EET-i Top of the News
Week of May 22, 1995
- May 25, 1995
 VRWorld '95: Second generation PowerGlove slated for 1996
- Fight breaks out over home-electronics standard
- Acer chip set targets workstations, servers
- Silicon Architects licenses ASIC architecture to Fujitsu, NEC, and Toshiba
- Intel readying audio develop
ers' kit for NSP
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- May 24, 1995
- HIT Lab's Furness Predicts Internet to Perform VR Litmus Test
- European chip market grows, but Euro companies at risk
- Gopher will be navigable in three dimensions
- Four firms bid to set de facto voice codec standard
- Pac Bell, Ericsson in wireless pact
- Taiwan's TFT-LCDs: too littl
e too late?
- May 23, 1995
- New virtual-reality products previewed at VRWorld
- SurfWatch promotes home censorship
- Syzygy supports IETF's RSVP Protocol
- First Virtual works with AT&T on new ATM switch
- Digital radio emerging from the lab
- Fujitsu is readying plasma LCDs for the Olympics
- May 22, 1995
- Sensors vendors sense VR's for rea
l
- Japanese giants making big screen play
- Nvidia bets on games with multimedia chip
- Real-timers eye spec for embedded computing
- DSPx Conference: get ready for 400-Mips DSP
Other news sources on Techweb:
VRWorld '95: Second generation Po
werGlove slated for 1996
By
R. Colin Johnson
SAN JOSE, Calif.--The PowerGlove, which became the the most sought-after virtual reality (VR) input device ever produced despite being discontinued, will see a second generation, according to its designers, Abrams Gentile Entertainment Inc. AGE (New York City) revealed at the VRWorld'95 Conference and Exhibition here that on June 1, it will officially announce the second generation device, dubbed the PC PowerGlove.
"We designed the original PowerGlove for Mattel in 1989, and they sold 1.7 million of them before it was discontinued. Unfortunately, we still get about 10 calls a day from VR researchers asking where they can find used ones," said AGE president, Chris Gentile.
The PowerGlove was not considered a success by Mattel, which discontinued the device barely a year after it was announced. Since then the PowerGlove has become a favorite of VR researchers, who have driven the price of used units u
p much higher than their original selling price ($89). "There is really nothing else like it available," said Linda Jacobson, author of the book "Garage Virtual Reality" and chairperson of the "Low-cost VR" session here at VRWorld.
The new PC PowerGlove ($120) will be marketed by AGE directly to VR developers, who in turn are expected to resell it to end-users. The revised design features a removable tracking unit that sits atop of each hand, and which can be used as a three-dimensional five-degree-of-freedom mouse when detached.
Each finger in the PC PowerGlove will have six sensors that relay the angle at which each finger is bent to a host computer over a serial 9600 bit/per/second interface communicating wirelessly using ultrasonic sound. The sampling rate has been increased from the original 20 Hz to 60Hz, and the absolute resolution of the new unit is one-eighth of an inch.
An output piezoelectric device has also been installed in the revised PC PowerGlove design, so that a form of force feedba
ck can be communicated to the user when, for instance, picking up or pushing around objects in virtual reality. "We have also added a sensor that lets you know when the user starts to sweat--that should be fun for developers to incorporate into action scenarios," Gentile said. The developers' version of the PC PowerGlove will be available by the end of 1995 (watch the
AGE Web site
for the announcement on June 1.
Fight breaks out over home-electronics standard
By
Junko Yoshida
and
George Leopold
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- The fight for control of the electronic infrastructure in the home heated up this week as an automation vendor jousted with government regulators over a bus standard for the set-top box.
In an effort to implement compatibility regulations that a
re part of the 1992 Cable TV Act, the Federal Communications Commission is considering adopting a decoder interface standard proposed by the Electronic Industries Association (EIA).
Doing so could make cable-ready TV a "gatekeeper device" that limits access by other devices, charged home-automation system vendor Echelon Corp. (Palo Alto, Calif.).
Echelon urged PC vendors and utilities companies to write to FCC chairman Reed Hundt asking the agency to back off from setting technical standards in home-automation and related products.
In a proposal filed last summer, the EIA suggested using AVBus to control channels between set-top boxes and cable-ready TVs and VCRs. AVBus is a subset of the CEBus (Consumer Electronics Bus) protocol, a technology that competes with Echelon's LonWorks.
Acer chip set targets workstations, servers
By
Rick Boyd
-Merritt
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Acer Laboratories Inc. is aiming at high-end workstation and server designs with its Genie chip set, which will be officially launched on Monday. The three-chip set supports systems using as many as four Intel P54C, P55C, Cyrix M1 or Advanced Micro Devices K5 processors in symmetric-multiprocessing workstations or servers.
Acer has leveraged the 64-bit multiprocessing bus it created for its Pica chip set for use in the Genie core logic. The company hopes to grab design wins from top-tier PC makers that want an alternative to an Intel-only solution to a multiprocessing system that uses a P54C or P55C processor with an Intel Neptune or Neptune II chip set, or a P6 processor with an Intel Orion chip set.
Chin Wu, president of Acer Laboratories, said he expects most of the initial users of the chips will be companies redesigning P54C servers for the faster P55C chip.
Silicon Architects licenses ASIC architecture to Fujitsu, NEC, and Toshiba
By
Ron Wilson
and
Richard Goering
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- A simmering revolt against the status quo of gate-array technology heated to a boil this week when Synopsys Inc.'s Silicon Architects Group (SiArc) announced partnerships with three of the world's leading ASIC vendors. Fujitsu Ltd., NEC Corp. and Toshiba Corp. have licensed SiArc's innovative Cell-Based Array (CBA) architecture, giving the Synopsys subsidiary a forceful nudge toward recognition.
But analysts last week called the agreements only one wave of a sea change sweeping the ASIC community.
The three ASIC vendors gain access to the SiArc architecture to build base arrays for their own use or to offer to ASIC customers. SiArc, for its part, will derive revenue via intellectual-property licenses, a per-chip royalty based on die-size savings and the sale of compilatio
n tools. Synopsys president and chief executive officer Aart de Geus said those sources could become a major part of the total Synopsys revenue base but declined to predict any numbers.
"This fits into our design imperative," said de Geus. "We have said we need to increase productivity tenfold every six years. One way to do that is designing at higher level; another is design reuse of intellectual property. For design reuse, you need to have a solid foundation."
Intel readying audio developers' kit for NSP
By
Ashok Bindra
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Taking another step toward implementing native signal processing (NSP) in Pentium-based PCs, Intel Corp. disclosed the availability of its Native audio developers' kit for an NSP platform at the recent DSPx conference held here. The kit is slated for release by the end of June. In addition, Intel Archit
ecture Development Lab's vice president and director Craig Kinnie also released Native audio-performance benchmarks based on a 100-MHz Pentium CPU. Kinnie presented the amount of Pentium processing power required as a percentage of the total CPU power for functions such as audio mixing, sample-rate conversion, GSM speech encoder/decoder, DigiTalk (encode/ decode), and TrueSpeech (encode/decode).
Intel said that CPU utilization percentages for audio applications were generated in the Windows 3.1 environment. And the applications were localized around the algorithm, so the CPU was not interrupted with the traditional tasks. Intel's performance chart showed that audio mixing of eight channels of audio stereo at 22 ksamples/second required 9 percent processing power of a 100-MHz Pentium, while DigiTalk speech compression consumed 16 percent and the TrueSpeech algorithm utilized 32 percent of the CPU load. TrueSpeech was implemented in floating-point arithmetic format.
According to Phil Lapsley, vice presi
dent of consulting firm Berkeley Design Technology (BDT; Fremont, Calif.), the audio applications disclosed by Intel at the conference are at the very low end of multimedia performance.
HIT Lab's Furness Predicts Internet to Perform VR Litmus Test
By
R. Colin Johnson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Thomas Furness, inventor of the head-mounted display and director of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle) predicted that the Internet will be the testbed that validates VR during his keynote address yesterday here at the VRWorld'95 Conference and Exhibition .
Furness gained his fame from his work for the Air Force in the 1960s where he managed the laboratory where the head mounted display was invented. That helmet-mounted military-grade display was created to assist jet fighter pilots visualize the enormous amounts
of information they manage during dogfights. Over 30 years later, Furness now manages the world's best funded and most prestigious VR development group--the HIT Lab.
"This is my first speech at an event such as this--in the past I have avoided such commercialism, because I thought you were just in it for the money and were giving the field a bad name," Furness explained. In contrast, the HIT Lab's primary goals include enabling people with disabilities or "awakening a sleeping generation of public school students," as Furness puts it. Furness claimed that public school students today forget most of what they are taught, but never forget a single lesson taught to them in virtual reality.
Furness also claimed that the free Internet, not the commercial entertainment ventures, will be the pioneering arena that provides the content that will make VR an everyday reality for future citizens. "If history has taught us anything, it is that we cannot predict what the future content will be whenever new media,
such as VR, is invented. I now firmly believe that the Internet, and not the entertainment industry, will define the content that will make VR a successful field in the future," Furness said.
Furness likened the Internet pioneers who are currently creating freely accessible virtual worlds for the World Wide Web (WWW) using the virtual reality modeling language (VRML) and Gopher+, to Isaac Newton. Many researchers before Newton were hit on the head by apples, but "Newton had the vision to understand what that meant," Furness said. Likewise, the most visionary Internet content providers are providing free access to VR over the Internet, rather than trying to cash in on the craze.
European chip market grows, but Euro companies at risk
By
Peter Clarke
PARIS -- Offshore suppliers have been the big gainers from Europe's semiconductor boom, and
the result is that Europe's second-tier silicon providers are in danger of being bought for capacity. That is the word here this week from observers at Dataquest's annual European Semiconductor Industry Conference.
The market-analysis firm revealed revised figures for Europe in 1994 showing a phenomenal 35 percent market growth over 1993 after a preliminary forecast of a 30 percent increase. For 1995, the prediction is for another 25 percent jump to take the European market to $26 billion from $20.8 billion.
For the world semiconductor market, Dataquest revised its 1994 growth figure upward a bit to 29.3 percent and predicted that global sales would total $136 billion in 1995, up a further 23 percent.
Mike Glennon, senior industry analyst at Dataquest's European semiconductor group (High Wycombe, England), warned that Europe's indigenous manufacturers are continuing to lose market share in their home continent, with suppliers from the Asia-Pacific and Japanese regions gaining mainly through memory s
ales.
Philips, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics and Siemens, had all restructured significantly to achieve profitable growth, address the global market and concentrate on higher growth segments of the market, but second-tier are at risk. For example, Atmel (San Jose, Calif.) is buying what was a struggling ASIC manufacturer, European Silicon Structures (Aix-en-Provence, France).
Gopher will be navigable in three dimensions
By
R. Colin Johnson
Minneapolis -- The Gopher development team at the University of Minneapolis has just finished work on a three-dimensional virtual-reality (VR) version of the team's client software. TurboGopherVR presents the thousands of Gopher databases in use worldwide as 3-D structures in so-called Gopherspace.
Gopherspace one-ups the recent announcement of a virtual-reality modeling language (VRML) for the Worl
d Wide Web by adding 3-D attributes to existing Gopher databases (Web databases must be completely rewritten to take advantage of VRML).
Gopher databases can also be rewritten to offer many of the same capabilities as VRML (Gopher+). But even the humblest existing Gopher databases can be transformed into 3-D virtual realities via TurboGopherVR.
TurboGopherVR is available now at no cost for Unix and PowerPC-based Macintoshes.
Download Unix versions from: gopher://boombox.micro.umn.edu/11/gopher/Unix/GopherVR
or from:
ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher/Unix/GopherVR
Download PowerPC versions from:
gopher://boombox.micro.umn.edu/11/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/TurboGopherVR
or from:
ftp://boombox.micro.umn.edu/pub/gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/TurboGopherVR
Versions for other platforms are under development.
Four firms bid to set de facto voice code
c standard
By
Peter Clarke
LISBON -- In a move that could create a de facto standard for the post-PCS auction market, a voice codec system that promises improved performance has been selected by the four leading developers of PCS-1900 digital mobile communications systems.
But the move, by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Northern Telecom, is creating friction with the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (Sophia Antipolis, France) which began its own procedure here to select an enhanced full rate (EFR) vocoder for GSM and the DCS-1800 system on which the PCS-1900 (sometimes called DCS-1900) system is based.
The major difference among the three digital systems is in the carrier frequency, with the protocols being almost identical. GSM is a mobile cellular system used in Europe and in many other countries that operates at 900 MHz. DCS-1800, which has the scope to be microcellular, is the basis for a pan-European personal commu
ncations service (PCS) operating at 1,800M Hz. To date, the only difference required for the United States is a shift in carrier frequncy to 1,900 MHz.
For both GSM and DCS-1800 a so-called half-rate codec has been standardized. By compressing the voice channel into half the time and creating twice as many time-slots to carry conversations the half-rate codec can relieve congestion and allow more people to make calls in a busy cell.
But prospective U.S. service providers have complained about the quality of sound produced by the half-rate codec. Jim Carey, vice-president of marketing at Motorola's mobile telecommunications operation, said the move by the four companies to adopt a 13-kbit/second speech-coding algorithm developed at Sherbrooke University in Canada had been done under pressure from prospective North American providers of PCS services. He said the service providers want better voice quality than PCS-1900 could supply with its present vocoder.
Pac Bell, Ericsson in wireless pact
SAN RAMON Calif. -- Pacific Bell Mobile Services signed a $300 million deal last week with Ericsson Inc. Radio Systems for Personal Communication Services (PCS) networks.
The pact represents an important vote of confidence in both Time Division Multiple Access channelization methods, and Global Systems for Mobile telecommunications (GSM) air interfaces for PCS. Pacific Bell will use Ericsson base-station equipment and handsets for the two-state area it won in recent FCC auctions, covering 30 million potential customers in California and Nevada.
Pacific Bell executives wouldn't comment on reports that Motorola Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. were among the bidders beaten out by Ericsson.
Taiwan's TFT-LCDs: too little too late?
By
Mark
Carroll
HSINCHU, Taiwan -- In its impressive march toward building a broad-based electronics industry, Taiwan may be running into a glass wall.
The country has thrown academic research, engineering power and government aid at the challenge of becoming a world electronics force. Now companies here are finding--as have their American counterparts--that putting the infrastructure in place to build LCDs isn't as easy as it looks through the window.
One Taiwanese company--Unipac Optoelectronics Corp.--currently turns out some thin-film transistor (TFT) LCDs for commercial markets, and at least one other vendor here will do so this year. Several others are poised to join them by 1997, all angling toward the 10.4-inch form factor popular with notebook manufacturers. But labor crunches, technology issues and component availability are conspiring to make that schedule seem overly ambitious.
A lack of sufficient labor resources threatens to constrain the hoped-for business expansion and looms as the
biggest problem for existing and potential LCD OEMs in Taiwan, said Gary Pan, marketing engineer for Prime View International Co., which plans to begin producing TFT displays by year's end.
New virtual-reality products previewed at VRWorld
By
R. Colin Johnson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- New tools for creating virtual reality (VR) are being previewed this week at the VRWorld '95 Conference and Exhibition starting here today, including two new electronic gloves, the first under-$10,000 turnkey development system and new development software for the nonprogrammer.
Fakespace Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.) is demonstrating its new electronic-glove technology called Pinch--a subsystem consisting of software, interface electronics and two electronic gloves containing conductive sensors in each fingertip. Used by developers of immersive visualization applicatio
ns, Pinch notifies the host computer whenever two or more fingers are touching and has a mount on the back of each glove for an optional tracking unit.
On the other hand, Virtual Technologies (Virtex, Palo Alto, Calif.) is demonstrating its new GestureGlove subsystem, which adds software to its existing electronic CyberGlove that recognizes up to 256 user-defined gestures.
On the software side, Sense8 Corp. (Mill Valley, Calif.) is showing its new turnkey development environment combining its existing WorldToolKit software development package with a high-speed hardware accelerator. According to the company, the WorldToolKit NT brings real-time, fully immersive VR under the $10,000 price barrier (you supply the PC) for the first time. The key to this price-barrier breaker is an OEM version of the Intergraph Computer Systems' GL accelerator card, previously only available on Intergraph's high-end workstations ($40,000 and up).
Based on the OpenGL application programmers interface (API), the bundled Wor
ldToolKit NT system offers real-time performance with full texture mappings for all objects in the virtual world. Texture mapping, according to the company, is the key to providing convincing, compelling realism in virtual worlds. The GL accelerator can map multiple textures to multiple objects within a 1,152- x 864-pixel 24-bit-color window, at up to 15 million pixels/second mapped onto as many as 440,000 independent three-sided polygons.
Sense8 will also be privately previewing its next-generation WorldToolKit in its suite at the conference hotel. The company claimed its as-yet-unnamed incarnation of the WorldToolKit will bring virtual-world-building tools to the nonprogrammer for the first time. Similarly, Division Inc. (Chapel Hill, N.C.) will also be demonstrating the new version 3.0 of its dVISE world-building tool kit, which that company also claims will bring virtual-world building to the nonprogrammer for the first time.
SurfWatch promotes home censorship
By
Loring Wirbel
LOS ALTOS, Calif. -- SurfWatch Inc., a startup formed by Internet pioneers Ann and Bill Duvall, introduced a special application package for parents and educators that the company claims could eliminate the need for legislation like the Communications Decency Act. SurfWatch 1.0 blocks client access to certain newsgroups, Web sites, Gopher databases and chat services that contain pornographic material.
The package is intended for use with direct SLIP/PPP or ISDN links to the Internet itself, not for commercial on-line services with Internet gateways, such as AOL or Prodigy. Client packages are $49.95, with monthly subscription updates priced at $5.95 per month. Macintosh versions are shipping now, with DOS/Windows versions in July. SurfWatch emphasizes that its list of 250 services is a subjective one, but that it will customize block lists at customers' request.
Syzygy supports IETF's RSVP Protocol
By
Loring Wirbel
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. -- Syzygy Communications Inc. has added support for the Internet Engineering Task Force's RSVP protocol to its suite of Network Quality of Service Solution (NQSS) transport stacks for isochronous information. RSVP, the Resource ReserVation Protocol, is a packet-prioritization scheme being developed in IETF, expected to go out for Request for Comment by late summer, which will allow time-dependent information such as streaming video to be carried over TCP/IP networks.
Syzygy developed a series of protocol stack products aimed at emerging Asynchronous Transfer Mode applications. All of its transport-layer services are provided in a proprietary module called ATM-T, which performs data segmentation/reassembly, flow control, bit-error selection, and ordering of IP-encapsulat
ed data.
Syzygy's initial network-layer products used an implementation of ST2, the IETF's Streaming Protocol V.2 for streaming data in Internet networks. ST2 is used in the Defense Department's Defense Simulation Internet (DSI). Last January, Syzygy and Bay Networks Inc. showed preliminary work at ComNet on routers for the DSI, which used the Syzygy NQSS tools to implement Quality of Service parameters.
First Virtual works with AT&T on new ATM switch
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- First Virtual Corp., the Asynchronous Transfer Mode specialist launched last year by Ralph Ungermann, is moving to a new generation of ATM workgroup switch utilizing an ASIC co-designed with AT&T Microelectronics. The new MS-Flex architecture differentiates First Virtual from its technology licensing partner, Advanced Telecommunications Modules Ltd. (Cambridge, England). In fact, First Virtual now is marketing it
s per-port pricing aggressively against the Virata switch line introduced last month by ATM Ltd.
Doug Tsui, director of marketing at First Virtual, said that the MS-Flex workgroup switch provides a convincing case for customers with new LAN sites to move to end-to-end ATM, since 25-Mbit/second ATM ports will be priced at $300 per port. First Virtual will keep its packet processing based on an Advanced RISC Modules RISC architecture, but the new AT&T ASIC will handle FIFO-based cell buffering, transmission convergence for 25-Mbit services, and management of streaming and bursty services. Tsui said that the combination of proprietary hardware and First Virtual's Media Operating System should convince skeptics that the company brings a lot of its own talents to bear in the ATM switch market.
The $5,300 baseline MS-Flex switch combines low-speed desktop links at 25 Mbits with special server ports, which can be outfitted with 155-Mbit Sonet or 100-Mbit Taxi interfaces. The switch provides eight full-dupl
ex 25-Mbit ports, two high-speed ports using 100- or 155-Mbit interfaces, and a special LAN Emulation port for links to traditional Ethernet networks. Up to five workgroup switches can be cascaded for full throughput of 5 Gbits. In addition to competing with ATM Ltd., AMP Inc.'s ConnectWare subsidiary, and IBM Corp., Tsui said he expects to compete directly against companies like Whitetree Networking Technologies Inc., which offer switched-LAN and ATM ports in a single switch.
Digital radio emerging from the lab
By
George Leopold
CLEVELAND -- Industry groups are wrapping up laboratory testing of seven candidate digital radio systems and expect to begin field testing in August prior to recommending a digital audio radio-broadcast standard to federal regulators by year's end. Precisely when terrestrial digital radio will be deployed remains uncle
ar, however, with proponents cautiously predicting that it will take almost a decade to earn broad consumer acceptance.
The Electronic Industries Association (EIA) and the National Radio Systems Committee have been the testing systems at NASA's Lewis Research Center here since April 1994. The final phase involves compatibility testing to determine whether in-band/on-channel systems can operate with analog stations and FM subcarriers.
While predictions are vague about when terrestrial digital audio radio will take off , industry groups remain bullish about the prospects for merging digital technology with radio broadcasting. The EIA, for example, estimates that U.S. sales of consumer audio products topped $8 billion in 1994 and that CD player sales made up more than half the total.
While broadcasters are close to agreeing on an HDTV standard, there is little enthusiasm so far among manufacturers to begin developing chip sets and other components for digital TV. Shapiro said digital radio will not face
the same problem. "You won't have the chicken-or-the-egg problem" once a digital radio standard is approved, he predicted.
Indeed, IC makers such as National Semiconductor Corp. have announced plans to develop chip sets for Chicago-based USA Digital Radio's AM and FM in-band/on-channel technique (see April 17, page 2).
The industry groups sponsoring the tests have adopted a series of objectives for digital radio service, including CD quality sound, immunity to multipath and other interference, no "objectionable" interference to other services, controling transmission costs as well as receiver complexity and cost and additional data capacity.
Improved data capacity could prove important if digital radio finds its way into car dashboards, proponents say. For example, the Federal Highway Administration's Intelligent Transportation System is expected to have large data-transmission requirements for navigation and other national services. However, the program has recently appeared on congressional budget
-cutters' hit lists.
Fujitsu is readying plasma LCDs for the Olympics
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- Fujitsu will invest nearly a billion dollars in a new factory to make 42-inch (diagonal) plasma displays that would be used in flat-screen high-definition televisions, a senior Fujitsu Ltd. executive said. The plan is to get the factory built and making displays in time for people to watch the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
Fujitsu plans to invest 80 billion yen ($941 million) in the new factory. Locations near Kobe and in Miyazaki prefecture are being evaluated now.
Fujitsu currently markets a 24-inch diagonal plasma display, and about 1,000 of them are being supplied to the New York Stock Exchange as a combination television/computer display. Hotels, train stations, retail stores, and other public gathering spots are potentially a la
rge market.
Fujitsu's goal is to reduce the cost of plasma displays to about $110 per diagonal inch, but the current production cost is nearly three times that much, a Fujitsu engineer said. "We believe the production process for plasma displays is simple enough so that we can get the costs down, once volume production begins. That is our here-and-now challenge."
Sensors vendors sense VR's for real
By
Terry Costlow
BOSTON -- In an effort to fuel the market, the young solid-state-sensor industry is taking aim at virtual reality (VR) systems -- an even younger enterprise. Several vendors at the Sensors Expo, in Boston, last week, mentioned VR as a potentially hot area. What's more, sensing technology will be front and center this week at the VR World Conference, in San Jose, Calif.
While in agreement that growth opportunity exists and low pri
cing is key, sensor vendors are skeptical about the timetable for VR market takeoff.
For designers of VR systems, sensors are an extremely critical component -- accelerometers and magnetic sensors are two of the primary applications. They sit in headsets, letting the system know when the user's head turns.
"Sensors are definitely an enabler," said Eric Tseo, electrical engineer at Virtual I-O Inc. (Seattle). "More and more of our input is not by keyboard or mouse, it's more interactive. Sensors are the only thing that work."
Many makers of solid-state sensors, which are just starting to see a solid market takeoff, believe that the potential for VR systems to become consumer items is large, but won't be particularly significant for some time. But others say that the market opportunity for this year is fairly significant.
Japanese giants making big screen play
By
Junko Yoshida
and
David Lammers
AKITA, Japan -- Better screens, at much better prices, are headed for the notebook-computer market -- so many, in fact, that an oversupply may be imminent. Despite such concerns, the Japanese powerhouses of the LCD world -- NEC, Fujitsu and Toshiba -- are moving full-bore to open new production lines and develop more advanced active-matrix panels.
Last week, NEC dedicated a new AM-TFT production line, which will turn out some 100,000 panels per month by year's end.
Meanwhile, AM LCD latecomer Fujitsu is making substantial LCD investments in both Japan and the United States. Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc. swung the doors open last month on its new Flat Panel Display Products business unit (San Jose, Calif.), marking its entry into the U.S. LCD market, and this week will reveal plans to sample low-power, 8.4-inch displays using low-temperature (500ýC) polysilicon technology next year. Back in Japan, Fujitsu's
Yonago fab will boost overall production capacity from 30,000 units per month now to 110,000 units in 1996 for 10.4- to 11.3-inch color TFT LCDs.
And Display Technology Inc. (DTI, Himeji, Japan), a joint venture of Toshiba Corp. and IBM, is set to double its production to 400,000 displays per month, by spring of next year.
The aggressive moves by Japanese vendors could be prompted in part by fear of foreign competition.
Peter Wolff, Asian technology analyst at Baring Securities (Japan), said that "Japanese companies have got to stay at the high end of the technology, because the Koreans and Taiwanese are coming on." Wolff said he talked to the U.S. manager of a South Korean company that is quoting $588 to $705 for an AM screen now and that promises "no premium for S-VGA by the fourth quarter."
Nvidia bets on games with multimedia chip
By
Ron Wils
on
and
Junko Yoshida
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Betting their stake on the home-PC games market, startup Nvidia Corp. and its technology partner SGS-Thomson will announce today their version of an integrated multimedia controller chip for personal computers. The NV1 combines GUI acceleration, 3-D rendering, video acceleration and audio processing on a single die.
But the integrated chip makes a number of critical feature and performance trade-offs in unique waysýways that could limit the NV1's appeal to the games developers on which it depends. And the chip's price, while less than that of high-end 3-D rendering chips, is still going to be a bitter pill for cost-constrained home-PC developers.
Nvidia has taken a focused, consumer approach, defining its chip as a solution to turn a personal computer into a "PC video-game console," with a goal to allow PCs to compete against Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation and Nintendo's Ultra 64. What Nvidia is after is not a s
cientific/CAD-oriented 3-D market, but a consumer 3-D playback market, explained Nvidia director of marketing Michael Hara.
"So far, a lot of home-PC games have been underwhelming compared with their game-console counterparts," said Hara.
Real-timers eye spec for embedded computing
By
David Lieberman
PHOENIX -- Representatives from nearly 40 companies will meet for the first time here Wednesday to hash out a standard operating-system framework for embedded and real-time computing.
The Embedded Systems Software Environment initiative (ESSE) is driven by dual dissatisfactions: with the limited scope of Posix and the perceived inadequacy of its real-time extensions, and with the proprietary nature of most real-time operating systems (RTOSes) and kernels.
The effort seeks to unify the highly fragmented embedded-software marketplace by def
ining a set of interfaces and methodologies that will make application code portable among compliant RTOSes.
The hope is that unified standards will expand the market by capturing the large percentage of embedded OEMs that now roll their own operating systemsýand even some of their own development tools.
"If we build it, they will come," said Ray Alderman, chairman of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO), which is sponsoring the effort. VSO itself is an ANSI-accredited standards organization that sprung out of VITA, the VMEbus International Trade Association.
Others counter that ESSE's participants, particularly the RTOS vendors themselves, will bring too many agendas and vested interests to the effort for it ever to fly.
DSPx Conference: get ready for 400-Mips DSP
By
Martin Gold
and
Ashok Bindra
SA
N JOSE, Calif. -- Digital signal processors will register dramatic improvements in performance, density, power dissipation and price over the next six years. That was the prediction of market players gathered at the DSPx Conference here last week. Progress toward those goals was evident in product announcements from established vendorsýincluding AT&T Microelectronics, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Analog Devices and IBM Microelectronicsýas well as startups.
But the improvements will force changes in design tools, as the DSP business increasingly comes to resemble the microcontroller market of today, conference speakers said.
"A typical DSP early in the next decade should be able to deliver 400 Mips at 200-MHz operation, will dissipate 0.25 mW/
Mips and could cost as little as $1.50 in very large volumes,"
Gene Frantz, DSP applications manager for the Semiconductor Group of Texas Instruments (Dallas), said in his conference keynote address, "As the price of digital-signal-processing solutions d
rops, many new high-volume applications will be found, in a similar way to what has occurred in microcontrollers since the 1970s."
TI envisions collision-avoidance systems in automobiles; videoconferencing systems with high-quality video imaging; and new generations of digital-cellular terminals, video phones, mass-storage devices and TV-set-top boxes among the mass-market applications for very low-cost DSPs that will provide hundreds of Mips. Such DSPs will likely rely on mixed analog/digital technology and will be ASIC-based.
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