, the LT-70P uses software to control the image-compression rate dynamically, so that images are refreshed evenly. Audio streams are unbroken during image transmission. The set-top unit uses a 14.4-kbit/second modem and transmits images and audio at an average rate of 7 kbits/s.

PADS upgrades pc-board tools

By Richard Goering

MARLBORO, Mass. -- Edging closer into territory held by expensive workstation-based tools, PADS Software has upgraded its PADS-Perform tool set into PowerPCB, which is claimed to establish new functionality for low-cost tools. PowerPCB offers such improvements as shape-based editing, an open object-orie nted database and an expanded set of design constraints.

Available on both Unix and Windows platforms, PowerPCB is priced starting at $7,740. It's aimed at what PADS president Richard Finegan calls the "mainstream" market, which includes design engineers and CAD designers currently using Unix-based systems.

PADS is seeing a strong migration to Windows from expensive Unix-based tools, said product-marketing manager Rich Almeida. "The level of tools has improved, and the processing power of PCs is equivalent to Unix, for the most part. The cost of maintenance on existing Unix EDA systems is incredibly high."

One feature of many Unix-based tool sets is constraint-driven layout -- an area in which PowerPCB adds new functionality compared with PADS-Perform.

"We've rewritten the design-rule database so that now we can support rules for layers, classes, nets and pin pairs. We can support high-speed properties as well as conditional rules," Almeida noted.

More players fielding voice recognition systems

By Ron Wilson and Junko Yoshida

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- As algorithms improve and demand increases for voice-actuated user interfaces, major semiconductor vendors are preparing to enter the voice-recognition market. And right up front is Oki Semiconductor, which trotted out a turnkey voice-recognition chip last week and is poised to announce a second product.

But at least one software source claims that it's just those algorithm advances -- by allowing the recognition job to be done on a microcontroller or as a software task on a personal computer -- that could limit the need for dedicated recognition hardware.

Whether or not that's the case, at least two major markets are emerging for voice-recognition products: voice-actuated consumer electronics -- particularly hands-free cellular telephones -- and voice-controlle d user interfaces to personal computers.

The first requires recognition of a strictly limited number of words, generally mapping directly into the command set of such products as cellular-phone devices. The second, voice interfaces, caters to PC users who can't use a mouse or are put off by command strings. Clearly, a segment of this second market overlaps the first: mobile computers that must be used in a nearly hands-free way.

EDA industry shaken further by IBM retrenchment

By Brian Fuller and Richard Goering

BURBANK, Calif. -- Beset by disappointing financial results and acquisition rumors, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry has been shaken further by IBM Corp.'s decision to reconsider its 18-month-old foray into the business.

IBM has stopped distributing its tools through its Altium subsidiary and is reassessing distribution strategy, but that is only the latest in a series of jolts to the EDA community's confidence.

Other developments included a dive in Viewlogic's share price stemming from a precipitous shift in its 1995 earnings outlook and persistent industry reports that a leading low-end CAE software vendor may be the subject of acquisition discussions. Additionally, QuickTurn took a charge of $3.7 million for bad debt relating to two customers that failed to pay for emulation systems that QuickTurn booked in the June 1994 quarter.

David Cope, who heads the computer/semiconductor marketing group, declined to say precisely why IBM EDA was removed from Altium, but he noted, "If Altium was clicking well, we could have kept it."

BiCMOS tempts Motorola to buy Alpha fab

By Peter Clarke

SOUTH QUEENSFERRY, Scotland -- Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Sector is buying Digital Equipment Corp.'s wafer fab here and plans to make the site its worldwide center for BiCMOS manufacturing by 1996.

The two companies revealed late last year that a possible transfer of ownership was in the works for the fab. The companies now say the transfer will be completed by June. Terms were not disclosed.

Motorola has agreed to take on existing foundry contracts at the site for Digital's Alpha AXP RISC and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Am486 CMOS microprocessors. The deal will also give Motorola access to a Digital BiCMOS process, with which Motorola plans to produce devices down to 0.5 micron on 6-inch wafers.

Motorola expects to turn out BiCMOS ICs in volume at the plant for such markets as cellular and cordless telephones, hard-disk drives, advanced televisions and computer printers. According to Dataquest Europe, the fab is capable of about 20,000 six-inch-wafer starts a month. But Motorola said it has already committed to spending more than $30 million to expand production capacity at the site.

Sun considers an asynchronous Sparc

By Ron Wilson

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems is seriously investigating an asynchronous implementation of the Sparc architecture, sources close to the company told EE Times last week. The design, which is not expected to become a product any time soon, is reportedly being conducted by graphics-industry legend Ivan Sutherland.

An asynchronous chip would differ from existing Sparc implementations by not using clocks in critical circuitry. Instead of circuit operations proceeding lock-step, in response to a global clock signal, asynchronous circuits are self-timed -- they begin to operate when new data arrives at their inputs, and they halt at the end of each computation. Thus, data trickles through a pipeline, taking the actual time required for each pipeline stage. In contrast, each stage in a synchronous pipeline must have the same delay, since each is clocked by the same glob al clock.

Asynchronous advocates have proposed several important advantages for such self-timed circuitry. In theory, an asynchronous CPU should be able to get more work done in a given time than a synchronous CPU implemented on the same die. That is because fast operations are not penalized by the need to wait for the slowest element on the chip to be clocked. Similarly, asynchronous chips should be much less sensitive to temperature and voltage changes, since changes in stage delays cannot lead to setup or hold-time violations. And asynchronous circuits should consume significantly less power than synchronous circuits, since clocks tend to consume huge spikes of current but do little actual computing work.

Thomas Jefferson, Newt go on-line

WASHINGTON -- With the help of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the Library of Congress launched its Thomas on-line servic e Thursday. The service is named for Thomas Jefferson, who first stocked the library's shelves with his own book collection nearly 200 years ago.

While the Library of Congress already has its own Internet home page, Gingrich and Librarian of Congress James Billington said Thomas will be the first service using a World Wide Web server dedicated to the inner workings of Congress. Gingrich, a passionate supporter of information technology, predicted Thomas would empower users by providing direct access to legislative documents unfiltered by a "cynical" media.

By the end of January, Thomas will offer complete texts of legislation before the 104th Congress along with the status of bills, committee hearing schedules, a tutorial on how bills become law and copies of the hundreds of press releases members crank out every week. Thomas will also serve as a bridge to the library's other on-line resources, such as its extensive collection of Civil War photographs.

Several Executive Branch operations have had a Web presence for months. Try the White House (if you have audio capability, don't miss Socks),

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