EET-i Top of the News
Week of Mar. 13, 1995
- Thursday, Mar. 16, 1995
 World multimedia PC market quadrupled in 1994
Taiwan phone company to issue Internet licenses
VLSI Tech, Wavecom team to offer GSM subsystems, software
Viewlogic regroups, loses staff
Bellcore charting independent course
Motorola launches 68302 triple-play
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- Wednesday, Mar. 15, 1995
- Cypress expands into Fast Ethernet
AMP connects with M/A-Com
The war of elegance and complexity
Fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms advance on the Internet
- Tuesday, Mar. 14, 1995
- Extreme-UV litho paves way to next IC generation
Verilog debug gets faster
AdvanCell offers synthesizable ATM/Sonet cores
IEEE looks outside the ranks for new GM
- Monday, Mar. 13, 1995
- Coming soon to your TV: `The Engineering Dean'?
Phone companies seek to redefine the set-top box
It's a battle of microprocessors at CompCon
Microsoft takes another crack at PDA operating systems with Pegasus
Visual Bas
ic catches engineering buzz
Other news sources on Techweb:
World multimedia PC market quadrupled in 1994
By Margaret Ryan
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The worldwide multimedia personal-computer market quadrupled in 1994 to more than 10 million shipments, according to final estimates contained in Dataquest's Multimedia Market Trends 1995 report.
Multimedia PC shipments reached 10.267 million units in 1994, up from 2.5 million units shipped in 1993.
Apple Computer led the world with 2.349 million multimedia PC shipmen
ts last year. But Packard Bell outpaced Apple in the United States, shipping 1.678 million multimedia PCs to Apple's 1.415 million units.
Bruce Ryon, Dataquest's principal multimedia analyst called multimedia the "car radio of the 1990's."
"Much like the demand for the car radio as a required feature when purchasing a car, multimedia is no longer considered an add-on when consumers buy a PC."
The multimedia PC market favors PC makers that have concentrated on the home market--Apple, Packard Bell and Compaq--Dataquest noted.
Taiwan phone company to issue Internet licenses
By Mark Carroll
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Marking a quantum leap into Internet services, the Directorate General of Telecommunications (DGT) -- the Taiwanese government's phone company -- is expected to start issuing licenses for private Internet-provider services in the next few weeks. The move will complem
ent existing services offered by the DGT, CNET (a division of the Institute for Information Industry) and the Ministry of Education.
Taiwan already has ample net bandwidth: The DGT has a fiber-optic international link and the possibility exists to lease satellite space.
Carl Nicolai, president of TranSend Internet Co., one of the early Internet providers, said Taiwanese government agencies and CNET in particular "are supportive in spreading Internet access to all who want it in Taiwan," and are unlikely to close down competing private service providers.
Once a country has several international lines available for Internet use, "it becomes virtually impossible to control Internet use," said Nicolai. Singapore's recent attempt to control the Internet, Nicolai said, is a response "to what they don't understand and can't control."
VLSI Tech, Wavecom team to offer GSM subsystems, softwa
re
By Peter Clarke
PARIS -- Wavecom S.A. and VLSI Technology have jointly developed a complete reference design for GSM (Global System for Mobile communications). The GTI-2000 is an integrated GSM six-layer pc board measuring 120 mm x 46 mm x 8 mm. It includes baseband ICs and RF design and software. The baseband silicon was designed by VLSI Technology and the RF module and software were developed by Wavecom.
The companies said all that is required is the addition of a keyboard and liquid-crystal-display controller IC. Customers can differentiate their products by customizing product features and the user interface.
VLSI Technology's contribution to the GTI-2000 project is a two-chip set: the VP22020 vocoder performs the speech coding with an integrated DSP microcontroller core and an integrated analog front end that can be linked directly to microphone, speaker and ringer. The VP22002 kernel processor implements channel coding and decoding, equalization and control links to
the RF section with an embedded ARM controller.
Wavecom designed the RF module, which includes an antenna filter, receiver, transmitter and synthesizer. It has written the European Telecommunications Standards Institute-compliant layer 1, 2 and 3 software for control of speech services
.
Viewlogic regroups, loses staff
By Richard Goering
MARLBORO, Mass.
--
Following a difficult fourth quarter and a plunge in its stock price, Viewlogic Systems Inc. has lost some key personnel through layoffs and departures, especially in the synthesis area. But company representatives say the company is actively seeking replacements and is not planning to drop any products.
Eighteen people have been laid off in the Marlboro and Fremont, Calif. offices, a source close to the company said, describing the Fremont-based synthesis operation as
"decimated." A number of other employees have left in recent months, including several who reportedly have launched a behavioral synthesis startup in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, Viewlogic will be struggling to break even in the first quarter, said John Marren, analyst at Alex, Brown and Co. (San Francisco), who called 1995 a "rebuilding year."
"Fundamentally the company is sound," he said. "If they can get things in order, they can return to growth."
Mike Emley, vice-president of corporate communications, acknowledged that Viewlogic has lost some personnel. "We're not going through a layoff," he said. "It's really just a redeployment. We had some disconnects with skill sets and geography."
Bellcore charting independent course
By George Leopold
MORRISTOWN, N.J.
--
A research combine formed 15 months ago by Bell Communication
s Research (Bellcore) to help pull together the information superhighway is taking on greater significance for the research arm of the Baby Bells as the
RBOCs divide into teams to crack the interactive TV market. The partnerships, their aggressive schedules and the high stakes involved have led some observers to wonder what role, if any, Bellcore will play in its customers' drive to deploy interactive networks.
Many question whether competing regional carriers, busy forming their own technology and integration units for interactive TV, will continue to cooperate with each other through their joint research division. The Collaboratory for Information Infrastructure (CII) "is working outside of the RBOCs to address independent projects," said an official of the 17-member consortium, which performs precompetitive R&D.
The independent projects require direct involvement in interactive trials to test the commercial viability of the collaboratory's efforts and to assure members that they wi
ll realize a return on their investments, the official said. "If they don't do that, then I'd question the support for CII."
But Bellcore officials insist there is plenty of work to go around for everyone in designing and building interactive networks, and that its unique networking capabilities make it a magnet for at least some of the regional carriers. "The reality is that no one organization is large enough to completely cover all the very crucial technical issues," said Eric Addeo, associate executive director of the collaboratory.
Motorola launches 68302 triple-play
By Loring Wirbel
AUSTIN, Texas -- Motorola Inc.'s data communications group is diversifying its 683XX controller line for communications along several axes. Only two weeks after offering a new version of the 68360 QUICC controller with embedded HDLC channels, Motorola is sam
pling three new versions of the lower-end 68302. The architectures will be shown at next week's Supercom show in Anaheim, since they are targeted at ISDN, line card, PBX and base-station applications.
The three new spins of the 68302 are the 68LC302, intended for lower-cost, lower-power communication applications; the 68PM302, with an embedded PCMCIA controller for portable applications; and the 68EN302, offering an Ethernet controller and DRAM controller for use in router and hub designs.
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
For a quick list and links to our most recently posted features, click
here
.
Cypress expands into Fast Ethernet
By Brian Fu
ller
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cypress Semiconductor Corp. will continue its reinvention as a semiconductor vendor on Monday by expanding into the promising Fast Ethernet business with a new product family.
The announcement caps a year of product design and signals the quickness with which Cypress, once a vendor focusing on niche, high-performance markets, has moved into more-mainstream areas to compete on cost and performance. It also shows Cypress's continuing expansion into data communications after years of strategic moves into various areas of the personal-computer systems, from simple to programmable logic, clock chips and fast memories.
While the Fast Ethernet market is still a niche now, it won't be for long, said T.J. Rodgers, Cypress's president and chief executive. "This business is real different," he said. "It's not something you get into even with a lot of money and a big fab. The key is having a good design team, and there are only a few good (Ethernet) design teams in the who
le world."
What Cypress is introducing as yet another "ramp to the information superhighway," as Rodgers likes to call it, is an Ethernet Transceiver that is capable of both 10-Mbit and 100-Mbit/second speeds and that can handle data transmission of category 3, 4 and 5 unshielded twisted-pair cable.
AMP connects with M/A-Com
By Brian Fuller
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- AMP Inc., the world's largest connector maker, has its sights set on a different kind of connection business. The company has just disclosed it is acquiring M/A-Com Inc. (Lowell, Mass.), in a bid to expand into wireless-transmission markets.
M/A-Com has built a presence in those areas with its microwave and gallium-arsenide technologies. AMP also believes that M/A-Com's Interconnect Division and Antenna & Cable Division will complement AMP's core terminal and connector busi
ness. Specifically, AMP is looking for a boost from M/A-Com's radio-frequency connectors and antenna and cable offerings.
The agreement calls for AMP to trade about $270 million in stock for all of M/A-Com's shares and assume $75 million in M/A-Com debt, executives said. The stock swap gives M/A-Com shareholders a small premium on their current stock -- trading at about $7 a share before the deal was announced. AMP's stock was trading for around $10.50 a share before the deal.
The war of elegance and complexity
By Ron Wilson
On Nov. 7, 1994,
EE Times
was the first newspaper to report the existence of the now-infamous bug in the Pentium microprocessor. Intel's response -- and the aftermath -- will be studied by business schools for decades to come. But what have engineers learned from it all? This week, the final part of our three-
part analysis.
Part One
and
Part Two
.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Across the expanse of computer architectures, a war rages. Campaigns have swept whole industries, driving some architectural ideas from the field. Battles fought over individual implementations have sometimes claimed a chip design or even an entire company as victims. Yet the conflict went largely unnoticed until the Pentium floating-point division debacle captured the public consciousness.
It is the war between elegance and complexity -- between architectural innovations that are simple, concise and correct and those whose irregular, incomprehensible structures open the door to error.
"The big problem is that complexity is outpacing our ability at verification," said Anant Agrawal, vice president of engineering for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sparc Technology Business, architects of the Supersparc and Ultrasparc CPUs. "From when we star
ted designing Sparc CPUs 11 years ago, the trend has been, I suppose I could say, alarming.
"In the beginning, we had a few engineers whose job was to verify the correctness of our design. On Ultrasparc, there were as many verification engineers as designers, and we may soon reach the point where we have two or three times more verification engineers than designers on a CPU project."
Most systems designers and users have been unaware of the struggles going on around them. Yet the outcome will decide -- without the informed participation of end users -- the extent of the risk of computer failure to which we all will be subjected.
Battles have been fought over the smallest objectives -- how to design a multiplier, for instance. And they have raged over the grandest topics -- whether RISC implementation should remain simple or should be allowed to grow complicated. Reports from the front reveal the scope of the conflict and its importance outside the community of architects.
Among the
circuit techniques that promise substantial rewards in speed and efficiency but extract their complexity cost are dynamic circuits. In that long-shunned approach, data is never latched in any particular location but is simply steered around by clock pulses. Asynchronous circuits, in which there are no clocks at all, are similarly avoided.
Both techniques make it difficult to predict how a circuit will behave. Most simulation and validation techniques are based on notions of discrete state. In a circuit where data can change at any time--without reference to a clock pulse--or where the data may decay between clock events, such notions are problematic at best. Many designers claim that there are no adequate simulation tools for such designs.
Fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms advance on the Internet
By R. Colin Johnson
SUNDERLAND, England -- Tw
o development environments born in European academic labs--one for fuzzy-system development and the other for application of genetic algorithms (GAs)--have been retrofitted for use by experienced engineers with access to the Internet.
University of Sunderland professor Andrew Hunter has released a university-developed GA package on-line for engineers itching to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to computers. "My main aim is to produce a single environment in which researchers can explore a wide range of variants on GAs," said Hunter.
A comprehensive user manual is available in Postscript and
on-line
. Sugal source code can be downloaded from:
ftp://osiris.sund.ac.uk/pub/sugal/sugal.tar
Also available on-line is a tool that originated at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Dubbed the Fuzzy Organizer from Oldenburg (Fool), the tool provides a graphical user interface with which to develop fuzzy systems and thei
r rule sets for controller applications.
Fool is available free from: ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/pub/Fool.
Extreme-UV litho paves way to next IC generation
By George Leopold
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- The question of what type of lithography will prevail in the Gbyte-level-memory generation has been further complicated by the proposal of Sandia National Laboratories and AT&T Bell Laboratories for a lithography system based on extreme-UV light. Though still experimental, the Sandia-AT&T technique has an edge over other alternatives because it would extend well-established UV-based lithography.
Attempting to provide the tools that will let chip vendors shrink IC feature sizes by a factor of five over the next decade, research efforts have been launched on several fronts, includi
ng four U.S. companies that are together pursuing X-ray lithography (see Oct. 10, 1994, page 1) and a government-industry partnership to develop an ion-projection lithography tool. Those activities are all being driven by an industry road map that targets volume production of 0.1-micron devices by 2007.
Now comes an attempt to push UV lithography down to the unheard-of operating wavelength of 13.4 nm using what its developers call an extreme-UV (EUV) lithography tool (see March 6, page 14). Most lithography tools today use UV light at 248
nm (i-line); a few machines operate at the "deep-UV" wavelength of 198 nm. Though operating in the UV spectrum, the jump to 13.4 nm would still be profound.
Sandia has teamed with Bell Labs to develop a laboratory version of the EUV tool capable for the first time of producing devices. Current plans include etching a 0.1-micron gate for a 90-GHz field-effect transistor.
Verilog debug gets faster
By Richard Goering
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Armed with its own mechanism for extracting simulation values, the Magellan 5.0 Verilog debugging environment from Systems Science Inc. is claimed to run up to thousands of times faster than previous versions. Magellan 5.0 also adds a Motif graphical user interface.
Magellan supports Verilog debugging in both interactive and post-simulation modes. It lets users traverse the circuit hierarchy, view waveforms, backtrack signals, define logic triggers and control the simulation through a source-level debugger. The tool works with Verilog simulators that comply with the Open Verilog International specification.
Daniel Chapiro, vice president of research and development, said 5.0 is fast because it bypasses the traditional Verilog value change dump (VCD) file format. "These are ASCII files that have to be parsed and loaded, so it takes a long time
," he said. "So we created our own dumping routines that interact with the Verilog PLI [programming language interface] and directly generate a compressed, binary, indexed VCD file."
AdvanCell offers synthesizable ATM/Sonet cores
By Loring Wirbel
CUPERTINO, Calif. -- AdvanCell Logic Corp., a startup launched by the founder of HDL tool specialist InterHDL, is offering a Sonet Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) user-network-interface core as a synthesizable cell to add to ASIC vendors' or OEMs' libraries. AdvanCell president Raj Singh said that his company is defining any blocks in the ATM/Sonet core protocol stack where ATM Forum standards and device commoditization justify the development of standard megacells.
Singh said that the ISC-ATM-101 core will be the first of several to cover Sonet and digital-synthesis framing devices,
clock-recovery modules and other blocks that can be defined for generic ATM functions in network-interface cards and workgroup switches. AdvanCell chose ATM/Sonet stacks first, since other LAN/WAN markets were already glutted with standard semiconductor devices. Singh said that "our window was a tight one."
IEEE looks outside the ranks for new GM
By Robert Bellinger
PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- Breaking with tradition, the IEEE is opening up its search for a new general manager to non-engineers.
In the past, IEEE has selected one of its own as the chief operating officer. Longtime GM Eric Herz and his successor, John Powers, who resigned last fall, were both EEs and IEEE members.
Now, IEEE is casting the net wider, seeking the "best candidate who can be found" and opening the possibility that acting general manager Richard Schwartz, or anot
her professional-association executive, could be named to the job, which paid $182,000 in 1993.
As 1993 president Martha Sloan observed recently, the job of running a 320,000-member global organization with a $100 million-plus budget requires managerial, not engineering, skills.
Coming soon to your TV: `The Engineering Dean'?
By Robert Bellinger
WASHINGTON -- Don't laugh. A coalition of engineering, math and science societies want the people who lionized lawyers with "L.A. Law" and deconstruct doctors in "E.R." to do the same for engineers and scientists.
Led by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and including the IEEE, the coalition has applied to the National Science Foundation for a $75,000 seed grant to create a pilot script for a prime-time show, to be call
ed "The Dean." The series would revolve around the adventures of a dean of engineering/science at a U.S. university. There's some serious muscle power behind the idea. The IEEE is one of 60 to 70 engineering, mathmematics and science societies that have attended sporadic meetings of the still nameless "public understanding" coalition over the past two years.
The TV networks have expressed "some interest" in the concept, said one promoter, Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, a former president of the AAAS, although "there were also expressions of skepticism."
Phone companies seek to redefine the set-top box
By Junko Yoshida
and George Leopold
ARLINGTON, Va. -- Bell Atlantic, Nynex and Pacific Telesis Group have released a joint request for proposals for set-top boxes, touching off a high-stakes scramble among vendors for the opportunity to supp
ly millions of units to the regional Bell operating companies' subscribers. The RFP's technical specifications point to a generic rather than a proprietary solution--a requirement that may spell trouble for some of the more established of the 30 or so set-top contenders.
The three RBOCs plan to buy as many as 4 million boxes over five years, as they roll out their interactive-TV network. The purchase is expected to be limited to a few vendors--and perhaps only one--to achieve the economies of scale needed to drive down the cost of digital set-top boxes while meeting the demands of an interactive network.
It's a battle of microprocessors at CompCon
By Ron Wilson
SAN FRANCISCO -- Disclosures last week at the IEEE Computer Society Conference (CompCon 95) not only intensified the race for the fastest microprocessor, but they laid open a continuing ar
gument between two seemingly irreconcilable camps in RISC design.
Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled the next step in the PA-RISC family, Digital Equipment Corp. showed the internals of its Alpha 21164, and HaL Computer Systems displayed its R1 RISC CPU for the first time at the 40th edition of the big show.
But the line in the sand grew sharper. On one side, Digital championed simple CPUs with in-order execution and extremely high clock frequencies as the way to greatest performance. On the other, HP and HaL both argued for complex processors with many pipelines and out-of-order execution.
The winner on SPEC benchmarks was the HP PA-8000, besting the performance of an Alpha 21164 that had nearly twice the clock frequency. But some significant details about the performance of the HaL architecture have done nothing to put the debate to rest.
Microsoft takes another crack at PDA operating system
s with Pegasus
By W. David Gardner
REDMOND, Wash. -- Bouncing back from the abortive WinPad project, Microsoft Corp.'s Mobile Computing Group is readying a new personal digital assistant (PDA) operating system dubbed Pegasus, EE Times has learned.
"Pegasus is going to be compatible with Windows, and it's going to be comparable to Windows," said one designer, who asked not to be identified. "WinPad was a real hog--that was the big problem with it--so Microsoft is starting from scratch on Pegasus. It's a new operating system from the ground up." Microsoft officials were not available for comment.
Visual Basic catches engineering buzz
By Alexander Wolfe
Gearing up for the autumn release of Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system, engineering-software vendors are taking a new broom to their old-line software development techniques.
They're sweeping aside traditional Unix methodologies and replacing them with robust graphical tools.
The most notable case in point: Visual Basic, the development environment from Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash.) that's rapidly garnering support in the EDA, test and embedded-control arenas.
The industry-wide tilt toward Visual Basic dovetails with a "platform shift" that's driving engineering software from the pricey workstation toward the still-unfamiliar territory of the low-cost desktop PC. The transformation has sent vendors scurrying for ways to pare product-development cycles, while grappling with the complexity of the ever-expanding Windows environment.
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