EET-i Top of the News
Week of Apr. 3, 1995
- Apr. 6, 1995
 Group eyes 12-inch wafers
- Vital endorsed
- Car radio on a chip
- Hyundai's MPEG-2 chip
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- Apr. 5, 1995
- Colloids challenge LCDs
- Brown: research imperiled
- Cadence boosts services
- Apr. 4, 1995
- Quantum dots eyed for logic
- 3-D `aerial' projection
- SIMMs double capacity
- Apr. 3, 1995
- Slide of dollar against the yen has Japan worried
- Simulation `redesigned' at Verilog Conference
- Yamaha-ESS suit over FM sound synthesis goes into next round
- Xilinx absorbs NeoCad
- Multimedia standards efforts spark network (PC and Internet) convergence
Other news sources on Techweb:
Group eyes 12-inch wafers
By
Peter Clarke
GENEVA -- Three semiconductor-equipment and service companies
have forged a joint venture focused on the development of services and mechanical handling for 12-inch silicon wafers, it was announced at Semicon Europa last week.
Called Integrated Fab Systems (Infab), the venture is owned equally by Empak Electronics (Chanhassen, Minn.), Meissner and Wurst (Stuttgart, Germany) and Jenoptik (Jena, Germany).
The base--Austin, Texas--puts the company close to Motorola, which is likely to be the first customer. Motorola has announced an aggressive plan in Austin to build a 12-inch-wafer fab that will start up in 1997 and reach volume production in 1998.
The three partners--with experience in areas ranging from wafer-fab design to wafer handling--said that for 12-inch wafers, the provision of gases and liquids to clusters of tools means that wafer-fab and clean-room design will be fundamental to a fab's operation. "It will no longer be possible to design a clean room and then populate it with equipment," said Herbert Blaschitz, manager of Jenoptik's clea
n-room automation division.
Vital endorsed
By
Richard Goering
SAN DIEGO -- Second-generation VHDL standards such as Vital and analog VHDL took center stage at this week's VHDL International Users Forum (VIUF) here, and Vital received a ringing endorsement as Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) announced library support from 12 ASIC and programmable-logic vendors.
Also at the conference, VHDL International (VI) announced that its VHDL simulation test suite will be maintained and expanded by the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio. This test suite will allow VHDL simulators to prove compliance with the language. VI also said it is expanding its board of directors to include representatives from Hughes Aircraft and Summit Design.
A smaller and more academically focused conference than the fall VIUF event,
the four-day spring conference attracted about 250 participants. The fall VIUF, now scheduled for Oct. 1-4 in Boston, will have vendor exhibits and more of a "trade-show" atmosphere.
Car radio on a chip
By
Brian Fuller
NIJMEGEN, Netherlands -- Philips Semiconductors this week is scheduled to release production versions of a single-chip car radio--a digital signal processor three years in the making.
The SAA7707H targets midrange and high-end systems for which board space and electromagnetic-discharge issues pose problems for pc-board subsystem design. At 2.57 square inches, the integrated solution could save 40 to 50 percent on board real estate.
The company touts the device as the first DSP specifically designed for the car-radio market, which Philips estimates at 60 million units annually worldwide, said Herman Coumans, Phil
ips's international product marketing manager. The part aims at a portion of the market that accounts for 60 percent of those units, he noted.
One key to the design--which handles all signal functions in front of the power amplifier and behind the AM and FM demodulator and digital CD and Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) inputs--is on-chip A/D and D/A converters. That design removes the electromagnetic-discharge-sensitive interface that can come between converters and other chips, Coumans said.
Hyundai's MPEG-2 chip
By
Junko Yoshida
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Using an embedded Microsparc RISC-core processor licensed from Sun Microsystems Inc., a Hyundai Electronics America division has begun sampling what it calls the industry's first single-chip MPEG-2 solution.
Priced at under $60 in production quantity and scheduled for volume shipment
in August, Hyundai's new silicon integrates MPEG-2 transport demultiplexing and audio and video decoding functions into a single chip.
Vahe Akay, director of marketing and sales for the Hyundai Digital Media Division, described the single-chip solution as "one big leap forward" from what leading MPEG silicon vendors such as LSI Logic, C-Cube Microsystems, SGS-Thomson, IBM Microelectronics and AT&T Microelectronics are offering. This is Hyundai's first MPEG product.
Industry analysts said the Korean electronics giant, backed by the $65 billion Hyundai Business Group, may have a good shot at providing volume-production solutions for the set-top market.
Colloids challenge LCDs
By
Peter Clarke
LONDON -- A U.S. research firm, working with Imperial College here, has shown that a 30-year-old technology--based on the colloida
l suspension of particles in liquid--could perform better than liquid-crystal displays (LCD), and be simpler to make. The work on the suspended particle device (SPD) display has resulted in the Japanese company Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. licensing display applications.
Research Frontiers (Woodbury, N.Y.), asked Mike Lee of the electrical engineering department at Imperial College to build a high-information-content demonstration based on new material mixes that Research Frontiers had developed. After working for about a year, Lee built a 320 ý 290 active-matrix thin-film-transistor display.
Robert Saxe, president of Research Frontiers, said, "We have a technology, using orientable colloidal-sized particles, which enables a flat-panel display to be built without requiring sheet polarizers or alignment layers." The hope is that almost all the other techniques and sub-components, such as backlights, glass processing and the application of color filters can be taken with little or no adaptation from th
e LCD manufacturing industry.
Brown: research imperiled
By
George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- Federal funding of research and development is in a nosedive that could bring 50-percent reductions by the end of the decade under a GOP spending plan, killing off joint-research programs that the electronics and computers industries helped to launch, a key House Democrat warns.
In one of the bleakest scenarios yet on the fate of the federal R&D budget, Rep. George Brown, D-Calif., said proposed budget cuts for fiscal 1996 would further erode U.S. spending for civilian R&D, which currently ranks 28th in the world. Moreover, Brown said, "the chances are pretty good" that government-industry technology partnerships will be gutted.
Brown spoke at a press conference this week to publicize his opposition to budget reductions being pushe
d by Rep. Robert Walker, R-Pa., chairman of the House Science Committee. Brown, the committee's ranking minority member, offered little hope for R&D programs that do not fit Walker's narrow definition of basic research. Walker opposes public-private technology partnerships championed by Brown and other Democrats.
Brown said he was particularly concerned about proposed R&D cuts for basic and applied science since industry is unlikely to pick up the slack as global competition stiffens.
Cadence boosts services
By
Richard Goering
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- To support a new business model that emphasizes both tools and services, Cadence Design Systems Inc. has undergone a major restructuring. Individual product groups for ICs, system design and hardware-description languages (HDL) have given way to companywide engineering, marketing a
nd business-development organizations.
No layoffs have resulted from the revamping, the company noted.
"We were organized into a traditional divisional structure where we had general managers who focused only on tools," said Tony Zingale, who moved from the HDL group to assume the new Cadence position of senior vice president of marketing. "It served us well, but it kind of got in the way. We want to sell a combination of tools and services to satisfy customer needs."
The restructuring was driven by a need to support what Cadence calls product development environments (PDE), Zingale said. A customer PDE combines tools and design methodologies.
The new structure is composed of several vertical groups, including engineering, marketing, business development, sales, "practice development," and Spectrum Services. Joe Costello, Cadence president and chief executive officer, will head the corporatewide engineering group until a senior vice president of engineering--a new position at Cade
nce--is found.
Quantum dots eyed for logic
By
Chappell Brown
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- An emerging technology that allows researchers to capture and control single electrons might vault the physical limits that are starting to cramp today's densest circuits. The latest results suggest that a process for building quantum-dot devices, where a capacitor can be charged with a single electron, could eventually supplant conventional transistor-based electronics. Theoretical studies based on the new quantum-dot physics point toward a complete design paradigm that would implement digital logic with the equations of quantum mechanics.
Quantum-dot devices might sidestep impending physical limits such as heat dissipation, thermal noise and wire capacitance. In both lab demonstrations and theoretical studies, quantum-dot devices are already proving to
be simple to fabricate, offering high-speed switching capabilities along with virtually no heat dissipation.
"Simple" could be "an array of tiny metal dots on a special semiconductor substrate," said Craig Lent, a researcher at the University of Notre Dame's Department of Electrical Engineering.
3-D `aerial' projection
By
Chappell Brown
NEW YORK -- Dimensional Media Associates, a 3-D display startup, has struck a joint technology agreement with London-based Central Research Laboratories Ltd. to develop Dimensional's proprietary high-definition, 3-D-imaging technology for medical training. The corporate partnership might speed commercialization of high-definition volumetric display (HDVD) technology, which projects "aerial" images into free space.
The two companies plan to develop an optical 3-D projection technology blending DMA's
HDVD projection with CRL's work in liquid-crystal displays.
SIMMs double capacity
By
Terry Costlow
AUSTIN, Tex. -- The daughterboard concept has been adapted to memory modules, with FirstTech Corp. unveiling a SIMM that stores up to 64 Mbytes. The SIMMs make it possible to double memory capacity without adding more sockets. The piggybacked SIMMs fit the standard 72-pin format for memory modules, holding nine memory packages on each side of the circuit board.
The company doubles capacity by mounting another board onto the SIMM using pin and socket connectors.
Tadpole Technology Inc. is already using the modules, putting up to 128 Mbytes in its Sparc-based notebook.
Slide of dollar against the yen has Japan worried
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- March 1995 will remain etched in this city's consciousness as the month of the nerve-gas murders and the shooting ambush of the Tokyo chief of police. But the news that had Japan's electronics executives sweating in the boardrooms was the yen's precipitous rise.
The yen shot to a stratospheric 88 to the dollar in the first two weeks of March and remained stuck there for the rest of the tumultuous month. Executives are wondering when the yen's value will slip back into the 100-plus range--and what to do if it doesn't.
"The strong yen is our biggest headache now," said Nobuyuki Idei, the incoming president of Sony Corp., which exports about 70 percent of its overall production. Sony has more than 30 factories in Japan, but Idei said that "if the yen remains in the 90 [yen to the dollar] range, it will be difficult to keep manufacturing in Japan.
"It may affect the whole concept of lifetime employment. Japan will ha
ve to change, and Sony will have to change as well," he said.
Simulation `redesigned' at Verilog Conference
By
Richard Goering
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In potentially far-reaching announcements at last week's International Verilog Conference here, Cadence Design Systems Inc. previewed a simulation architecture that supports multiple technologies. Separately, Chronologic Simulation announced a compiler that could make models more available for all simulation tools.
The Interleaved Native Compiled-code Architecture (Inca), announced by Cadence (San Jose, Calif.), promises concurrent support for multiple languages as well as different types of simulation--including digital, analog, event-driven and cycle-based--with no performance penalty. The advance information on Inca coincides with announcements of bilingual simulation environments from
Model Technology Inc. and Viewlogic Systems Inc.
Yamaha-ESS suit over FM sound synthesis goes into next round
By
Junko Yoshida
LOS ANGELES -- Developers of audio chips, sound cards and PC multimedia systems will be watching closely as Yamaha Corp. and ESS Technology Inc. return to court next week for the second round of what could be a landmark showdown for the FM-sound-synthesis industry. ESS claims to be the first Yamaha competitor to produce an FM-synthesis chip that does not violate Yamaha's patents. Yamaha, in a suit filed in district court here, claims otherwise.
The suit against ESS is the 11th patent-infringement complaint Yamaha--whose OPL series chips dominate the FM-synthesis market--has filed against competitors in recent months. What sets the ESS suit apart is that some observers think the smaller company has a shot.
Xilinx absorbs NeoCad
By
Richard Goering
BOULDER, Colo. -- In an unexpected move, FPGA leader Xilinx Inc. purchased vendor-independent FPGA layout tool pioneer NeoCad Inc. last week in what could be (1) Xilinx's attempt to deal with its diverse portfolio of architectures, (2) that company's final admission that NeoCad had better layout software, or (3) a veiled action to disarm FPGA rivals by depriving them of tools. Analysts also speculated that the acquisition may deal a blow to AT&T Microelectronics and Motorola, both of which have come to rely on NeoCad for software support.
Under the reported terms of the agreement, Xilinx will acquire all of NeoCad. Xilinx and NeoCad will continue to sell their separate tool sets for now, but NeoCad's FPGA Foundry technology will eventually be folded into Xilinx's XACT set. NeoCad will support customers
designing with Actel, AT&T and Motorola parts for one year but will not develop any further software for non-Xilinx architectures.
Multimedia standards efforts spark network (PC and Internet) convergence
By
Alexander Wolfe
LAS VEGAS -- A pair of industry-wide efforts to thrust multimedia into mass markets bubbled to the surface at last week's Networld+Interop conference here. The projects--on an Internet standard called the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and a Windows software spec called WinSock 2--could spark a multimedia convergence that would link the largely separate networking spheres of the PC-based local-area network and the TCP/IP-driven Internet.
However, both developments were upstaged at Interop by a commercial announcement from Pacific Bell (San Ramon, Calif.), which uncovered plans to use ISDN and ATM technologies to c
onnect the Internet and World Wide Web to its telephone network.
All the disclosures highlighted the increasingly chaotic nature of the networking landscape, as vendors search for practical ways to deliver text, audio and motion-video to the desktop PC. What's not clear is which protocols and technologies will propel phone and computer networks into the multimedia future.
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