EET-i Top of the News

Week of June 26, 1995

June 29, 1995

Malaysian explosion cripples IC-assembly factories

Flexible boards represent a new twist

Symbios/Scriptel to push pen technology to notebooks

Philips hopes hybrid touchscreen will 'Paid' off

EIA: federal IT outlook evolving

Big plasma-display push
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

June 28, 1995

Philips digs in heels on MMCD format

BBN, AT&T join to market Internet services

100 VG-AnyLAN enters switched camp

ATM-monitoring unit forms

Slow-moving ANSI seeks image makeover

Force joins PowerPC market

June 27, 1995

Intel, PowerPC group gird for battle

Avista offers 'what-if' Analog 'spreadsheets'

HP server bridges Windows, X terminals, Unix stations

Repeaters mix media

Battery road map in works

June 26, 1995

Chip makers want to set up independent outfit to qualify 12-inch gear

IPC maps a course to improve cost-performance rati ons of pc boards

Philips, Silicon Graphics plot microprocessor alliance

Move to single DSP core

Spectrum fees are put in FCC's court

Synopsys to acquire emulation startup Arkos

Web site hosts NASA's shuttle

Other news sources on Techweb:

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

Malaysian explosion cripples IC-assembly factories

By David Lammers

PENANG, Malaysia -- The world's supply of ICs took a temporary hit recently when an explosion destroyed overloaded power cables stretching under a bridge connecting the Malaysia mainland to the island of Penang. More than 200 electronics factories were crippled, including a 3,000-person Intel assembly operation packaging Pentium processors, as well as disk-drive operations on the island supplying Seagate Technology and Conner Peripherals.

The factories were forced to run backup generators and operate on three-days-on, three-days-off power-sharing from the national power utility, Tenaga National. The utility said full power would be restored in 20 days.

Tan Boon Ann, a sales manager at Johnson Matthey's Singapore office, said that Intel's Penang operation, which he said assembles a majority of Intel's Pentium processors daily, could take several weeks to bounce back to full operation.

Flexible boards represent a new twist

By Terry Costlow

WASHINGTON -- Flexible circuit-board technology--once an obscure, arcane packaging option-- is being propelled into the design-engineering mainstream.

Driving the new twist is a surge in demand from myriad space-conscious applications at the leading edge of svelte new packaging designs in portable and mobile-computer, communications and automotive applications.

Many observers at the recent Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits' Technology (IPC) Marketing Research Council meetings here believe the surge marks a coming of age for the technology, which is seeing use in areas that demand thinness, such as PCMCIA cards above all else. Domestic flexible-circuit-board shipments rose sharply last year after several years of flat growth.

Flexible boards were expected to see dramatic growth when portable computers first started appearing, but the technology didn't grow much beyond becoming the link between notebook motherboards and displays. Now, many companies are finding new applications for very thin circuit boards.

Symbios/Scriptel to push pen technology to notebooks

By Loring Wirbel

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- WriteTouch, a cordless electrostatic digitizer technology jointly developed by Symbios Logic Inc. and Scriptel Holding Inc. (Columbus, Ohio), is expanding from its personal-digital-assistant (PDA) and pen-input notepad roots to find wide favor among developers of next-generation notebook PCs. Symbios moves into production this month with chip sets that can control WriteTouch, which supports pen- a nd touch-input on an electrostatic screen. Scriptel is in early production phases with stylus cartridges and digitizers for the system.

Bruce Trunck, product manager for WriteTouch at Symbios, said that early prototype demonstrations have proven so successful that the two companies have been approached by portable-PC OEMs who wish to make pen and touch input the primary non-keyboard input for their next-generation machines.

Symbios and Scriptel also are finding that Windows 95 drivers are the most important operating-environment tool with which to supply OEMs. J. Vance Holloway, president of Scriptel Corp., said that Microsoft's folding of WinPad functions back into Windows 95 last year cinched the subject. Even those OEMs working on embedded PCs and limited-function PDAs for vertical markets are turning away from PenDOS and Windows 3.x to full Windows 95.

Philips hopes hybrid touchscreen will 'Paid' off

By Junko Yoshida

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- Cultivating a new trend for touchscreens that allow both finger and pen input, Philips Semiconductors has unveiled a technology called Philips Advanced Interactive Display (Paid) and a highly integrated, low-power mixed-signal controller IC for it. Both are due for launch early next year.

Philips's new hybrid touchscreen technology, developed at Philips Research in the last couple of years, offers two input mechanisms using capacitive touch and electromagnetic pen input, allowing system designers to use either or both in a system.

By combining the two independent detection principles for pen and touch, "the Paid is designed to provide scalable solutions" for OEMs planning on a variety of applications, said Yves Kessener, senior application engineer responsible for Paid at Philips Semiconductors.

Though Philips is not the first in the industry with a touchscreen accommodating both pen and finger input (see story above), Philips engineers are confident that Paid, compared with competing technologies, can provide lower power consumption for the touchscreen, longer battery life for cordless electromagnetic pens and less-expensive-to-produce single-component glass sensor plates with non-structured conductive layers.

EIA: federal IT outlook evolving

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Federal spending for information technology (IT) is expected to drop slightly after it peaks in 1996 at an estimated $25.4 billion, the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) said in a study released this week. Much of the slowdown is attributed to anticipated budget cuts and possible elimination of some federal agencies. But the decline could be mitigated by increased emphasis on information technology to modernize government operations and ensure data security.

The study projects that civilian agencies will spend $16.6 billion in fiscal 1996 on information technology, with special emphasis on modernization, systems integration and increased productivity. The Treasury Department's tax modernization programs and the Transportation Department's air-traffic-control upgrades are expected to be the biggest programs next year.

Overall, privacy has become a big issue as more government agencies hop on the Internet. "Data security and privacy are other key issues in the civil marketplace, especially as they relate to an increased use of telecommunications across the federal government," said Mary Freeman, an AT&T executive who headed the EIA's five-year forecast of federal information-technology spending.

Big plasma-display push

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- Sony Corp. and NEC Corp. have separately launched aggressive manufacturing schedule s for large flat-panel plasma displays. Sony promised a 25-inch consumer version in a wall-hanging TV by fall, with larger displays to follow. NEC announced planned construction of additional capacity and promised monthly volumes of 1,000 panels, aimed largely at the business market, by midyear 1996.

Sony's Plasmatron LCD panel will uses so-called plasma switches in place of thin-film transistors. The display is based on plasma-addressed liquid-crystal (Palc) technology that was developed jointly under a patent-sharing agreement with Tektronix Inc. (Wilsonville, Ore.).

Sony Component Co. president Yoshiyuki Kaneda said the backlit Plasmatron combines the best of the plasma and LCD worlds. "We'll continue to develop a self-emitting plasma display," he said, "but Plasmatron will be ready for the market much earlier."

The 25-inch, wall-hanging TV display planned for fall release will be followed by a 40-inch model to follow. Sony plans to show the 25-inch prototype in late August at the International F unkausstellung Berlin show.

Philips digs in heels on MMCD format

By Junko Yoshida

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- Philips Electronics NV will go to the mat for its MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD) format--and then some.

"I've never been willing to die for the principle of standards . . . but [in the Digital Video Disc format battle] I believe the new format must maintain the integrity of backward compatibility with a family of compact discs," said Jan Timmer, president of the Dutch electronics giant.

Timmer, speaking at a recent industry briefing held here, said, "I'm defending a principle. I'm not defending [MMCD] solely because the CD is a Philips-Sony invention. It's extremely important for the consumer not to be confused."

Philips, which has been instrumental in the development of next-generation, high-density Digital Video Disk (DVD) formats, made clear recently that the company would guard Philips' own MMCD format against a possible merger with the rival Super Density (SD) DVD format developed by the Toshiba/Time Warner-led group.

Despite strong urgings by the computer industry to merge the two incompatible formats into a single standard, Timmer's unequivocal remarks underline the gulf that still separates the two camps.

BBN, AT&T join to market Internet services

By Brian Santo

NEW YORK -- AT&T and BBN late last week agreed to team to provide business customers with Internet services.

BBN (Cambridge, Mass.), already one of the most savvy companies operating on the Internet, has spent the past year building itself into the country's largest Internet access provider. AT&T, meanwhile, has networking expertise and--perhaps more important to BBN--a huge customer base and an extensive sales and marketing organization that is now being trained to hawk the services the two companies intend to provide.

The two plan to offer businesses the means to access, plan, set up, operate and maintain dedicated, leased-line connections to the Internet. The contract will be exclusive for three years.

BBN and AT&T insisted that BBN-based services will complement, rather than compete with, AT&T's existing Internet access options, including Interspan Frame Relay Service and dial-up InterSpan Information Access Service, as well as access planned through AT&T Netware Connect Services, which interconnects and provides remote access to local-area networks.

100 VG-AnyLAN enters switched camp

By Loring Wirbel

ROSEVILLE, Calif. -- Not to be outdone by the Fast Ethernet adherents offering LAN-swit ching services, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced this week that its 100 VG-AnyLAN network will be offered in switched as well as shared-media flavors. For the first few months of its shipment, the new AdvanceStack 10/100 LAN Switch-16 will be offered with only switched 10-Mbit Ethernet LAN ports in its chassis. But by November, HP will add a two-port VG switching module to the LAN switch to allow dedicated VG channels operating at 100 Mbits/second.

Fast Ethernet and VG-AnyLAN are the two IEEE-approved LANs intended to upgrade Ethernet networks with 100-Mbit performance. When they were first brought before the IEEE three years ago, shared-media implementations were considered of paramount importance. In this topology, several LAN users share a single common bus or star network, and true packet throughput can decline significantly from the advertised speed when the network is loaded.

In the last two years, the popularity of switched 10-Mbit Ethernet links has skyrocketed. In that model, carrier-sensing is di sabled from Ethernet, and dedicated links are established between a node and a hub. The concept is similar to LAN bridging, except that it is private to one workstation user, allowing a desktop application user to get the full 10 Mbits/s of performance from Ethernet.

ATM-monitoring unit forms

By Loring Wirbel

WARRENDALE, Pa. -- Fore Systems Inc. has recruited 15 Asynchronous Transfer Mode switch and test-equipment companies to join a new effort to monitor virtual circuits within an ATM network, feeding the information into a management information base (MIB) that could be accessed through network-management systems.

While the effort could have an impact on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) updates within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as well as on the work of the Desktop Management Task Force, the new "ATM Monitoring " (Amon) coalition will take its proposals first to the ATM Forum.

Though several vendors in LAN switching environments have been working on remote- monitoring SNMP extensions for frame switching, the Amon work is different. Steve Hand, manager of software development for network management at Fore, said that most LAN-switch monitoring keeps track of individual hardware ports. The Amon coalition wants to develop a standard for "steering" individual ATM virtual circuits to an analyzer or probe, so that the contents of one virtual circuit could be studied. The proposal to the ATM Forum will be called the ATM Circuit Steering MIB, or ACS MIB.

Slow-moving ANSI seeks image makeover

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the big daddy of standards bodies, but it's often criticized for moving at the pace of an aging grandparent. ANSI's president doesn't think that independent grou ps move any faster, and they sometimes come out with specifications that dont work.

"The PCMCIA specification is an example of a standard that cost more money, took longer than expected, and the result was a specification that sucks," said Sergio Mazza, president of ANSI. "It's not true that our system itself is slow. The T1 was introduced as a national standard for telecom in six months. What is true is that companies compete against each other for an extension of one company's approach over another approach."

Mazza's view of the PCMCIA specification, which was written by a number of major manufacturers who set up their own organizing body, is fairly harsh, but it's consistent with the

view of the marketplace. Problems with compatibility lowered the expectations for PCMCIA cards dramatically; more than three years after the independent group completed its document, compatibility

issues are still being resolved.

Force joins PowerPC market

MUNICH, Germany -- Embedded-systems developer Force Computers GmbH is adding the PowerPC to its established 68K and Sparc processor offerings.

The company has unveiled two VMEbus products: the CPU-60xRT and the IBC-60x. The former is a single-board computer based on either the 66-MHz 603 or the 100-MHz 604. The latter is based on the same choice of processors and provides dual PCI mezzanine-card expansion ports for I/O. Performance ranges up to 160 SPECint92 and 165 SPECfp92, depending on choice of processor, clock speed and secondary-cache memory.

"We believe the time is right to enter the PowerPC market, as the necessary microprocessors and real-time kernels are now becoming available," said Chris Williams, director of marketing at Force Computers (U.K.) Ltd. (Aylesbury, England).

The products will be supported by the VxWorks, pSOS+ and LynxOS real-time OSes. Also, Force is working with Chorus Systems (Paris) to bring the open microker nel-based OSes to these PowerPC VME platforms.

Intel, PowerPC group gird for battle

By Rick Boyd-Merritt and Alexander Wolfe

NEW YORK -- In what could be termed the battle of Megahertz, Intel and PowerPC-based systems clashed at the PC/Expo show late last week. Each camp touted systems based on powerful 120- and 132-MHz processors. But the latest PowerPC-based systems from Apple Computer, IBM and IPC Technologies show that the RISC-based machines are still being pitched mainly as technical workstations at $4,000 and up, with their Pentium-based rivals more geared to the cream of mainstream desktops and $4,000 and below.

While some analysts have criticized the PowerPC systems as failing to engage in head-to-head battles with the Pentium, others say the new RISC systems are seeking a suitable niche fo r the short term. "1995 is just a beachhead year for them," said Mark Stahlman, of New Media Associates (New York). "1996 is when the fight will become a more serious one."

For its part, Apple rolled out the Power Macintosh 9500, its first systems using the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus and its first to use the PowerPC 604. Going whole hog to PCI 2.0 from the proprietary NuBus, the systems offer six PCI slots, compared with two or three in the typical PC.

IBM crashes the $4,000 barrier with its new entry-level Power Series 830, which the company says will sell for a "street price" of $2,795 configured with a 100-MHz PowerPC 604, 16 Mbytes of RAM and a 540-Mbyte hard drive. It offers two shared PCI/ISA slots and one ISA slot for expansion. A companion desktop, the model 850, comes with a 100-, 120- or 132-MHz 604, two shared PCI/ISA slots and three ISA slots.

Avista offers 'what-if' An alog 'spreadsheets'

By Richard Goering

FOLSOM, Calif. -- Taking a new approach to analog-circuit simulation, Avista Design Systems has released Spectre/XL, a product that embeds the Spectre simulation engine from the University of California at Berkeley inside a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The product claims to offer a fast, interactive "what if" analysis that helps users analyze and optimize analog designs.

Avista is a two-person startup headed by Paul Tuinenga, a founder of MicroSim Inc. (Irvine, Calif.) and author of a popular book, Spice--A Guide to Circuit Simulation and Analysis Using PSpice (Prentice-Hall, 1995).

According to Tuinenga, Spectre/XL--a $695 Windows-based product that works with Microsoft Excel version 5.0--provides rapid feedback on ac, dc and non-linear frequency (spectral) results, while eliminating the traditional Spice bottleneck that requires users to prepare a volume of data and run one analysis at a time. "You can now add ac, dc and spectral results to any sort of Excel formula," he said. "It's like Excel can suddenly calculate circuits."

HP server bridges Windows, X terminals, Unix stations

By Loring Wirbel

WATERLOO, Ontario -- Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Panacom Automation X terminal division used the recent Design Automation Conference to introduce a hardware platform that crosses several application and operating-system boundaries. The HP 500 Windows Application Server is a special Vectra-class PC running Santa Cruz Operation Unix, which is intended to provide high-performance X86 Windows applications performance to X terminals and Unix workstations.

Brent Remai, product manager for the 500 at Panacom, said that true virtual-Windows application availability within X.11 can show 486-level performance at less than $300 per seat. While HP is positioning the platform against the likes of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s WABI tools, the only direct competition comes from Tektronix Inc.'s Windows Distributed Desktop, or WinDD. Remai claimed that HP can offer better performance and, unlike the WinDD solution, does not use any proprietary protocols in its networking stack.

Repeaters mix media

By Loring Wirbel

LOS ANGELES -- Broadcom Corp. is out to prove that there is as much life left in shared 100-Mbit Ethernet as in switched versions of the network. The company is sampling a repeater chip that lets Fast Ethernet shared-media hubs use any mix of two-pair, Category 5 wire (100 Base TX); four-pair, Category 3 wire (100 Base T4); and fiber-optic media (100 Base FX).

Broadcom's BCM5012 is the high-end star of its Fast Ethernet repeater line, offering full Management Information Base (MIB) support for network m anagement, as well as combo TX/T4 support. But Pini Lozowick, director of high-speed networks at Broadcom, said that the company also has been sampling a lower-end repeater, BCM5006, intended for unmanaged hubs using only 100 Base T4. Lozowick predicted that there will be a significant market for "dumb" stackable 100-Mbit hubs using the BCM5006, but that many OEMs will quickly transition to the BCM5012.

So far, only Grand Junction Networks Inc. (Fremont, Calif.) has offered a chip-set design for repeaters to other OEMs, licensing it to Farallon Computing. Lozowick predicted that Broadcom will be the only repeater vendor with full physical-media support in the near term.

Battery road map in works

By Ashok Bindra

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. -- Calling battery technology critical for U.S. leadership in global electronics, especially in portables and handhelds, a working group drawn from the public and private sectors is developing a road map for energy-storage systems.

Members of major battery manufacturers, representatives of government organizations such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) and Central Intelligence Agency, researchers from national labs and managers from systems houses such as IBM Corp. met here recently under the framework of the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI).

They hope to facilitate development of newer technologies to support the rapidly growing needs of the U.S. electronics industry and establish an infrastructure for the manufacture of advanced battery technologies.

NEMI promotes collaboration of industry, government and academia to facilitate manufacture of new high-tech electronic products in the United States, said Robert C. Pfahl, director of manufacturing and technology assessment for Motorola's corporate manufacturing research center and chairman of NEMI's technology road-map-plan ning committee.

Chip makers want to set up independent outfit to qualify 12-inch gear

By David Lammers

OSAKA, Japan -- Navigating from the Semiconductor Industry Association's technology road map, the 10 largest U.S. semiconductor companies are proposing that an independent corporation be set up to qualify production equipment for the 12-inch-wafer generation. The company could assume a powerful intermediary role between device and equipment makers worldwide, according to sources attending last week's Semicon/Kansai equipment show here.

The proposal's U.S. backers are already courting the cooperation of their technology partners in Japan and elsewhere. But some sources were asking last week whether Japanese semiconductor companies will be willing to steer a course set by a U.S. organization.

The corporation would not just ease the transi tion to the larger wafer size. Consulting the SIA road map's detailed process specifications, it would test equipment to verify its ability to meet the specs, at a quantifiable level of reliability, for a given technology.

"Think of this as a sort of Underwriters Laboratories for the semiconductor industry," said a former Sematech staff member who was in Japan last week to pitch the concept to Japan's semiconductor companies.

IPC maps a course to improve cost-performance rations of pc boards

By Terry Costlow

WASHINGTON -- Looking to dramatically improve the cost-performance ratios of circuit boards, the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits, known as IPC, has formulated a technology road map through 2010 that addresses the full interconnection industry. Though the document, the National Technology Road Map for Electr onic Interconnection, won't be formally introduced until next month, copies floated around the IPC's Technology Marketing Research Council meeting here last week.

A major goal is to bridge the big gap between boards that can be made cost effectively and those that can be made only when premium pricing can be charged. Today, for example, many fabricators can make boards with 5-mil lines and spaces and a handful can make them with 3 mils, according to a recent report from the Interconnection Technology Research Institute.

To close the gap, ITRI has proposed setting up six priority-research areas, among them improving CAD-to-CAM interfaces, fine-pitch electrical test, and direct-chip and chip-scale attachment manufacturing processes. It also has proposed examining ways of embedding passives in boards, extending circuit-board density by improving hole-drilling techniques and multilayer registration, thinner laminates and copper materials and fine-line etching. Dry-board processing also might be up for ex ploration.

Philips, Silicon Graphics plot microprocessor alliance

By Junko Yoshida

EINDHOVEN, the Netherlands -- Philips Electronics N.V. and Silicon Graphics Inc. are negotiating a strategic microprocessor alliance that would see the MIPS architecture play a crucial role in spawning a new generation of consumer devices capable of running multimedia software authored on high-end graphics workstations.

The talks with Silicon Graphics came to light last week during an industry briefing in which Philips Semiconductor disclosed a broad new silicon strategy designed to support its expanding consumer and digital media electronics operations.

The alliance would make the Dutch electronics giant the first consumer-electronics manufacturer to embrace a personal-computer-like paradigm consisting of a common platform based on a single microprocessor architecture.

Philips also detailed plans for a new proprietary digital signal processor family and laid out the elements of an emerging consumer electronic system-level architecture that will employ analog and digital processing cores along with Philips' much-touted multimedia engine, the Tri-Media processor.

Philips' DSP move--part of a three-pronged processor strategy for consumer electronics--saw it unify its embedded-DSP-core offerings under a single architecture, the Reprogrammable Embedded Architecture Low-cost (Real) label. The customizable Real approach targets applications that require dedicated DSP functionality rather than a MIPS RISC core or the Philips TriMedia VLIW (very long instruction word) multimedia platform.

Move to single DSP core

By Peter Clarke

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- Philips Semicondutors has unified its embedd ed-DSP-core offerings under the Reprogrammable Embedded Architecture Low-cost (Real) label. The move to a single DSP-core architecture is one part of the company's three-pronged processor strategy for consumer electronics.

The customizable Real approach targets applications that require dedicated DSP functionality rather than a MIPS RISC core or the Philips

TriMedia VLIW (very long instruction word) multimedia platform.

The major break with previous approaches to DSP is that customers can extend the Real instruction set and design their own hardware-accelerator units to implement a particular algorithm or math function. That technique, according to Philips, can prevent bottlenecks that would otherwise limit a custom DSP chip's performance.

Philips is making Real available to key customers, who can select among general-purpose ALUs with 16-, 20- or 24-bit data widths; various memory technologies and sizes; and various peripherals to produce an embedded DSP optimized for their application.

Spectrum fees are put in FCC's court

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Legislation that would require broadcasters to pay for using parts of the advanced TV (ATV) spectrum for other services would be difficult to monitor and enforce, regulators and industry officials warn.

A provision of a telecommunications-reform measure, approved by the Senate on June 15, directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to collect an "annual fee" when "existing or advanced television spectrum is used for ancillary and supplemental services" such as high-speed data transmission. A similar provision in a House version--preferred by broadcasters--would assess fees only for using digital-TV spectrum.

The measure says that the agency should "take into account the portion of the licensee's total existing or advanced television spectrum which is used for such services and the amount of time such services are provided."

Asked how the FCC would determine the annual fee, Saul Shapiro of the FCC's Mass Media Bureau, said only, "That's a really good question." Among the possible approaches, he said, are simply counting the number of bits transmitted by broadcasters or allowing them to develop services and track average use of the ATV bit stream before developing a rate structure.

Shapiro stressed that the FCC views the Senate action as one of several steps needed before telecom reform becomes reality. The House is expected to take up its version in July, then the two chambers must reconcile their differences in a conference.

Synopsys to acquire emulation startup Arkos

By Richard Goering and Brian Fuller

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Synopsys Inc. rolled into the lucrative IC -emulation market last week by announcing its intention to acquire Arkos Design Inc. (Scotts Valley, Calif.), a startup that last year announced--but never shipped--an emulator based on a custom processor. Though Arkos's technology will be aimed at high-level design validation, Synopsys is apparently on a collision course with emulation market leader Quickturn Design Systems (Mountain View).

Expected to close this week, the deal calls for Synopsys to pay $9.3 million in cash and notes for Arkos, which has consumed $1.5 million in venture capital but has no products or revenue. The move was expected by some market observers. Arkos's 12 employees will become part of the Mountain View-based Modeling Systems unit of Synopsys's Logic Modeling Group (LMG).

The acquisition is part of a broad new initiative in design verification, said Steve White, vice president and general manager of LMG's Modeling Systems unit. "Synopsys has traditionally delivered productivity tools on the implementation side, but what we n eed now to increase customer productivity is a variety of verification tools, of which Arkos is one of several we're in development with," he said.

Web site hosts NASA's shuttle

HOUSTON -- This week's planned space shuttle mission will take to the World Wide Web. The shuttle Atlantis is slated to dock with the Russian Mir spacestation. Some of the Information on the mission will be updated several times daily on the Shuttle Web page , but other features will be real-time. Reports from both crews will be posted directly to the site.

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