EET-i Top of the News
Week of Mar. 27, 1995
- Mar. 30, 1995
 Viewlogic taps COO
- Voice algorithms via Web
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- Mar. 29, 1995
- Cray Computer files Ch.11
- Compression at NAB
- Encryption chip for cars
- Kodak vows digital thrust
- Pcb-tool costs attacked
- Help wanted at chip firms
- Mar. 28, 1995
- Fuzzle up next to control engineers
- Mitsubishi has eye on retina opportunities
- Images Clarified with Fuzzy Logic
- Sharp lab develops 3-D video display
- Mar. 27, 1995
- Intel's NSP attracts PC industry attention at WinHEC
- Ferro materials move closer to the real world
- Factories finally moving to open systems
- Chip vendors may exterminate frame buffers
Other news sources on Techweb:
Viewlogic taps COO
By
Richard Goering
MARLBORO, Mass. -- Recovering from financial setbacks and personnel losses, Viewlogic Systems Inc. has appointed Will Herman, an EDA industry veteran, to the newly created position of executive vice president and chief operating officer. Viewlogic also said it intends to buy a potentially groundbreaking synthesis startup headed by Herman.
A Viewlogic founder in 1984, Herman became president last year of Silerity (Walnut Creek, Calif.), a four-person startup launched by industry luminaries Carver Mead and David Johannsen. Formerly known as Plan Beta, Silerity is developing technology that includes data-path synthesis for high-end ASICs and structured-custom ICs.
The announcements follow Viewlogic's unexpectedly weak 1994 fourth quarter, a plunge in stock prices and the loss of key personnel, especially in synthesis. Despite success in PLDs and FPGAs, Viewlogic has no significant market share in ASIC synthesis.
Viewlogic apparently hopes Silerity technology can do an end-run around synthesis market leader Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), aiming at large structured-custom ICs.
Viewlogic had talked with Herman about a relationship with Silerity before offering the COO post, Herman said. "One criterion for absorbing Silerity was my continued presence," said Herman, who will remain Silerity president while serving as Viewlogic COO. Hanover said Viewlogic would buy Silerity for $5.5 million in cash if Silerity completes certain business goals, such as development of a product and integration with Viewlogic tools. The acquisition is expected to be completed by year's end.
Voice algorithms via Web
BEDFORD, Mass. -- As of next week, system developers will be able to quickly access and download demo speech files from the World Wide Web for evaluating DSP speech encoding algorithms.
DSP Software Engineering Inc. will provide demo files created with its algorithms on the WWW through the home page of DSPnet, sometimes described as "the virtual DSP trade show." The files are available in .WAV format for PCs and .AU format for Macintoshes and Unix workstations.
The DSPnet is accessible via a Mosaic, Netscape or other compatible graphical browser at
http://www.dspnet.com
. Users without a browser can access the demo files from the Internet at
dsp.com
by logging in as "lynx."
Cray Computer files Ch.11
By
Loring Wirbel
COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- Cray Computer Corp., strapped for cash and short on orders for its vector-supercomputing platforms, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, laid off the bulk of its 340 employees and halted all work on the Cray-4 and Cray-3/Super Scalable System.
Workers were notified of the moves on March 24--the date of the Chapter 11 filing--and a recording on Cray's central phone line has been informing callers of the company's status. Chairman Seymour Cray and company president Terry Willkom did not grant interviews, though Cray wrote an open letter to employees in which he said it was "disheartening" that investors would not provide further money to complete the Cray-4.
The moves are scarcely a surprise, given the mountain of debt Cray Computer has accumulated without selling a single Cray-3 in the two years since the system's introduction. In fact, Cray executives had sought special permission from shareholders in an extraordinary Feb. 28 meeting to seek private placement of additional capital in foreign markets to keep the company operating. The failure to raise capital in a private placement spurred the bankruptcy-protection filing.
Cray's troubles began when Livermore National Labs canceled a planned Cray-3 purchase. Yet Cray Computer's probl
ems go beyond the Livermore incident. Chairman Cray believed that increasing the access times of the GaAs logic elements in his vector-supercomputing platform would alone ensure success for his architecture. But the company sought to make a go of it just as the supercomputer industry at large faced dwindling interest from both government and commercial accounts.
Compression at NAB
By
Yoshiko Hara
and
Terry Costlow
LAS VEGAS -- Leading electronics companies will showcase for the first time at the National Association of Broadcasters' NAB '95 show here next week a variety of broadcast systems based on digital compression. They represent a trend away from products that handle only straightforward digital recording/mastering with no compression.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Sony Corp. w
ill bring competing digital newsgathering and broadcasting systems to NAB. Meanwhile, Micropolis Corp. (Chatsworth, Calif.) will show what it claims is the industry's first MPEG-2-compatible decoder for its video server.
Matsushita will challenge the dominance of Sony's Betacam, used widely by news camera crews, with a compact professional digital camcorder based on the Digital Video Cassette (DVC) standard. Matsushita has extended DVC, an emerging VCR standard designed for consumers and using quarter-inch digital tape, to a professional standard called DVCPRO.
For its part, Sony will announce a complete digital broadcasting system that it claims is the the first to use the MPEG-2 4:2:2 Profile, intended for broadcast use.
Micropolis, a disk-drive manufacturer whose strategy is to focus on video markets as a way to sell disk drives and disk arrays, will feature in its server an MPEG-2-based decoder that offers resolution of up to 640 ý 480 pixels, providing twice the picture clari
ty of MPEG-1 decoders, and a 15-Mbit/second data rate. Those specifications meet the demands of broadcasters, giving them high enough quality to insert digital advertisements.
Encryption chip for cars
By
Ron Wilson
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- National Semiconductor Corp. this week escalated the countermeasures war between automobile manufacturers and car thieves by announcing an encryption-chip family for use in keyless entry systems. The device also is the first step in a new National business strategy.
The encryption chips, the HiSeC Rolling Code Generator and Detector, are designed to defeat even thieves who monitor transmissions from keyless entry devices to steal key codes.
National's chips use a complex rolling-code generator that National director of marketing Stephen Hamilton claimed is
virtually impossibl
e to predict
without access to National's proprietary algorithm. When the user presses one of up to four buttons on the entry device, the generator chip creates a preamble, sync field, key identifier, data field, rolling code and trailing information. The rolling code is unique for each transmission, as it is produced by a combination of cyclic redundancy check and what National calls "non-linear" logic.
Kodak vows digital thrust
By
Junko Yoshida
SAN FRANCISCO -- Eastman Kodak Co. chief executive officer George Fisher last week unveiled a slew of alliances, projects and product plans for the consumer and professional digital-imaging markets. The company is betting its revamped business plan will succeed where past strategies have proved lackluster.
Kodak's renewed commitment to the digital arena is embodied in it
s emphasis on alliances (most recently with IBM Corp.'s Global Network, Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sprint), an open-licensing initiative for the Kodak Photo CD format, and the development of a new format and architecture for long-distance network imaging.
Fisher acknowledged the company's past problems in selling the consumer market on such digital imaging technologies as Photo CD. "Our products in the past might have been premature, or our approach might have been half-hearted, perhaps in an attempt to protect our traditional market," he said. "But today, we are committed. We'd do anything we can to succeed in the new market."
Pcb-tool costs attacked
By
Brian Fuller
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Users of PCB design tools and vendors faced off at a panel session here recently, resurrecting a litany of complaints from users, the
most contentious of which is their belief that they're simply paying too much for too little.
Audience members complained to vendor panelists about paying high maintenance fees for shoddy service, questioned quality programs and urged greater attention to standards efforts.
User Steve Smith, who sat on the panel, asked, "When does Mentor decide to sell a new product and when does it decide to do enhancements?"
Bob Ard, vice president and general manager of Mentor's PCB group, said the company recently responded to concerns from its users' group and has issued a policy delineating the differences between enhancements and new products. But he declined to elaborate.
Keith Felton, executive director for software at Zuken-Redac
noted, "It's a look at what's the new benefit, where's the value-add and what's happening on the whole in the industry."
Vendors at the PCB Design Conference panel, suggesting there's no free lunch, said customers want the unattainable: more features
at the same price.
Help wanted at chip firms
By
Robert Bellinger
LYNN, MASS. -- The employment picture in the semiconductor industry "is as good as I've ever seen," said Bruce Rafey, a principal at the semiconductor recruitment firm of Bruce Rafey Associates based here.
"
I've been in this business almost 30 years and I've never seen it better. It's been great."
Asked what's in demand, Rafey replied, "Everything. Especially maintenance people at all levels, design engineers, layout people." EEs should have three to five years' experience in the semiconductor industry. There are also multiple positions for managers at various levels, including product-line managers for analog ICs, equipment products and process integration.
As might be expected, the ramping up of new fabs is creating some of the new deman
d, but the design and development engineers are enjoying a hiring boom at such corporate research centers as Intel and TriQuint Semiconductor.
Rafey said demand is especially high in the Southwest.
Fuzzle up next to control engineers
By
R. Colin Johnson
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Modico Inc. next month will announce Fuzzle 2.0, the Windows upgrade of its four-year-old, DOS-based fuzzy-logic-development tool. The jump from DOS to Windows adds new ease-of use features for development of fuzzy control systems.
Later this year, Modico plans to release two Fuzzle-based vertical applications: one for ad hoc text retrieval using fuzzy matching algorithms and the other for picking stocks and bonds.
The biggest difference between Fuzzle ($475) and competing fuzzy-logic-development systems is what Modico calls Fuzzle's pick-and-plug arc
hitecture. All other fuzzy-development systems, according to the company, require that the engineer input the details of the fuzzy-logic rules for an application, as well as check to make sure that every parameter has been specified and that the fuzzy logic is internally consistent.
The technology in Fuzzle, however, automatically fills in missing values to produce working fuzzy systems that the user builds pick-and-plug style. Designers simply click on menus and icons to define the fuzzy system "with full input validation, including completeness of logic and soundness of design," said Modico marketing director Al Hangul. Fuzzle makes a complete check of a proposed fuzzy-system design for rule redundancy, proper variable names, effective range of action and proper membership-function shape.
Mitsubishi has eye on retina opportunities
By
Peter Clarke
HYOGO, Japan -- A CMOS version of an artificial retina (AR) chip has been produced by researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Corp.'s Semiconductor Research Laboratory. The device could be used for robotic vision systems, text recognition, machine guidance and video telephony.
The chip builds on previous work by the research group in GaAs. As well as moving to a mainstream CMOS process, which should help reduce cost, it extends the architecture from a 128 by 128 array to 256 by 256.
The device's major claim is that it combines image sensing with on-chip parallel processing, said Anno Hermanns, a German member of the research team who previously was a member of the optoelectronic computing program at the University of Colorado (Boulder).
The frame rate of the Mitsubishi AR is variable between 30 and 1,000 Hz, and it can produce processed results at the highest speed. That is at least 10 times faster than comparable CCD-based devices and provides some time budget for post-processing
of data in real time, according to Hermanns.
Images Clarified with Fuzzy Logic
By
R. Colin Johnson
FORT LEE, N.J. -- Avian Systems Inc. this month is delivering the fuzzy-enabled image-processing program called FullPixelSearch. Fuzzy logic enables the high-end software package to find matching patterns that were previously too distorted to recognize.
FullPixelSearch ($1,295 for the Macintosh) is an image-analysis tool that finds regions of interest over an entire image in about 5 seconds. Using a combination of traditional and fuzzy pattern-matching techniques, FullPixelSearch assists quality-assurance engineers with non-destructive testing. Scientists, too, use it for all sorts of pattern-matching applications, from microscopy to macroscopic analysis of space and earth imagery. And industrial engineers use the tool to find difficult-to-
spot items in aerial photographs.
"We have a wide customer base, from neuroscience to engineering," said founder Richard Podolsky, who came from a background in the life sciences, with a PhD in ecology, when he founded Avian Systems in 1993 for imaging services. "One customer is finding heat leaking from rooftops by scanning thermal images.
"We have several services, mostly for thematic mapping, such as for surface features," Podolsky said. The work is done "mostly from satellite images or aerial photography, but also some vector files."
From that work came the company's first shrink-wrapped software package, its Gaia Software ($2,000, $1,000 academic, K-12 $500) for analyzing earth images. From Gaia came the more general-purpose image analyzer, FullPixelSearch.
Sharp lab develops 3-D video display
By
Peter Clarke
OXFORD,
England -- A 3-D video technology has been developed by a team of scientists working at Sharp Laboratories of Europe, the overseas extension of Sharp's research effort, which specializes in optoelectronics and LCD technology. Sharp is investigating the use of the system in such applications as medical imaging, scientific visualization, CAD and multimedia.
The technique is based on the use of two thin-film transistor LCDs_one to display the right-eye image, the other the left eye_arranged at right angles. A proprietary optical filter combines the two, reflecting one and transmitting the other, while ensuring that the viewer can see one panel with the left eye and the other with the right eye.
Two versions of the display have been built, one based on 14-inch and the other on 8.6-inch-diagonal LCDs. Both are at a resolution of 640 by 480 and are able to take 8-bit color NTSC-, PAL- or VGA-resolution right- and left-eye image pairs directly from conventional sources.
One traditional method to
create 3-D images has been to use two different polarizing filters on glasses worn by the viewer. But viewers must put up with the inconvenience of the glasses themselves and possibility of fatigue and eye strain after long periods of use. The Sharp system creates a 3-D image with apparent depth without the need to wear special glasses.
Sharp Labs has added an infrared light source and sensor that detects the viewer's position. With a suitably prepared set of stereo views of a scene and a fast enough workstation, information about the position of the viewer's head can be used to update the image presented, providing the ability to look around objects on display without so-called image flipping.
Intel's NSP attracts PC industry attention at WinHEC
By
Martin Gold
SAN FRANCISCO -- In a series of high-level sessions, Intel Corp. moved to ra
lly support for its Native Signal Processing initiative at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in San Francisco. Intel emphasized the cost advantages of the NSP architecture, which performs many signal-processing tasks on a Pentium host microprocessor rather than on add-in DSP accelerators.
Many sound-chip vendors and software developers stated their support for NSP. But others--notably some PC makers--were guarded in their embrace of the initiative. One question raised repeatedly: how will NSP play in the Pentium environment.
"There's a lot of work in bringing all this NSP software together," said Craig Estepp, manager of graphics resesarch and development at Compaq Computer Corp. (Houston) "It's new enough that I don't know what the mix [of host and non-host processing] will be." But Michael Slater, publisher of the
Microprocessor Report
, said NSP was likely to be adopted as a low-cost way to finally bring 16-bit sound to the base PC.
A notably lukewarm endorsem
ent came from Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. "There are certainly some tasks that the native processor will be able to take over," he said. "But I doubt that any time in the near future [will] a native processor be able to perform such functions as MPEG-2."
Voting with their presence, some 260 engineers and engineering managers from PC OEMs and independent hardware vendors crowded a seminar to find out how NSP will be implemented by the Intel Architecture Labs (Hillsboro, Ore.).
Ferro materials move closer to the real world
By
Loring Wirbel
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Perovskites may never be a household name, but this family of ceramic materials took a step into the real world at last week's International Symposium on Integrated Ferroelectrics. Reports at the conference indicate that ferro materials and thin-film deposition advanc
es are edging toward mass manufacturability.
"This year represents the cusp," said conference chairman Carlos Paz de Araujo, founder of ferro-materials developer Symetrix Corp. (Colorado Springs). "A lot of the papers this year have moved beyond early test to proving devices."
In DRAMs--where ferroelectric thin films are considered the best bet for achieving high-dielectric capacitance for planar capacitors in DRAMs over 1 Gbit--several companies said they are running test wafers with special base electrodes that enhance manufacturability. In nonvolatile memories, researchers described parallel and serial destructive read-out, SRAM-like nondestructive read-out (NDRO), and flash-EEPROM-like memories as the ultimate vehicles for exploiting ferroelectrics' nonvolatile effects.
Factories finally moving to open systems
By
Terry Costlow
and
Michele Clarke
Industrial automation's status as a bastion of closed systems is under aggressive attack, as common-bus and communications-standards initiative charge the wall of proprietary technology that's been the major barrier confronting manufacturing engineers.
Ford, GM and Chrysler have stormed the controller front as allies, unveiling the Open Modular Architecture Controllers (OMAC) initiative to push the $4 billion PLC industry toward open bus architectures and interface standards. The National Institute of Standards has also entered the fray, spearheading a move to create a standard interface for sensors.
In communications, several approaches are vying to become the de facto field-bus standard for connecting sensors, motors and other components to programmable logic controllers.
An equally aggressive campaign is being waged in software, as Windows, Visual Basic and other technologies mount an incursion against the ladder logic programs tha
t have dominated the factory floor for years. While engineers have long used the operating systems to program PLCs, the use of standard PLC-chip and -bus architectures would enable them to bypass ladder logic.
Perhaps the most sweeping of the expected moves will be the adoption of networking schemes as replacements for proprietary interconnects. Observers say the impact on industrial automation could be as significant as the "opening" of the office by Ethernet and other networking schemes.
Chip vendors may exterminate frame buffers
By
Ron Wilson
SAN FRANCISCO -- It could be the beginning of the end of the PC-AT-style personal computer architecture. The killer: a core logic set designed by OPTi Inc. for the Intel P6 CPU scheduled for introduction late this year. The chip set, the first wave in an architectural sea change of enormous proporti
ons, will eliminate the separate graphics frame buffer in favor of a unified system memory pool. That means goodbye to several of the most critical performance bottlenecks in today's PC, as well as a significant influence on the design of graphics and video accelerator chips, a reorganized PC bus architecture and perhaps the end of an entire category of specialized memory chips.
"The economic advantages of the unified approach are overwhelming," claimed S3 Corp. marketing manager Glenn Schuster. "You are eliminating $20 to $30 of frame-buffer DRAMs. In an entry-level system, where systems designers negotiate over pennies, that is enormous savings. And it may be that you don't have to give up performance in exchange."
But OPTi director of marketing Prem Talreja asserted, "This isn't just a matter of saving silicon. When the graphics frame buffer is actually a part of main memory, the CPU can directly manipulate pixel data in the frame buffer. Our caculations show that this can result in a 60 perc
ent to 80 percent increase in graphics performance."
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