EET-i Top of the News
Week of May 1, 1995
- May 4, 1995
 Toshiba to build Portland fab; IBM to take part of the output
- HP, AMD to develop a core for Geos-based handhelds
- Analog H.324, video over LANs focus of desktop videoconference
- Notebook displays big at Japan show
- Siemens, Zoran eye deeper ties
- Update: Atmel moves into SRAM market
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- May 3, 1995
- Atmel to enter SRAM market
- U.K. may seek more investment by U.S., Japanese firms
- Intellon standardizes modules for CEbus networks
- Sunny days for AM-LCDs
- TI, HP and AT&T altering their strategies, target MCM market
- Report from In-Stat: Barriers to building info highway identified
- May 2, 1995
- BNR closes in on terabit-level switching
- IBM's neural-based antivirus program eradicates the buggers
- Board synthesis readied
- Fore bases ATM switches on new i960
- Cree, Philips sign blue-laser agreement
- May 1, 1995
- Japan's IC prices headed up as yen gets stronger
- Seiko looking for OEMs for its watch-embedded FM subcarrier
- Custom IC conference offers submicron IC solutions
- Computer makers unite behind their own DVD wish list
- NIST to demo sensor standard
Other news sources on Techweb:
Toshiba to build Portland fab; IBM to take
part of the output
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp. has decided to abandon its long-held practice of keeping wafer fabrication at home and will build a quarter-micron memory fab in the Portland, Ore., area that will send a portion of its output to IBM Corp.
While the decision to build a billion-dollar facility in Portland has been made, Toshiba executives said that important discussions continue on what role IBM might play in the deal. IBM, Siemens and Toshiba engineers have worked together at East Fishkill, N.Y., to codevelop 64- and 256-Mbit DRAM designs and process technologies. The Portland fab would be ready by the end of 1996 to build third- and fourth-generation Toshiba-designed 16-Mbit DRAMs, while the cooperatively developed 64-/256-Mbit process would be used for production at Portland.
"IBM and Toshiba have spent a lot of money together, and there are more than 40 Toshiba engineers at East Fishkill," a Toshiba execut
ive said. "We want to provide IBM with part of the output, but the basic manufacturing and production technology will come from Toshiba. We still have a manufacturing edge, we think."
HP, AMD to develop a core for Geos-based handhelds
By
Junko Yoshida
SINGAPORE -- Hewlett-Packard Co. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have forged a long-term alliance to develop a highly integrated, low-power engine for HP's next-generation handheld devices.
Indeed, for its new family of advanced handheld products, HP will move away from the DOS environment--currently employed in HP's popular 200LX handheld devices--to a platform that uses the Geos operating system from GeoWorks, said Kheng Joo Khaw, HP's general manager for the Asia Pacific Personal Computer Division, based in Singapore.
Khaw called AMD "the next-generation platform partner."
AMD is expected to play a key role in developing a core-chip solution for HP's new Geos-based products. An ASIC that AMD will design exclusively for HP will feature "either a 386 or 486 core," Khaw said. "We need AMD to design a powerful enough engine so that it won't run out of steam on a long run."
The goal of the agreement is to help develop handheld devices that combine advanced PC functions and communications in a pocket form factor.
Analog H.324, video over LANs focus of desktop videoconference
By
Loring Wirbel
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Now that major OEMs have agreed to implement the International Telecommunications Union's (ITU) H.320 standard for videoconferencing over digital lines, attention is turning to the new H.324 standard for analog phones and to new strategies for isochronous conferences on LANs. At last week's Deskt
op Videoconferencing Conference (DVC) at the Hyatt Regency here, attendees argued that early H.324 implementations will spark a POTS (plain old telephone service) market for videoconferencing, pulling it out of its current niche application base.
AT&T Microelectronics (Berkeley Heights, N.J.) was the first to respond to the new efforts, launching a third version of its Audio Video Processor, or AVP III, which supports both H.320 and H.324 standards. The latter standard is expected to move to final draft in the ITU by November.
Andrew Davis, analyst for Forward Concepts Inc., said that the regional Bell operating companies begrudgingly are moving to wider basic-rate ISDN deployment in response to end-user pleas for high-speed digital access. But RBOCs still show signs of muffing a home market for ISDN, he said, thus necessitating H.324 options for videoconferencing. H.324 assumes data rates of 28.8 kbits/second, as specified in the V.34 standard. The digital equivalent, H.320, was challenged by
Intel Corp. through its Personal Conferencing Working Group, but PCWG capitulated to the industry last month and accepted the widespread adherence to ITU standards.
Notebook displays big at Japan show
By
Yoshiko Hara
YOKOHAMA, Japan -- The latest and biggest notebook displays highlighted last week's Electronic Display Exhibition (Edex '95) here, with Super VGA displays for multimedia stealing the spotlight.
As performance has improved for passive-matrix color displays, demand for the more-expensive thin-film transistor (TFT) displays has cooled.
The last few months have brought higher demand for supertwisted-nematic (STN) color displays. Now, active-matrix display makers are counting on Super VGA (SVGA)_aimed at multimedia notebooks that need to display moving images_to revive the TFT market.
Sharp Corp. showed off
11.3-inch (diagonal) SVGA panels in both active-matrix TFT and STN technologies, NEC announced a 7.5-mm-thick SVGA TFT, and Toshiba Corp. brought an SVGA panel lineup to Edex that ranged from 5- to 12.1-inch models.
Siemens, Zoran eye deeper ties
By
Junko Yoshida
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Siemens Corp. and Zoran Corp. are discussing broadening their current marketing agreement to include joint silicon development, a fab deal or an equity investment, officials confirmed.
The discussions come on the heels of a recent agreement through which Siemens, under its own brand name, will sell Zoran's MPEG-1 decoder ICs, motion JPEG controllers and Dolby AC-3 decoders worldwide except for the Japanese market.
"We hope this will be the starting point of a long, mutually fruitful relationship between the two companies," said Hartmut Fischer, w
orldwide-marketing manager of PC multimedia ICs for Siemens Components Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
Update: Atmel moves into SRAM market
By
Brian Fuller
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Atmel Corp., the rising specialty-memory and logic company that has made admirable margins in competitive markets, said last week it will enter one of the semiconductor business's toughest segments: SRAMs.
The company announced it is buying a 19-percent stake in fast-SRAM vendor Paradigm Technology Inc. (San Jose) in exchange for certain product rights and a possible seat on the board. Under a five-year deal, Paradigm, which emerged last year from Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, receives a capital infusion and wafers from Atmel's fab in Colorado Springs, Colo. No dollar value was offered for the equity stake because Paradigm remains privately held, but officials s
aid much of the money went to buy out certain investors.
"If we're going to be a billion-dollar company, we have to have an expanded business," Atmel sales vice president Jeff Katz said in an interview.
The deal gives Atmel access to Paradigm SRAM technology, which scales from 15-ns access to slower grades. Paradigm has honed its technology in recent years to play in the high-end PC and telecommunications segments with parts as fast as 8 ns and as dense as 4 Mbits, said Paradigm president and CEO Mike Gulett. The companies will jointly develop the next two generations of SRAMs, which will push past 8 ns, Gulett said.
Paradigm's parts are generally made in 0.7-micron CMOS, but engineers are working the kinks out of a 0.6-micron process that will be transferred to the Atmel fab and should be qualified by year's end, Gulett said. "This will help them work on 0.5- and 0.4-micron a lot sooner than they would by themselves," Katz said. That, in turn, will increase Paradigm's ability to design
denser and faster parts.
Atmel to enter SRAM market
By
Brian Fuller
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Atmel Corp., the fast-moving specialty memory and logic company, said on Monday that it would enter the SRAM business.
The company said it has entered an agreement with SRAM vendor Paradigm Technology Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., to provide Paradigm with manufacturing capacity in exchange for product rights. Atmel will support some of its customers with SRAM devices beginning in September and will also take a 19 percent stake in Paradigm, said Atmel president and CEO George Perlegos.
Paradigm President Mike Gulett said the deal will give his company access to advanced process technology at Atmel fabs.
U.K. may seek more investment
by U.S., Japanese firms
By
Peter Clarke
LONDON -- Launching a report that reviews the United Kingdom's strengths, weaknesses and prospects in technology, the Technology Foresight program has fired off a hit list of what needs to be done to give the United Kingdom leverage in the coming years. Paramount among the plans, which culminated from the program's panels of academics and industrialists that held meetings throughout 1994, is a recommendation for a multinational center that encourages inward investment by the United States and Japan.
In addition, the U.K. government should encourage the formation of technology centers for both microelectronics and display technology to promote electronics over the next 10 to 20 years. It should also help establish centers for distributed information management and electronics media. And U.K. companies should compete harder in global markets, especially with the United States.
Announced in 1993,
the Technology Foresight program has now produced reports from all fifteen of its panels that cover topics ranging from chemicals to transport and from food and drink to leisure and learning.
The report on information and technology (ITEC) will be of most interest to those working in hardware engineering, though nearly all panels emphasize the importance of electronics, computers and communications as the underpinning to future competitiveness in particular sectors, be they transport, construction or finance.
Intellon standardizes modules for CEbus networks
By
Loring Wirbel
OCALA, Fla. -- Intellon Corp. this month will offer a suite of standardized single-in-line memory modules (SIMM) to serve as network interfaces to the Electronics Industry Association's (EIA) Consumer Electronics Bus (or CEbus). The company hopes to make CEbus a
s well-known with second-tier developers as the Smart House network or Echelon Corp.'s LONworks.
The modules use both RF and power-line networking, as well as sensor interfaces to a CEbus network.
When combined with the development-software package now in beta sites, CEbench, the CEnode Points hardware will allow developers with little or no familiarity with CEbus protocols to create sensor and control networks. Eric Buffkin, vice president of marketing at Intellon, said that some industrial-control developers don't care whether they are using the EIA control bus. They simply want an efficient way to link a sensor with a control and actuator network. The combination of CEnode Points and CEbench marks the first time a simple suite of tools has been available with CEbus for this class of developer.
Intellon uses a common spread-spectrum protocol to carry CEbus signaling over both wireless-RF networks and power lines. Buffkin said that the spread-spectrum protocol does not resemble either direc
t-sequence or frequency-hopping spreaders common in wireless-LAN realms, but instead shares most features with "chirping" modulation from radar and sonar networks. The chirp pattern is recognized by each node on the network as the de facto carrier, giving Intellon its trade name of "Spread Spectrum Carrier." The spread-spectrum chirper does not require synchronization between nodes and allows Ethernet-like carrier-sensing/collision-detection protocols to be used for data packets on a CEbus.
Sunny days for AM-LCDs
By
David Lieberman
BOSTON -- Costly active-matrix (AM) LCDs are usually only called into duty when CRTs can't fill the bill because of issues of power, real estate or weight. But the Federal Aviation Administration has tapped an optically enhanced LCD because of its superiority to CRTs in one critical aspect: sunlight readability
.
By the end of August, the FAA will install its first flat-panel touch-screen display system in an airport control tower. It will be a Raytheon system using a 14.2-inch color LCD manufactured by Sharp Corp. in Japan and post-engineered by Electronic Designs Inc. (Westborough, Mass.).
-"Initially, we were going to use CRTs," said Reggie Howard, electrical engineer at the FAA's Great Lakes operation in Des Plaines, Ill.,"but we visited Dallas, Denver and other airports and talked to the air-traffic controllers. On a sunny day in a tower, which is mostly glass, it's difficult to read a CRT without looking hard. The image washes out," added Howard, who's now implementing the system that will control runway lighting at Chicago's O'Hare Airport as the model for future installations.
Howard has looked at CRT touch-input systems put together by non-FAA engineers at various city airports. "They have some work to do," he said. "You may have put $4 million and a lot of work into the greatest elect
ronics to create the display, but it's no good if the controller can't easily read it."
TI, HP and AT&T altering their strategies, target MCM market
By
Terry Costlow
DENVER -- Three captive multichip-module suppliers -- Texas Instruments Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and AT&T -- are altering their MCM strategies to address the merchant market, bolstering MCM vendors' claims that the segment is at last approaching critical mass.
In moves disclosed here late last month at the International Conference on MCMs, HP is selectively entering the merchant market, TI is expanding beyond its military base to court commercial customers and AT&T is scouting around for an external foundry.
After years of watching the vendor base shrink, MCM-industry observers are pleased to see major corporations offer products.
HP will lever
age the hybrid technology it has accumulated over the past 25 years to enter the merchant MCM market, selling to a small base of customers that are willing to sign long-term commitments.
"We're looking for partners who want to grow on a similar technology path," said Dan Reed, marketing manager at HP's Colorado Springs, Colo., Technology Tech Center. They will help guide our technology path and keep our internal customers on track.
Report from In-Stat
: Barriers to building info highway identified
BNR closes in on terabit-level switching
By
Peter Clarke
BERLIN -- Engineers at Bell Northern Research (BNR), the R&D arm of Northern Telecom, have achieved an experimental 160-Gbit/se
cond Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch as part of the company's drive toward terabit switching. Some studies predict that 1-Tbit (1,000-Gbit/s) rates will be required for multimedia services within a few years.
The architecture, described in a paper at the International Switching Symposium here recently, uses electro-optical technology, but an all-optical rework is planned that the BNR researchers say will dramatically simplify the cross-connection core. To keep a lid on development costs, the engineers used slower ATM-switch technology to buffer inputs and outputs in the initial design.
The experimental unit already switches four times the volume of data of the ATM switches currently deployed. Northern Telecom believes a 1-Tbit switch could be built by using several of the experimental 160-Gbit/s units in parallel, though the current switch may have to be refined in terms of the particular components used.
James Parker, manager of the terabit-switch project at BNR Europe (Harlow, England) an
d a coauthor of the the ISS paper, said that the BNR architecture "relies on the use of high-speed optical components, a unique traffic-management scheme and a technique known as wavelength-division multiplexing to achieve Tbit levels of switching capacity."
The architecture uses a cluster of buffered, lower-capacity ATM switches surrounding an electro-optical cross-connect. Each of 16 10-Gbit/s peripheral switches routes ATM cells and bundles channels together for bulk transmission across the core to other peripheral switches. An all-optical core-switching matrix would avoid the use of electronics at speeds above that of the satellite switch, thereby avoiding the attendant high power consumption, Parker said.
IBM's neural-based antivirus program eradicates the buggers
By
R. Colin Johnson
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. -- IBM Corp. is claiming that
its neural-based IBM AntiVirus program has detected and eradicated several new viruses automatically in the year since the program's release. The AntiVirus-development group, based here at the T.J. Watson Research Center, has also extended the biological analogy over the past year, incorporating neural networks into AntiVirus to create what it calls an "artificial immune system for computers." The modified version is due for release this fall.
"The biological analogy was made by the first person to call a computer virus a virus, but we were the first research group to take the analogy seriously," said Jeffrey Kephart, a manager at the Watson center's High Integrity Computing Laboratory.
According to Kephart, biological analogies are necessary to combat the increasing speed with which computer viruses spread. "Now it typically takes many months before a new virus spreads around the world. But once you get a virus that can spread in days or hours, you need something that responds to new viruses right t
here on the spot," Kephart said.
The principal reason for the currently "slow" reproduction rate of computer viruses is that they typically spread when floppy disks are exchanged. The category of virus most often spread in this way is the so-called boot-sector virus. "Of the two categories of virus -- boot-sector or executable-file viruses -- there exist only about 250 boot-sector viruses, out of 3,500 known viruses," Kephart said. But while boot-sector viruses "account for less than 10 percent of the known viruses, they create more than 90 percent of the infections."
IBM thus concentrated its neural network's efforts on boot-sector viruses.
Board synthesis readied
By
Richard Goering
PITTSBURGH -- Providing a new avenue for high-level design, Omniview Inc.'s Fidelity tool set is claimed to be the first board-level synthesis tool that ca
n generate a detailed logical description from high-level graphical and VHDL input. Omniview will formally introduce and demonstrate the tool at next month's Design Automation Conference in San Francisco.
While such vendors as Interconnectix, Harris EDA and Unicad have described some of their products as "board synthesis" tools, those offerings are based on timing-driven pc-board layout. Fidelity, in contrast, operates solely in the logical domain. The tool selects off-the-shelf parts and automatically produces schematics, bills of materials and synthesizable VHDL code from abstract block-diagram descriptions.
Chief engineer Robert Gonzalez said "With ASIC synthesis, you have regular components that are well-defined and you work at most with a few thousand of those," Gonzalez said. "With board design, you're picking components out of a very, very large set of available parts."
Fore bases ATM swit
ches on new i960
By
Loring Wirbel
WARRENDALE, Pa. -- Fore Systems Inc. has updated its private-backbone Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch architectures with a new i960 processor base and has e-quipped the line's higher end models with Northern Telecom's Magellan 10-Gbit backplane.
Last summer, Fore introduced prototypes of ASX-200BX and ASX-200BXE models. But company executives said a new technology available through a Northern Telecom partnership, as well as an examination of i960 architectures, convinced Fore to update its high-end switching products for corporate backbones.
Fore already offers LAN-interface ATM switches (in the LAX family) and ATM workgroup switches (in the ASX-200 family). The latter family is based on Sparc architectures and allows scalability for some enterprise-backbone-switching functions.
But switch-marketing director Joe Skorupa said that the need for greater fault tolerance and hot-swappability of module
and power supplies required a dedicated architecture for an enterprise switch that would link ATM workgroup switches with such WAN edge switches as Northern Telecom's Magellan.
Cree, Philips sign blue-laser agreement
By
Ashok Bindra
DURHAM, N.C. -- Under a joint development pact signed late last month, Cree Research Inc. and Philips Laboratories are developing blue laser diodes based on gallium nitride (GaN) materials grown on silicon carbide (SiC) wafers. The joint project is partially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa), which is matching the partners' $4 million combined investment.
The two-year effort will focus on development of blue laser diodes for commercial optical-storage applications and for use in critical military systems.
Cree brings its basic materials technology and blue-LED expertise to the program. Phi
lips Laboratories (Briarcliff, N.Y.), a division of Philips Electronics North America, will contribute its laser-fabrication, -handling and -testing technologies. A Philips researcher said the company's experience with wide-bandgap optoelectronic devices will benefit the development effort.
Because of its shorter wavelength compared with laser light of other colors, blue laser light can be focused to a smaller spot on a disk, thereby increasing the number of tracks available for memory storage, according to Cree. Philips researchers said that a shift from red to blue lasers yields a fourfold improvement in achievable optical-storage density, without any coding-scheme enhancements.
Japan's IC prices headed up as yen gets stronger
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- Look for a second wave of price increases by Japan's semiconductor companies, with their
South Korean counterparts expected to follow. This was what executives said privately last week at Dataquest's 1995 Japanese Semiconductor Industry Conference.
The move would be in response to March's sharp rise in the price of the yen, which came on the heels of a general 5 percent boost in the price of chips. Hajime Sasaki, who heads NEC Corp.'s Semiconductor Division, told
EE Times
that NEC will raise prices this time by 5 percent to 7 percent on most products, with the exception of 16-Mbit DRAMs.
Toshiba Corp. also will boost most product prices by about 5 percent. Masanobu Ohyama, group executive of Toshiba's semiconductor operations, said, "Many people focus on the shortage of DRAMs. But demand is strong for logic devices, such as high-end microprocessors and PC chip sets."
Mentor Graphics Corp. chief executive officer Wally Rhines said one worry is that prices for end-use electronics equipment could go up if Japanese and Korean companies raise prices. "If consumers see price
s go up on computers that have enough memory to run Windows 95, there could be some slowdown in sales," he warned.
Seiko looking for OEMs for its watch-embedded FM subcarrier
By
Loring Wirbel
BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Seiko Communications Systems Inc. is looking to parlay an FM technology first used in its Dick Tracy-like wristwatch--MessageWatch--into a general-purpose messaging system competing with digital cellular networks.
The company is talking to OEMs about embedding its FM subcarrier-band technology--unveiled last November in MessageWatch, which sports an FM receiver and message display--in PDAs and car radios for intelligent-vehicle and other communications systems. Seiko hopes to license chip designs to outside IC manufacturers as well, to broaden the receiver-chip-set offerings.
The FM network is known as Acttive, for advanced co
mmunications and timekeeping technology. Mike Park, vice president of business development at Seiko, said that almost as soon as prototype units of MessageWatch were finished, sponsors of the Seattle area intelligent vehicle highway system project expressed interest. Swift talked to Seiko about working with IBM and Delco Electronics on embedded FM subcarrier support for vehicle messages, Park said. The project would embed receivers in car radios and IBM portable computers, and would integrate the messaging system with Global Positioning System navigational modules.
Custom IC conference offers submicron IC solutions
By
Richard Goering
and
Brian Fuller
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Three products that promise to significantly ease the task of designing high-performance, deep-submicron ICs will be introduced at this w
eek's Custom Integrated Circuits Conference here. Cooper & Chyan Technology Inc. (CCT) will enter the IC-layout market with a "shape-based" routing technology; Cadence Design Systems will present a tool suite for data-path ICs, and Mentor Graphics Corp. will offer a transistor-level power-analysis tool.
While CICC is normally a focused, academically oriented show without much vendor activity, this year's event is preoccupied with a compelling need to bring deep-submicron ICs into the commercial marketplace. Concerns about interconnect delays, die size and power consumption are high on the minds of ASIC and custom-IC designers.
Computer makers unite behind their own DVD wish list
By
Junko Yoshida
SAN FRANCISCO -- An ad hoc computer industry group is jumping into the Digital Video Disk (DVD) format war, advancing its own proposals on n
ew CD-ROM media and system compatability. At the same time, one of the two competing technologies gained new support.
The new computer group, called the industry Technical Working Group (TWG), is composed of five leading U.S. computer hardware and software companies. It will disclose--possibly as early as this week--the computer industry's nine requirements for a DVD format. The disclosures will end a long industry silence on the DVD format issue, although how much say the computer industry will have is uncertain.
The TWG is currently composed of IBM Corp., Apple Computer, Compaq Computer, Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard. Its forthcoming recommendations will "carry the full weight and support, both in business and technical aspects" of each participating company, said Alan Bell, optical data storage systems scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., a leading member of the group.
Meanwhile, Philips Electronics N.V. and Sony Corp. last week announced endorsements f
rom a host of CD-ROM drive manufacturers, including Acer Peripherals, Alps, JVC, Mistumi, Ricoh, Teac and Wearnes Peripherals, in support of their high-density "MultiMedia CD" format, a new name introduced last week for what they previously called High Density CD (HDCD). The Sony-Philips CD format is battling for acceptance as the next-generation CD-ROM storage/playback standard with one proposed by Toshiba and a consortium of other hardware manufacturers.
NIST to demo sensor standard
BOSTON -- A group trying to create a standard for attaching sensors to digital systems has
completed a proof of concept, demonstrating that sensors can be linked to incompatible local-area networks. The prototype will be displayed here at the Sensors Expo conference, May 16-18, after which the group will decide whether to create a draft standard.
The Smart Transducer Interface group, cosponsored by the
IEEE and National Institute of Standards and Technology, is trying to cut sensor costs by making it easier to design a single version. Sensors are now being attached to a variety of incompatible, proprietary local-area networks for factory automation.
The demonstration will link 11 sensors from five companies to a pair of networks: Echelon's LonWorks and Allen-Bradley's DeviceNet.
After the prototype is demonstrated, the group will decide whether to write a standard. That decision will depend on potential support and technology, said Kang Lee, an NIST official who chairs the standards effort. For information, call Tammie Grice at (301) 975-3883.
The standards group is also gathering information on the requirements for sensors and actuators. An applications questionnaire is being circulated in the sensor community. A copy of the
questionnaire
with an e-mail return to NIST is posted on
EE Times-
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