EET-i Top of the News

Week of Mar. 20, 1995

Thursday, Mar. 23, 1995

Digital to intro VGC chip
Bell Atlantic granted long-distance-TV OK
AMD, Epilogue tip remote-monitor hub chips
Bilingual simulation emerges
Virtual sound card market gets boost
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

Wednesday, Mar. 22, 1995

Microsoft grudgingly given credit for features in Windows 95 for disabled
Info highway a dead end for disabled?
Transaction taxes seen for info highway
Compass plays library card
DRAMs scarce in Taiwan

Tuesday, Mar. 21, 1995

NC State improves CVD production
Surprise robustness in gallium nitride blue LEDs
Alantec adds Fast Ethernet to its hubs
Brooktree launches ATM segmentation and reassembly
Verilink multiplexer offers options for ATM on T1 lines

Monday, Mar. 20, 1995

New switched PCI scheme marks first use of synchronous DRAM
Altera embeds memory in Flex PLDs
Intel turns aggressive on P6 rollout
AMD and Cyrix push open PC server specs
Philips to splash into PDA and multimedia business

Other news sources on Techweb:

• Interactive Age
• Information Week
• Electronic Buyer's News

Digital to intro VGC chip

By Michele Clarke

HUDSON, Mass. -- Digital Equipment Corp. next month will join the growing list of companies pursuing the latest class of PC graphics coprocessors. Digital will unveil a part that pairs display-control-interface (DCI) logic with an 8-bit graphics-dithering technique to display color graphics and video images with 24-bit quality.

To begin sampling next month, the DECchip 21130 will be a member of the VGC class of coprocessors, which seek to support applications requiring both graphics and video, notably multimedia authoring and conferencing and collaboration suites.

These chips principally include an accelerated VGA controller (also known as a Windows/GUI accelerator) to create graphics data, a video controller and a RAMDAC (also called a lookup-table DAC) to translate digital RGB signals into an analog-monitor feed.

"This is the first in a family of integrated PCI-bus display controllers," said Frank Schapfel, Digital Semiconductor's graphics and multimedia product-line manager.

Bell Atlantic granted long-distance-TV OK

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Bell Atlantic Corp. has cleared a major legal hurdle in its bid to provide video programming and perhaps other n etwork services over its phone lines.

U.S. District Judge Harold Greene issued two orders freeing Philadelphia-based Bell Atlantic to provide video programming beyond its local calling areas. A 1984 consent decree overseen by Greene that broke up AT&T Co. had limited regional Bell operating companies to transmitting in their own region.

Bell Atlantic said the ruling lets it compete with cable companies to provide television programming, including full-blown video-on-demand and other services offered by cable systems. "We now have the competitive freedom we need to deliver the same and even better kinds of video programming services on the same virtually unrestricted basis as cable companies can," said James Young, Bell Atlantic vice president and general counsel.

The two orders allow Bell Atlantic to deliver video programming nationwide by satellite, provide nationwide compression and digitizing services by satellite, provide local video distribution within its service territory and up to four regional calling areas outside its territory. The orders also permit it to use a central video-storage facility to serve multiple calling areas around the nation, operate satellite receive-only facilities and own and operate TV and radio stations whose signals cross regional calling boundaries.

AMD, Epilogue tip remote-monitor hub chips

By Loring Wirbel

LAS VEGAS -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will unveil multiport-repeater-hub chips at next week's NetWorld+Interop that it claims are the first LAN ICs to provide full support for remote-monitoring (RMON) statistics. The support is provided under the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) through a new port of Epilogue Technology Corp.'s Ambassador RMON/TurboRMON tool suite.

AMD's pact with Epilogue (Albuquerque, N.M.) gives the chip maker access to Epilogue source code and the rights to of fer RMON software solutions to its semiconductor customers. AMD also gains an effective way to differentiate its new chip set, comprising the Integrated Multiport Repeater (IMR2) and Quad Integrated Ethernet Transceiver (Quiet) chips, from other Ethernet ICs.

Such companies as National Semiconductor Corp., Seeq Technology Inc. and Standard Microsystems Corp. have been pursuing Fast Ethernet and full-duplex Ethernet follow-ons to 10 Base T. AMD, by contrast, has been widening its 10-Mbit/second support by adding management support to its chip sets. It was the first to hardwire support for SNMP management information bases in its Himib adjunct chip for Ethernet; now, it claims to be the first to move into RMON statistics support.

Bilingual simulation emerges

By Richard Goering

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In a sign that the VHDL-vs.-Verilog "language wars" may be ending, three vendors will present bilingual simulation solutions at this week's International Verilog Conference (IVC), here. One announcement will mark the entry of Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) into the Verilog simulation marketplace, while another will set forth a next-generation simulation architecture developed by Cadence Design Systems (San Jose).

Mentor's Model Technology Inc. (MTI) subsidiary, Cadence and Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) will present solutions that make it unnecessary for designers to pick VHDL or Verilog, and make it possible to use models written in either language. Such solutions can open the vast arsenal of Verilog ASIC libraries to VHDL designers, ironically helping VHDL.

However, new market data prepared by Open Verilog International (OVI) on the eve of IVC suggests that Verilog is doing just fine. According to Bill Fuchs, OVI chairman, Verilog simulators and related tools garnered over $100 million in 1994, a near-100 percent increase ove r 1993. Fuchs said that Verilog synthesis revenues were also over $100 million.

Despite the optimism surrounding Verilog, most market analysts still say the momentum is swinging toward VHDL as a "second wave" of users adopts that language. Gary Smith, analyst at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose), noted that the OVI simulation figure includes a lot of gate-level simulation as well as maintenance for a large installed base.

Virtual sound card market gets boost

By Junko Yoshida

SAN FRANCISCO -- Intent on staking out a position in the emerging "virtual sound card" market, InVision Interactive Inc. is poised to jump aboard the native signal processing (NSP) bandwagon. InVision, a sound sample company based in Palo Alto, Calif., plans to bring out this summer its own software-only wavetable synthesis solution optimized for Pentium-based personal computers. InVisi on will become the third player in the game, following Intel Corp. and Brooktree Corp.

More choices are becoming available in software-only solutions that take advantage of faster and more powerful CPUs. So wavetable synthesis, which no longer is an issue of implementing cost-prohibitive dedicated DSP chips and ROMs, is looking better to those who have been seeking ways to bundle better sound than FM synthesis in their systems.

This won't help the sound-card market. "This year will be a peak year for the sound-card market. Sound cards won't go away, but this is a market that will slowly erode," predicted Will Strauss, president of market watcher Forward Concepts Inc. (Scottsdale, Ariz.).

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Microsoft grudgingly given credit for features in Windows 95 for disabled

By Robert Bellinger

LOS ANGELES -- Microsoft Corp. showed up at the Technologies and Persons With Disabilities Conference here last week to promote the accessibility of its upcoming Windows 95. While advocates for the handicapped welcomed the company's initiatives to aid the blind, hearing impaired and other disabled in using the operating system, they called Microsoft's sensitivity to such issues newfound and hard-won.

Gregg Vanderheiden, head of the Trace R&D Center at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), said it took "aggressive cajoling" and "strong encouraging" to prod the Redmond, Wash., software giant into building in such accessibility features as easier visual interfaces, new APIs or hooks for developers of third-party accessibility aids and alternat ive keyboard options for those who can't use a mouse or a standard keyboard. Vanderheiden said Microsoft is using code developed at the Trace R&D Center, which focuses on making computers accessible to the disabled.

Only after Massachusetts' commissioner for the blind, Charles Crawford, threatened a boycott of Microsoft products did the company formalize its creation of a new Accessibilities and Disabilities Group.

Crawford said his agency was worried about the ability of blind workers to function in the graphical environment of Windows. "It wasn't a boycott. It was a call for us to press the corporate body where's it's most sensitive --the dollar bill."

Facing the threat of bad publicity and economic pressure by governmental agencies, Microsoft agreed to upgrade Windows 95 for accessibility, Crawford said.

Greg Lowney, senior program manager of the three-person Microsoft operation -- formed only a month or so ago -- told EE Times that Microsoft had relied on third parties to tweak earlier Windows versions for accessibility. Many developers, preferring the text-based DOS over the graphical-interfaced Windows, were late in moving from DOS to Windows, creating delays in accessibility products, he said.

Info highway a dead end for disabled?

By Robert Bellinger

LOS ANGELES -- The disabled see the Information Superhighway as a potential dead-end for them unless designers, developers and engineers construct "cross-disability-access" ramps.

Speaking from her wheelchair at the Technologies and Persons With Disabilities Conference, Deborah Kaplan warned, "We have to be on guard." Kaplan is a member of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) Task Force.

Too often, she said, technology has blocked the disabled rather than helped them. Automated answering systems -- those phone menus that everyone encounters -- are "not ju st another annoyance" for some disabled, said Kaplan. "Some of us could no longer communicate."

To avoid barriers, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration has issued a grant for an 18-month universal-access project that will focus on putting accessibility for disabled people into the information superhighway.

However, said Kaplan, it's not only what impact technology has on the disabled, but what impact the disabled have on technology.

"We have an important, central role to play," she said, adding that demanding universal design benefits everyone. She defined universal design as always examining "the broadest application for the broadest range of individuals."

"Implementing the concept of universal design means that accessibility for all users will be designed in at the blueprint stage, avoiding costly retrofits," Kaplan said. "We are not the only beneficiaries." Closed-captioned TV, it turns out, aids not only the deaf but non-English speaking people as well. Curbcuts for wheelchair users help kids on bicycles.

Transaction taxes seen for info highway

By Peter Clarke

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Rapid development of the information society could hit a few snags in the next few years as focus shifts from technological conquests to economic ones, John Taylor believes. The director of Hewlett-Packard's overseas R&D facility, HP Laboratories, Europe, Taylor spoke at an exhibition held in conjunction with the Group of Seven ministerial conference here.

Forecasting fundamental changes, he predicted that transactions on the information superhighway will eventually be taxed. In addition to technology improvements, which the electronics and computer industries seem set to provide, Taylor also sees changes in the law to recognize and deal with "electronic objects," new kinds of intellectu al-property rights and progress in individual electronic privacy.

Taylor said authorities must be able to police transactions on future information networks. "There's already $100 million of IPR traveling across national boundaries without paying any duty. We need an electronic equivalent of the police force--the traffic cops of the information superhighway."

Hewlett-Packard might be able to provide some of that technology. Taylor said his laboratory has developed systems to provide real-time monitoring of Signaling-System Seven (SS7), which is used to control telephone calls.

The system was developed primarily, he said, to monitor for faults and to measure peak demands to help telecommunications companies. But he said demand has mounted for Hewlett-Packard to adapt the system to help monitor for fraud and other crimes committed on the telephone network.

Compass plays library card

By Peter Clarke

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France -- Compass Design Automation Inc., in a business expansion, will delve further into sales of intellectual property rather than add services to its core business, as other EDA vendors have done.

The plans include an expansion of the company's cell libraries and library tools to higher levels of abstraction, including microprocessors.

Peter Sherrett, Compass manager for Northern Europe, said, "We do not sell processor models today. We sell cells and larger logic blocks that are catered for our compilers." But company executives confirmed the intention to go higher in terms of abstraction.

Paul McLellan, vice president of technology at Compass, said that processor blocks could be provided to customers through partnerships with other companies.

DRAMs scarce in Taiwan

By Mark Carroll

T AIPEI, Taiwan -- Margins on VGA boards have gotten so thin that increasing numbers of DRAMs are being diverted from the cards to the DRAM spot market, sources here said. If the trend worsens, supplies of graphics cards could become unstable.

The severe shortage of DRAMs in Taiwan has produced a huge and lucrative spot market, accounting for as much as one-fifth of the total Taiwan DRAM market, which is expected to exceed $2 billion this year. Supplies of the by-16 configuration DRAMs for graphics applications are especially tight.

VGA cards, in particular, use large numbers of wide-configured DRAMs, but margins on the cards themselves have worsened to the point that more VGA card makers are using the spot market as a major source of profit, said sources here who requested anonymity.

A year ago, board makers used most of their DRAM supplies in their own products. This year, DRAMs are in such short supply and margins on add-in cards are so thin that many companies with good connections in t he spot market can make more money by selling much of their monthly allotment of DRAMs than by actually using the components in their own products.

NC State improves CVD production

By Chappell Brown

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Hoping to leverage two silicon wafer-processing trends into a next-generation cluster tool, researchers at North Carolina State University are exploring an ultra-high-vacuum/rapid-thermal-processing approach to chemical vapor deposition.

Both high-vacuum and rapid thermal CVD are being employed separately in various approaches to the high-precision epitaxial work required by ultra-dense circuits, but the combination promises additional benefits. University researchers say the new setup simplifies CVD processing in a number of ways without sacrificing precision, thus promoting higher throug hput of large wafers.

That could turn out to be a significant manufacturing advantage crucial to buying decisions in future fab lines, said project leader Mehmet Ozturk.

"Both processes offer advantages that will be needed for next-generation circuit manufacturing, but each has an impact on the important issue of throughput," Ozturk said. "We were looking at the full range of problems that need to be addressed when you try to build smaller devices on larger wafers, and a combination of both approaches seems to provide the critical advantage."

Surprise robustness in gallium nitride blue LEDs

By Chappell Brown

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- A study of new gallium-nitride light-emitting diodes manufactured at Nichia Chemical Industries (Tokyo) has turned up a surprise that may bode well for the future of blue-light-emitting devices. The study, performed jo intly by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and Xerox Corp. found that, unlike their effect on other compound semiconductors, lattice defects in GaN LEDs seem to have little impact on performance. Nichia has pioneered the new materials system to build the first III-V LEDs that emit in the blue region of the spectrum.

"We were using a transmission electron microscope to find why the Nichia LEDs have such high efficiencies, so it came as big surprise to find an extremely high density of lattice dislocations," said Fernando Ponce, an optoelectronic specialist at Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center. "It is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find."

Normally, precise fabrication techniques are required for light-emitting devices because any defects in the lattice become photon traps that prevent light from radiating out into the environment. Ponce estimated that other compound semiconductor systems would not emit any light at all if they suffered from the same defect densities. In contra st, the Nichia devices are brighter than most other sources, with AlGaAs and GaInAlP (gallium-indium-aluminum-phosphide among the exceptions.

Ponce speculates that the reason for the difference in susceptibility to defects may be the unique chemical bond formed by the elements. "Evidently, there is something about gallium nitride that prevents the dislocation centers from trapping electrons and holes, and there are some studies of the compound that suggest why," he said.

Alantec adds Fast Ethernet to its hubs

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Alantec Inc. has added its first support for Fast Ethernet to the PowerHub shared-memory switching hub series. At next week's NetWorld+Interop, the company will also be showing a new mid-range chassis, the PowerHub 6000 for departmental applications, a system that will incorporate Fast Ethernet modules.

P aul Schaller, vice president of marketing at Alantec, said his company had always been an early proponent of Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) rings for backbone concentration, but had been "strictly agnostic" regarding which networking technology would predominate in switched applications. The 6000 can handle 10 Base T, FDDI and Fast Ethernet, and upcoming modules will update the platform for ATM switching.

"The only perceived limitation of Fast Ethernet has been in longer-distance applications, and we recommend that people look at full-duplex fiber links using the 100 Base FX standard if they need those distances," Schaller said.

He added said that the primary differentiator between PowerHub and other LAN switch architectures remains its ability to perform multiprotocol routing of packets. In general, the 6000 will compete against platforms such as Grand Junction's FastSwitch, Network Peripherals Inc.'s EIFO and Cisco Systems' Catalyst, though none of those switches supports embedded routing.

Brooktree launches ATM segmentation and reassembly

By Loring Wirbel

BOULDER, Colo. -- Brooktree Corp.'s long-awaited "Steamboat" design for Asynchronous Transfer Mode segmentation and reassembly (ATM SAR) functions has sampled in time for next week's NetWorld+Interop. Though the design was delayed from an anticipated mid-1994 debut, the Bt8230 SAR Controller, or SRC, can take advantage of very recent standards from the ATM Forum specifying how traffic management is handled with available-bit-rate (ABR) services.

Steamboat is not an SAR for all private ATM networks needing simple data-only throughput to the desktop. Instead, it targets WAN interfaces, where ATM confronts complex mixes of isochronous voice and video traffic along with bursty data traffic. The Bt8230 can be used without local intelligence; it interfaces with a local embedded processor like the Intel i960 for optimized packet throughput.

The chip includes full transistor-transistor logic (TTL)-level interfaces to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, both master and slave modes. It also can interface directly with Brooktree's Bt8222 transceiver chip for ATM, which supports a variety of speed rates up to 155 Mbits/second.

Verilink multiplexer offers options for ATM on T1 lines

By Loring Wirbel

San Jose, Calif. -- Verilink Corp. is offering a new inverse multiplexer add-in board set to its Access System 2000 architecture, which could give corporations a new option for carrying Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) traffic over T1 lines. The Access System 2600 IMUX allows ATM cells to be mapped to as many as eight separate T1 lines. Product manager Kevin White said the dropping cost of T1 lines could make this option much less expensiv e for ATM traffic than transfer over T3 (45-Mbit) lines, which are still expensive to lease.

The 2600 IMUX can work with such low-speed ATM interfaces as Data Exchange Interface (DXI), for linking Switched Multimegabit Data Service and ATM traffic, or the new Frame-based User Network Interface (FUNI) standard, which specifies mapping of frame-relay packets to ATM. "It is dawning on members of ATM Forum that T1 may ultimately be too slow for FUNI," White said. "But unlike N x DS-0, where there are bonding standards for concatenating lines, there are no industry bonding standards for T1." Verilink will be interested in providing some of its T1 concatenation methods to whatever industry group will take on the issue of T1 bonding, according to White.

Ed Ip, vice president of engineering at Verilink, said that multiple Xilinx XC4000 FPGAs were used to implement the eight channels on the 2600 boards. Communication channels can be cascaded with only 8 bits of overhead per channel, and 3 kbits of in-band comm unication data. Ip said a future IMUX product will turn to 28 channels of T3 (DS-3) service, and Verilink will likely turn from FPGAs to ASICs at that time.

The minimum configuration of the IMUX system uses two cards. The IMUX 2160 is the data terminal equipment interface, and the QUAD 2164 is a four-channel T1/E1 interface. For eight-channel muxing, two quad boards are used in a system. The AS2600 is not just for ATM traffic, but could also be used for carrying routed packet traffic over a high-speed serial interface, using multiple T1 channels. The IMUX system is managed via Simple Network Management Protocol agents.

New switched PCI scheme marks first use of synchronous DRAM

By Michele Clarke

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- It could trigger the next step in the evolution of the Peripheral Component Inte rconnect (PCI) bus--or the next great debate. But wherever the chips fly, I-Cube Inc. has shown a reference design for a switched PCI bus that could boost the actual throughput of PCI-based systems from today's neighborhood of 30 Mbytes/second to peak rates of almost 132 Mbytes/s per port.

The application, which is the first announced use of the synchronous MoSys DRAM, holds great promise for video servers, ATM switch backplanes and similar applications. But it could require major changes within the PCI community.

The memory device itself is the 400-Mbyte/s MoSys DRAM. Functioning as shared memory, it provides not only very high bandwidth for in-page accesses, but, due to its unique internal architecture, a very high probability of a page hit when traffic through the DRAM is interleaved from several sources.

The concept of switched PCI could fit well into the plans of server and switch vendors, say industry sources. Several OEMs investigating LAN switching are looking to the PCI bus as a backplane. Using a backplane bus would avoid the cost and complexity of designing a non-blocking crossbar switch to serve as the backplane interconnect. The idea is all the better if an industry standard bus, with existing commodity silicon, is usable.

Altera embeds memory in Flex PLDs

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Introducing a new concept to the programmable-logic-architecture debate, Altera Corp. has announced a high-density PLD that includes embedded blocks of diffused SRAM. The Flex 10K family, derived from Altera's FPGA-like Flex architecture, includes up to 26 kbits of SRAM in 2-kbit configurable blocks. It will address many of the needs now met by embedded-array ASICs, the company claims.

"According to Dataquest, nearly 45 percent of gate-array designs included some form of embedded RAM megacells," said Altera product marketing mana ger Sandeep Vij. "In addition, many ASIC designs include other types of large cells, such as microprocessors or peripherals."

Such designs rely on embedded memory arrays for everything from scratch-pad RAMs to FIFO buffers to coefficient storage. They may embed larger logic blocks as controllers or processors for sequencing, control or signal processing.

Altera has aimed the Flex 10K family at projects that need embedded memory or combinatorial functions, but can't wait for--or pay for--an embedded array, Vij said.

Intel turns aggressive on P6 rollout

By Mark Carroll and David Lammers

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- With working samples of its forthcoming P6 processor in the hands of major Asian customers, Intel appears to have inaugurated a new, aggressive CPU strategy, EE Times has learned.

Acer, Fujitsu Ltd., NEC Corp., Toshiba C orp. and others confirm that engineers are racing to design prototype motherboards based on the early samples, and announcements are expected as early as May.

The Asian P6 activity suggests Intel's new game plan: P6 samples are in the hands of a far wider base of key accounts, farther afield from Intel's home base than ever before. Even some second-tier vendors in Taiwan expect silicon by the end of the month. And in Tokyo, an Intel Japan spokeswoman said local companies began receiving P6 samples in the first quarter.

C.H. Chen, technical support manager at the Taipei branch of Intel Technologies Far East, declined to say how many companies in Taiwan have received early processors and support logic. But Chen predicts that "production of systems based on the P6 should be available in the third or fourth quarter."

As they did with other recent rollouts, Intel and its early customers are focusing on the server market. At Acer--Taiwan's largest system company and one of Intel's closest allies in Asia--a P6 design team is already at work on a server design for the Acer Frame Division, sources said.

AMD and Cyrix push open PC server specs

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

SAN FRANCISCO -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Cyrix Corp. are about to disclose the first fruit of an effort to develop an Intel-independent multiprocessor server architecture for Cyrix M1, AMD K5 and Intel P6 CPUs. The pair launched the initiative--called OpenPIC, for Open Programmable Interrupt Controller--to battle what they consider a concerted strategy by Intel Corp. to establish proprietary P6 PIC technology as the de facto industry standard.

The challenge for AMD and Cyrix is that the P6, like its P54C and P55C predecessors, includes many of the supporting elements of a multiprocessor design. The P6, for example, provides an integrated, 256-k byte level-2 cache; a split-transaction processor bus tuned for multiprocessing; and the Intel Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (Apic).

It's the last device, which works with the core-logic chip set to route interrupts to the correct CPU in a multiprocessor system, that is the heart of the issue for Intel's competitors.

Philips to splash into PDA and multimedia business

By Junko Yoshida

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Seeking to transform itself from a low-profile supplier of commodity ICs into a multimedia powerhouse, Philips Semiconductor is readying a two-pronged assault on the personal digital assistant and multimedia markets.

The first leg of that strategy revolves around an upcoming PDA chip set based on the MIPS R3000 RISC microprocessor core. The multimedia move will thrust the company's programmable "TriMedia" DSP technology into vi deo and audio applications.

The PDA effort is part of a Philips push to become one of the main chip-set suppliers for General Magic's second-generation PDA hardware. To help PDA vendors hit multiple price/performance points in their market, Philips plans to launch two R3000-based PDA chip sets in the second half of 1995. Along with an R3000 CPU core, the sets will include a separate ASIC that functions as an analog telephone-interface circuit.

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