EET-i Top of the News
Week of Mar. 6, 1995
- Thursday, Mar. 9, 1995
 Altera ships biggest MAX CPLD
Maxoptix broadens focus to include desktop
Higher speeds, new profiles expand Fiber Channel use
S3 adopts MPEG across entire lineup
Scorpio commits new ATM concepts to silicon
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- Wednesday, Mar. 8, 1995
- Four National chips define Fast Ethernet for cards, hubs
Pro sound set for PCs
SBE shifts to wide-area access systems
Brooktrout creates midrange line, enters LAN market
DVB-TV turns to PCMCIA for conditional access
- Tuesday, Mar. 7, 1995
- IBM pushes drives deeper into gigabyte range
Excitons may hold key to superconductivity
Software, not the user, learns
CAE Plus debuts multi-partitioning
Switched-based logic design powers NT server
- Monday, Mar. 6, 1995
- Pentium-like chips can be tested--but it's not easy
NeoMagic embeds DRAM in graphics chip
Fujitsu's Sparc Lite to be engine for PC-in-a-camera
Sharp's 8.4-inch TFT LCD needs
only 1 W
Cadence gets design team in service deal
Other news sources on Techweb:
Altera ships biggest MAX CPLD
By Ron Wilson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The leapfrog match for bragging rights in complex PLD capacity continued this week as Altera Corp. shipped the largest member of its MAX9000 family, hitting 560 macrocells. Altera rates the chip at 12,000 usable gates, seemingly well above the capacities of other announced complex PLDs and challenging the useful density of many FPGA f
amilies on some types of applications.
The chip offers 772 flip-flops in 560 logic macrocells plus 216 user I/O cells. In the familiar MAX9000 architecture, the logic cells are organized into 16-cell logic-array blocks (LABs). Each macrocell within the LAB contains a cluster of five product terms, which are routed through a steering matrix to a flip-flop, various outputs and feedback paths. Product terms may be allocated within a macrocell or within a LAB using a variety of expander techniques.
The LABs are dispersed through a lattice of vertical and horizontal long interconnect lines, which provide interconnect across the chip. In the fastest grade of the MAX9560, the row delay is 1.5 ns and the column delay is 1.7 ns -- significant from the perspective of lower-density CPLDs, but very competitive with average routing delays in FPGAs.
Maxoptix broadens focus to include desktop
By
Terry Costlow
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Maxoptix Corp. moved last week to broaden into the desktop market by introducing a low-cost, half-height 5.25-inch magneto-optic drive.
Maxoptix -- now owned solely by Kubota, which bought 65 percent of the company from co-owner Maxtor Corp. earlier this month -- has previously focused on high-end 5.25-inch drives used mainly in jukeboxes for library data retrieval. The new T4-1300 offers most of the performance of its high-end counterparts but costs substantially less.
"We think this will be the price leader for the industry," said Steve Slovenkai, product marketing manager. "This runs at about 80 percent the performance of the T3 line, but going to half-height and making other changes let it consume less energy."
Maxoptix is broadening its market approach at a time when some observers believe 5.25-inch M-O drives are going into eclipse. These rewritable drives offer far better performance than tape drives and have far more capacity than 3.5-i
nch drives, but unit shipments are far below the levels of either of those alternatives.
Higher speeds, new profiles expand Fiber Channel use
By Loring Wirbel
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) last week approved 2.134- and 4.26-Gbit/second speed rates for the Fiber Channel networking spec, officially known as X3.230.
The nod from ANSI should broaden the reach of Fiber Channel beyond its serial-channel routes into more-mainstream enterprise-networking applications, predicted Ed Frymoyer, Fiber Channel Systems Initiative (FCSI) program manager.
"Fiber Channel is the only scalable Gbit networking technology which is shipping in production right now," Frymoyer said. "We saw some 20,000 connections sold in 1994, roughly twice that of ATM connections for the same year."
One sign of Fiber Channel's maturity is the planned obsolescence o
f the FCSI, a special vendor initiative formed three years ago by Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
S3 adopts MPEG across entire lineup
By Junko Yoshida
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- S3 Inc. is scheduled to announce Monday its decision to provide MPEG solutions as a standard feature across its entire product line.
The graphics and video-acceleration-chip company will launch scalable MPEG video-decoding solutions ranging from a software-only MPEG decoder to S3's first dedicated MPEG accelerators that are "highly optimized for a PC environment," said Mike Nell, multimedia marketing director at S3.
The company is readying a software-only MPEG solution, called the S3 Native-MPEG, while planning to unveil within two months a PC application-focused hardwired MPEG device architecture.
For S3's Native-MPEG solution, the company licensed the rights to a cor
e driver from Xing Technology (Arroyo Grande, Calif.) more than a year ago.
Scorpio commits new ATM concepts to silicon
By Loring Wirbel
NEW YORK -- Scorpio Communications Inc., a new player in Asynchronous Transfer Mode switching silicon, has completed design on a scalable switching architecture that will sample later this year. The technology could revolutionize ATM switching, said Raphael Gidron, president of the New York City company, which grew out of the former SuperNet Communications.
Partitioning a portion of the design Scorpio calls its Port Interface Module Port, which handles all physical-layer and segmentation/reassembly functions will allow a better mix of interface speeds, ranging from 25-Mbit/second private and T3 public speeds up to Sonet rates of STS-12 (622 Mbits/s).
Scorpio also has developed implementation guidelines for OEMs that wish to incorporate m
ultiprotocol packet routing into an ATM switch, promoting the new hybrid architecture as a "swouter" (switch/router) platform.
Scorpio has defined a nonblocking switch array with an aggregate bus throughput of 640 Mbits/s. Where input and output buses cross each other, Scorpio has defined a junction module consisting of a quad-crosspoint-switch IC and a related cell-buffer SRAM.
This junction-based buffer architecture represents a compromise between output buffer and central distributed buffers for handling ATM cells. It allows one common switching fabric to handle ATM cells with a variety of different quality-of-service parameters and output-port destinations.
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Four National chips define Fast Ethernet for cards, hubs
By Loring Wirbel
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- National Semiconductor Corp. has announced early beta samples for four circuits that will provide full Fast Ethernet support for both network-interface cards (NIC) and intelligent hubs. The 100-Mbit 802.3 controller/transceiver sets support auto-negotiation features to determine the speed and medium of the network that the ICs are attached to -- no great surprise, given that the IEEE auto-negotiation standard is based on the National "Nway" algorithm it submitted to the 802.3 working group.
National is simultaneously introducing to distributors ISA and Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) "InfoMover" cards that use the chip sets in mixed 10- and 100-Mbit NIC implementations. Though Intel Corp. and Standard Microsystems Corp. (SMC) also intend to play at both the chip and board level, Intel has ye
t to provide chip-level spinoffs of its 596 LAN controller architecture. Meanwhile, SMC's board-level division has elected to use Digital Equipment Corp.'s controllers, rather than the Fast Ethernet controllers from SMC's own microelectronics unit, in many of its initial PCI boards.
Pro sound set for PCs
By Junko Yoshida
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- InVision Interactive Inc., a small company based here that creates sound samples for music professionals, is bringing its core technologies downstream, in a bid for a key role in the consumer multimedia market.
Leveraging the company's expertise developed for various synthesizers and keyboards on the professional market, the company plans to license its sound samples and audio-synthesis technologies to manufacturers of audio chips and sound cards.
InVision executives believe this initiative will help silicon and board-level manufactu
rers build wavetable-synthesis solutions with optimum sound quality, creating an opportunity to challenge Yamaha's domination of the PC sound market.
Moreover, InVision ultimately hopes to provide "a software-only synthesizer" that comes free on a PC, with no extra audio chips, according to G. Scott France, chairman and chief executive officer of InVision.
SBE shifts to wide-area access systems
By LorinG Wirbel
SAN RAMON, Calif. -- SBE Inc., known as a developer of VME and EISA boards for OEMs, undertook a dramatic shift this week to become a distributor- and reseller-oriented business. The company will offer self-contained WAN-access systems that leverage its board-level expertise for digital public network interfaces.
While SBE's board business will continue, the company has hired new staff from the likes of Telebit Corp. and 3Com Corp. to make the new NetXpand line th
e major part of its business.
SBE's target is the emerging "small-office/home-office" (Soho) market for wideband digital access. Like many other providers of desktop WAN access, SBE will use Motorola Inc.'s 68360 Quicc communications controllers to provide multiple-port WAN services on a motherboard.
Brooktrout creates midrange line, enters LAN market
By Michele Clarke
NEEDHAM, Mass. -- What do you do when corporate buyers overdesign their LANs with your telco-intended voice/fax boards because they've outgrown PC-grade products? If you're fax and voice-messaging house Brooktrout Technology Inc., you create a slimmed-down midrange line that retains some high-end software functions and leverage your reputation for reliability.
The privately held company, based here, recently announced its re-entry into the PC-based fax market with the first in a line of 14.4-kbit/second Tru
Fax multichannel fax boards. Intended for LAN fax, fax gateway and fax-on-demand systems, the boards are based on Brooktrout's popular TR series of voice/fax boards traditionally sold to service providers such as regional Bell operating companies.
Brooktrout hopes to fare better than Intel Corp., Hayes Microcomputer Products and other companies that have suffered setbacks in the PC-fax market. Brooktrout itself abandoned a 1987 foray into PC fax and Intel recently sold its fax-board line to PureData.
The company's edge, said Andrew O'Brien, vice president of business development, will be its rich suite of applications software and firmware developed for its high-end TR series that brings new functions to the midrange.
DVB-TV turns to PCMCIA for conditional access
By Peter Clarke
LONDON -- Europe's DVB, the digital TV effort, has inched closer to fruition as a group workin
g to set standards puts its money on PCMCIA modules rather than smart cards for conditional access.
The DVB (Digital Video Broadcast) project, based in Geneva, is creating standards around the MPEG video data format for satellite, cable and terrestrially transmitted digital television. A working group set up to determine the best means of supplying a conditional access system, primarily for services such as pay TV and video on demand, presented its draft proposal to a technical meeting last month and to a DVB steering committee on Tuesday.
David Cutts, a London-based communications consultant who works extensively with France Telecom, is chairman of the conditional-access working group. "We're not trying to define a standard pay-TV system, but rather a standard electrical, mechanical and protocol interface, which provides a common degree of connectivity between different conditional-access systems."
IBM pushes drives deeper into gigabyte range
By Terry Costlow
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- IBM Storage Products Co. is pushing deeper into Gbyte territory with its latest hard-disk drives. The company has introduced a 3.5-inch drive, designed for digital-video applications, that holds up to 5 Gbytes. At the same time, IBM pushed the capacity of 2.5-inch drives beyond 1 Gbyte, giving notebook designers as much storage as that of many desktops.
The drives also move data about 20 percent faster than competitive products, said Bill Pinkerton, drive brand manager for IBM.
While some drive makers have focused on the video-on-demand applications, coming out with 5.25-inch models that store 9 Gbytes and will be tied to video servers, IBM is going after digital-editing business.
Excitons may hold key to superconductivity
B
y Chappell Brown
MURRAY HILL, N.J. -- A new aspect of electron tunneling that could aid in the understanding of exotic phenomena such as the quantized Hall effect and high-temperature superconductivity has surfaced in a dual quantum-well system being studied at AT&T Bell Laboratories. The novel aspect of the experiment is the linked movement between electrons and holes separated by a thin insulating barrier, a new wrinkle on superconductivity that has never been observed before. Theorists speculate that the linked movement of electron pairs across insulating planes in the rare earth perovskites promotes high-critical-temperature superconductivity, but linked electrons and holes previously have never been observed.
Theorists believe that all types of superconductivity result from the linked movement of electrons, but so far only low-temperature superconductivity, created by the formation of linked "Cooper pairs" has been explained in this way. And without an accurate model of electron dynam
ics, the exploitation of high-critical-temperature superconductors has been limited by trial-and-error methods.
Software, not the user, learns
By R. Colin Johnson
PITTSBURGH -- NeuralWare Inc. announced a generation of software that learns from the historical data provided to it by users who have no knowledge of neural networks. Predict was designed for developers of applications that automatically employ statistically sound biological-like learning methods, but who don't wish to learn about neurobiology themselves.
The company claims that by following a short list of simple instructions, users can set Predict to the tasks of automatically massaging a user's data into a suitable format, creating a neural network and training it.
"We wanted a product that could build statistically sound neural networks using a reasonable methodology, but which did everything so automatically
that we could fit all the instructions on the label of the diskette," said company founder Casey Klimasauskas.
CAE Plus debuts multi-partitioning
By Richard Goering
AUSTIN, Texas -- Most high-level design and synthesis tools handle only one block or partition at a time. Now, with the latest version 1.2 release of ArchGen, an IC design tool from CAE Plus, users can design and verify multiple CPUs, register-transfer level (RTL) blocks or ICs, with each partition maintaining its own schedule.
ArchGen enables users to input behavioral descriptions using graphical icons or C language code. It provides C language-based simulation and animation, automatically schedules designs and generates synthesizable RTL code. However, it's not fully automatic behavioral synthesis because users have to explicitly map functions to hardware resources.
Prem Jain, president of CAE Plus, said that in
the new release, a partition is simply a set of instances controlled by a single state machine. Users can graphically assign datapath instances to multiple partitions, each with its own clock phase and frequency. "We are trying to address total system validation," said Jain.
Switched-based logic design powers NT server
By Michele Clarke
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- With an eye toward building large-scale Windows NT servers, Netpower Inc. on Monday announced a two-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) server based on its FastSwitch architecture. The company also revealed plans for midyear shipments of a hardware redundant array of independent disks (RAID) subsystem and Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and 100-Mbit/second Ethernet cards.
Down the road, promised chief executive officer Robert C. Miller, Netpower will field a multichannel SCSI controller w
ith memory-backed cache and a new network-management utility, called Netprotect, that officials said will complement the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the forthcoming portion of Microsoft's BackOffice. Netpower already offers a set of network-management utilities with its systems.
"This isn't the PC business; it's much more like the Unix system business," Miller said. "We're going to announce a new generation every year to 18 months, and we're finding that purchasing organizations want to cut a single purchase order. As long as we meet our financial models, we'll [design] as much of the system as makes sense."
Pentium-like chips can be tested--but it's not easy
By Stan Runyon
EE Times
was the first newspaper to report the the now-infamous bug in the Pentium microprocessor. Intel's response--and the aftermath--will b
e studied by business schools for decades to come. But what have engineers learned? This is the second of three parts.
The Pentium floating-point fiasco drove home the point that multimillion-transistor chips must be designed and tested with an unprecedented degree of thoroughness. Indeed, Intel's new P6 microprocessor may debut as the most thoroughly tested chip in CPU history.
Even so, designers entering the age of deep-submicron design are asking whether such chips are truly verifiable and testable. In the main, the answer is yes. But catching the flaws missed by functional testing, designers say, requires the combination of a multitude of techniques, from better simulation at the outset to tighter links between simulation and test, and the use of built-in self-test structures for design verification and debugging.
"The opportunities for correctness and testability go back to the design stage," said Lew Paceley, marketing director for the P6, who noted that almost half of the resou
rces for that 5.5-million-transistor part went into correctness and design-for-testability.
To meet goals for "rigor and thoroughness" in the face of the P6's increased complexity, Paceley said, Intel engineers concentrated on the design effort. They applied some static formal verification and made fundamental methodology changes--for instance, in the way signals were named, to identify associated clock phases immediately for the large number of internal units.
What about hardware emulation? "We do it," he replied, "but the vast bulk of operational anomalies are found at the behavioral-model level. As for manufacturing test, "it's way down the line in terms of determining correctness."
In the view of Ben Bennetts, a test consultant for Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), "Designing chips to be functionally testable is impossible." Is the only solution, then, known-to-be-good test programmers and adoption of a "no news is good news" philosophy? Bennetts believes so: "If you never hear f
rom the end user, you know you've got reasonable functional tests. Perhaps that's not satisfactory, but it's where we'll be until someone comes up with a theory of functional testing and a metric."
NeoMagic embeds DRAM in graphics chip
By Ron Wilson and Brian Fuller
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Startup NeoMagic Corp. today will unveil a graphics-controller chip for notebook computers that includes an embedded 1-Mbyte DRAM frame buffer. The NM2070, the company's initial product, appears to be the first chip to fold a large DRAM array into a logic IC for a high-volume product.
The design--which aims to bring desktop performance to the high-end, Windows-based mobile PC market--represents both a technical breakthrough and a market gamble, according to industry analysts. If the chip finds a price/performance niche, it could be a big hit. But if it is perceived as too costly, it could wind up re
legated to low-volume applications.
"In high-end mobile computing, you have a mix of needs--desktop performance, consumer ease of use, form factor and cost," said NeoMagic president and chief executive Prakash Agarwal. "These constraints create many opportunities to use our base technology of combining DRAM with logic. The graphics [chip] is just the first."
Fujitsu's Sparc Lite to be engine for PC-in-a-camera
By Junko Yoshida
LOS GATOS, Calif. -- A tiny startup that aims to bridge the gap between the PC and photography is pinning its hopes on a RISC processor as the brains for a point-and-shoot digital still camera it plans to sell for less than $500.
Sierra Digital Imaging Inc. is embedding Fujitsu Microelectronics' 32-bit MB86933H, or Sparc Lite, in its smart camera, which is scheduled to appear this year. The camera weighs 1.25 pounds and is small enough to fit in a coat
pocket.
The 11-person startup has also pulled off a strategic agreement with Sanyo Electric Co. for another key component: a 0.33-inch progressive-scan charge-coupled device (CCD). One of the funding partners for the company, Sanyo will mass-produce the camera on an OEM basis, according to sources close to the Japanese company.
The RISC processor supplies enough intelligence and computational power to capture, process, enhance and compress images in PC applications-ready files without using a personal computer, said Marc Roberts, vice president of marketing and sales at Sierra.
Sharp's 8.4-inch TFT LCD needs only 1 W
By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO -- Chasing that Holy Grail of flat-panel display technology--reduced power consumption--engineers at Sharp Corp. have figured out how to make an 8.4-inch thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) that requires only about 1 W to ope
rate.
Toshiba and NEC are in hot pursuit with their own low-dissipation designs: Toshiba has demonstrated a 9.5-inch video-graphics-array TFT prototype that consumes 2 W, while NEC plans a 10-inch-class panel that uses some 1.5 W.
All of the efforts are sparked by a common goal: running a notebook computer for 8 hours on a single battery charge. Notebooks equipped with today's color TFT displays run only about 2 hours; Sharp's new display will permit construction of notebooks that can run for 6 hours between battery charges. And, with the shift to larger, 10.4-inch panels expected to commence this year, power consumption is sure to become even more of a bottleneck.
Cadence gets design team in service deal
By Brian Fuller
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In the biggest leap so far by an EDA vendor into the emerging "outsourcing" business, Cadence Design Systems Inc. will acquire the IC desig
n operation of Unisys Corp. (Blue Bell, Pa.). The move is part of a $75 million service contract signed between the two companies.
The contract is five times bigger than Cadence's biggest previous contract in its services business, an area the company has marked for growth in an otherwise slow-growth EDA market. Outsourcing emphasizes design services rather than pure software and support.
For Unisys, which derives most of its revenue from its own outsourcing services for information-technology solutions, the deal continues the company's move away from capital-intensive internal development of certain technologies. It also suggests the near-overwhelming challenges facing certain companies that are approaching 0.35-micron design rules.
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