EET-i Top of the News
Week of July 3, 1995
- July 6, 1995
 Philips demos plastic transistor aimed at low-cost use
- National takes aim at thermistor market with sensors
- NEC takes stake in Packard Bell
- Auto electronics gears for growth
- PC sales continue climb
- Austria Mikro Systeme to buy control of Thesys
- Daimler-Benz subsidiary buys wafer fab
- Altera to provide applications expertise with FPGA kits
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- July 5, 1995
- Hacker cracks Pentium's 'Appendix H' in Internet posting
- Remote ISDN hits streets
- Aavid floats fluid-filled product lineup
- Peripheral connectors shrink, simplify
- July 4, 1995
- Circuit board technology inches ahead
- Chip combines ISA, SCSI, in plug-and-play format
- Analyzer tackles digital TV
- July 3, 1995
- Gap in Windows 95 about to hit PC-card flash
- Debate begins over new science agency
- Neural team bares silicon brain
- Cadence-Mentor deal would eliminate o
bstacle to EDA outsourcing
- U.S. partners sought for European Microprocessor Initiative
- Conner makes tape drive look like removable hard disk
- FCC to review HDTV rules
Other news sources on Techweb:
Philips demos plastic transistor aimed at low-cost use
By
Peter Clarke
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- A five-transistor ring oscillator circuit operating for over a month here at Philips Research Laboratories (PRL) is demonstrating the feasibility of p-type field effect transistors made of plastic.
Though the speed of the circuit is low and the transistor size large, PRL's development opens up the possibility of low-cost, disposable electronics in a number of areas where silicon is either not feasible or is prohibited by cost.
Examples being considered include the labeling of supermarket items in the form of active bar codes, replacement of amorphous or polycrystalline silicon in active-matrix LCDs, RF identification tags and smartcard applications. Rather than competing with silicon's speed and circuit density, the new plastic devices could excel in other directions.
For large area electronics applications such as LCDs, or for very high-volume, low- cost production, plastic circuits could be a boon. "Take the example of a smartcard. It costs a few cents to make the
chip and 30 cents to attach and bond it to the card. If we could print smartcard electronics directly on the card it would save $100 million in 1995," said Dago de Leeuw, who leads the plastic electronics team at PRL.
National takes aim at thermistor market with sensors
By
Junko Yoshida
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- With an eye on a growing market and a tricky design challenge, National Semiconductor Corp. is focusing on sensors.
"This is a market where very few competitors exist, yet its demand is expected to grow to as much as $100 million within a few years," said Simon Prutton, strategic marketing manager for data acquisition.
National is betting that its new family of silicon temperature sensors can replace the thermistors that are used in volume consumer products operating at lower temperatures. This week, the company announced the fi
fth member, the LM50.
NEC takes stake in Packard Bell
TOKYO -- NEC Corp. announced yesterday that it will buy a 19.99 percent stake in Packard Bell for $170 million to beef up its presence in the multimedia computer market.
Hisashi Kaneko, president of the Japanese electronics giant, said the move also would help sales in Japan of PCs based on NEC's proprietary architecture and let NEC cut production costs through joint procurement of parts.
NEC said the purchase will strengthen links with France's Cie des Machines Bull, which owns about 20 percent of Packard Bell. NEC holds a 17 percent stake in Bull.
NEC holds about a 50 percent share of Japan's PC market, but faces rising competition from foreign companies.
Auto electronics gears for growth
SAN JOSE, Calif. --
Worldwide revenue for automotive electronics will reach $57 billion by the year 2000, up from $36 billion in 1994, the Dataquest research house forecasts.
In its Emerging Electronics Applications Focus Report, Dataquest said the growth in automotive electronics will be fueled by automakers' moves to create futuristic "smart cars" by equipping them with features that improve a car's handling, safety and comfort. Greg Sheppard, director and principal analyst of Dataquest's Semiconductor Application Markets Worldwide program, called automobile electronics "one of the top five growth markets."
According to the report, there will be an increase in electronic-production revenue in every major automobile application segment.
PC sales continue climb
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- Stronger-than-expected sales in Europe will more than offset an expe
cted cooling of the U.S. home PC market, causing Dataquest Inc. to forecast two more torrid years of growth for the personal-computer industry, said Phillippe de Marcillac, director of Dataquest's worldwide PC research group. With Japan and other Asian nations also showing fast growth, the worldwide personal-computer market will exceed 100 million units in 1999, perhaps hitting 110 million. That compares with 47.9 million in 1994.
"Late in 1994 there was a tremendous surge in northern Europe, and excluding southern European countries such as Italy and Spain, we see a developing boom in the home market in Europe. The home market in Europe looks very much like the home market in the United States two years ago," de Marcillac said at a two-day Dataquest computer conference here. While U.S. home buyers snapped up 6 million PCs last year, European home buyers bought about 2 million, and with "a more-cost-conscious approach than in America."
Austria Mikro Systeme to buy control of Thesys
By
Peter Clarke
UNTERPREMSTATTEN, Austria --Austria Mikro Systeme International AG (AMS) will buy a 51-percent stake in Thesys Microelectronics GmbH (Erfurt, Germany), which makes semiconductors in a wafer fab inherited from the state-controlled electronics industry of the former East Germany. Terms of the deal, expected to be concluded within the next two months, were not immediately available.
Thesys, founded in October 1992, makes ASICs and application-specific standard products (ASSPs) based on CMOS and BiCMOS process technologies. It has received support from LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.), which provided process expertise and has been a 20-percent shareholder, and the German state of Thuringia. Just before the latest deal last month, LSI Logic turned back its Thesys shares to Thuringia for undisclosed consideration.
Daimler-Benz subsidiary buys wafer fab
By
Peter Clarke
HEIBRONN, Germany -- Temic, a subsidiary of German automotive giant Daimler-Benz, is in negotiations to acquire semiconductor company ITT Intermetall (Freiburg, Germany). Expected to be completed within a few weeks, the deal is part of a scramble to buy up wafer-fabrication capacity at some of Europe's smaller and less viable semiconductor firms.
Temic's semiconductor division encompasses Telefunken Semiconductors, Matra MHS S.A. (Nantes, France) and Siliconix Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"There are discussions with ITT Intermetall; they are not finalized yet, but I think they will merge well with us," said Hanspeter Eberhardt, president of Temic's semiconductor division. "Their digital TV and our multimedia would give us a lot of opportunities. [ITT Intermetall] fits very well with us."
Altera to provide applications expertise with FPGA kits
By
Ron Wilson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A new design kit from Altera Corp. could telegraph a major shift in the business model for the FPGA industry.
Altera's ATM Design Kit is intended to ease the use of the company's Flex programmable-logic devices in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks, by providing prototype designs for packet scheduling and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) blocks. But as the kit expands, it will take Altera beyond the industry's current policy of design assistance, and into a world where FPGA companies add significant applications knowledge to a design.
"We have always provided leading-edge programmable logic that helped our customers get from design to silicon quickly," said Altera product marketing manager Sandeep Vij. "The next logical step is to provide design kits that help customers in a p
articular vertical market get from concept to design quickly.
Gate-array vendors have evolved from gate-level libraries to sophisticated megacell libraries that incorporate significant knowledge of applications, he said. "As the capacity of FPGAs increases--now, for instance, when we are looking at 100k gates in the Flex 10k family--we are being drawn into the same trend," Vij said.
Hacker cracks Pentium's 'Appendix H' in Internet posting
By
Alexander Wolfe
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- A programmer living in the former East Germany has posted a document on the Internet that reveals the operation of a series of highly confidential features of Intel Corp.'s Pentium microprocessor.
The features involve a set of performance-monitoring registers that tally data on 40 aspects of chip operation, including cache hit rates, memory accesses and process
or pipeline operation--information that can be crucial for developers attempting to optimize their systems or applications software.
The only official intelligence on the registers that's been available to date is contained in "Appendix H" of Intel's Pentium user's manual--provided solely to selected OEMs and designers under tight non-disclosure restrictions.
An Intel spokesman said of the Internet document, "It does appear that [it's] a portion of Appendix H." He added that Intel is considering making Appendix H public in the next revision of the user's manual; a decision could come next month.
Industry sources told
EE Times
that they believe much of the material in the 18-page Internet treatise, posted by Christian Ludloff, is correct.
The Internet revelations come at a time when performance-monitoring features are being viewed as an increasingly important analytical tool and are appearing in leading-edge microprocessor architectures like Advanced Micro Devices' K5, Cyrix Corp.'s M1, Digi
tal Equipment's Alpha, Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC, MIPS Technologies' R10000, the Motorola-IBM PowerPC and Sun Microsystems' Ultrasparc .
Ludloff's document is available at
ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/Local/msdos
in the file
4p_v302.zip
Remote ISDN hits streets
By
Loring Wirbel
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- New Integrated Services Digital Network products for remote offices and telecommuters seem to be everywhere this summer, as the regional Bell operating companies expand service and cut rates to deliver ISDN services nationwide.
At Ascend, a new access-router product called Pipeline 25 represents a way for workstations on an Ethernet LAN to link to an ISDN basic-rate interface (BRI). With two bearer channels from BRI bonded through inverse multiplexing, the Pipeline 25 can offer data rates of up to 128 kbits/second raw, or up to 512 k
bits/s with optional 4:1 compression.
Pipeline 25 targets small-office/home-office markets. The baseline $895 configuration has full Ethernet bridging. Data compression and routing (IP and IPX stacks) are add-on options.
U.S. Robotics (Skokie, Ill.) has introduced the first BRI member of its Courier modem family, the Courier I-Modem ISDN/V.34. The product integrates an ISDN terminal adapter with a V.34 modem, the latter backward-compatible with all slower analog modem standards, including V.32 turbo.
Aavid floats fluid-filled product lineup
By
Ashok Bindra
LACONIA, N.H. -- Aiming to expand its thermal solutions and services for cooling electronic components and systems, Aavid Thermal Technologies Inc. has launched a new line of fluid-filled products. Unlike other cooling solutions, the new line uses fluid, either in one- or two-phase
mode, to increase heat-transfer rates and handle higher flux densities generated by high-performance devices.
The new line of products divides into three families--liquid heat sinks (LHS), Oasis and heat-pipe designs. Aavid recently acquired Fluorinert LHS technology from 3M Co. (St. Paul, Minn.) under a licensing agreement.
In addition, the company is using these technologies to develop newer products, including a backlighting module for flat-panel displays. The module uses LHS techniques to cool fluorescent light bulbs that light the flat screens.
The need for highly efficient heat sinks and increasing thermal content and heat-flux densities of electronic equipment calls for a shift in cooling methodology, said Gary F. Kuzmin, director of Aavid's corporate technical marketing. As a result, Kuzmin said, Aavid has developed the fluid-filled line to enable greater heat removal from either small-system formats or high-heat-flux semiconductor chips. By comparison, he said, fluids offer 25 times better
thermal conductivity over air and up to 1,400 times higher density over air.
Peripheral connectors shrink, simplify
By
Terry Costlow
MONTEREY, Calif. -- Connectors are taking center stage at a couple of peripheral meetings here this week. At one user-group meeting, developers are considering changes in IBM Corp.'s Serial Storage Architecture (SSA). Meanwhile, at the Dataquest Storage Track Conference, vendors are discussing new high-density connectors for parallel SCSI.
At the SSA user-group meeting, backers of the emerging serial interface began discussing a new version that has only data lines. That development is designed to make it simpler and less costly to attach peripherals other than disk drives to SSA-compatible systems.
"Today, SSA connectors are unitized, with four segments," said Ray Muggli, senior engineer for system tec
hnology at IBM's Storage Systems Division (San Jose, Calif.). "There's a power bay, an auxiliary bay and two port bays. What was proposed today is bringing the two ports out as a separate connector."
That's necessary now that people are starting to attach CD-ROMs, tape drives, optical drives and other peripherals to SSA systems.
Circuit board technology inches ahead
By
Terry Costlow
LINCOLNWOOD, Ill. --The number of layers in a typical circuit board is increasing at a rate that defies the technology's historically slow rate of change.That's one of the revelations found in the latest IPC Technology Market Research Council (TMRC) survey, which details the declining size of lines and via holes.
The research branch of the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC), TMRC has been monitoring trends in board technolo
gy and marketing for more than a decade, letting engineers see how their designs fit into the current state of the art.
The wrap-up report on 1994 production shows that 18 percent of the multilayer boards made last year had nine or more layers. That's up from 15 percent in 1987. Boards with three or four layers have skidded to 30 percent, down from 36 percent in 1987. Five- and six-layer boards, now the dominant market segment, were largely flat, climbing to 33 percent from 31 percent. Seven- and eight-layer boards were also flat, rising to 19 percent from 18 percent.
But when those unit shipments are examined from the revenue side, the high-density boards grow in importance. Boards with seven or more layers accounted for 37 percent of the $1.7 billion in total revenues logged in 1994 by the responding companies. Five- and six-layer boards brought in 33 percent of the cash last year.
In one of the report's few predictions, the researchers wrote that the percentage of boards with some surface-mount pa
rts appears to be plateauing. They predict that such boards will account for 63.3 percent of the total this year--not much different from 1994's 62.7 percent or 1991's 61.9 percent. But the dollar value of such boards continues to rise steadily: The report forecasts 72.8 percent this year, up from 68 percent and 61.9 percent in 1994 and 1993, respectively.
Chip combines ISA, SCSI, in plug-and-play format
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Despite a string of considerable difficulties and delays, the concept of plug-and-play is slowly spreading through personal-computer systems.
The notion that two boards designed for the same bus ought to be interoperable, and that they ought to be installable without resort to EDA tools, has some sort of appeal to end users, despite the aversion of hardware vendors to the idea.
Consequently, plug-and-play has claimed all of the new generation of buses, startin
g with PCI and continuing through more recent ideas. But the hardest part of the struggle has been retrofitting existing buses to plug-and-play compliance. If designers had to pick culprits, many would point to the ISA bus and SCSI.
Both buses were fully evolved before Intel and Microsoft begin to circulate their plug-and-play specifications. Neither is inherently friendly to the concept. And the communities around both buses have more often feuded over compatibility than worked for it.
It is an indication of how far the revolution has spread, then, that Symbios Logic--the company that used to be NCR Microelectronics, then became a division of AT&T, and recently became a spin-off--has announced a SCSI controller chip that sits on the ISA bus, and offers full plug-and-play operation on both buses.
The SYM53C416 is the chip in question. It provides a 16-bit connection to each bus, supporting up to 10 Mbytes/second over synchronous SCSI, and 5 Mbytes/s in asynchronous mode.
Analyzer tackles digital TV
By
Stan Runyon
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- If digital TV is to become a reality, engineers working in that field will need a new breed of focused test equipment. One of the first in that genre, an enhanced signal analyzer, comes from Hewlett-Packard Co.
According to HP, the new analyzer is the first commercial unit to characterize advanced-digital-television signals. The company claims the tool will help designers speed the next generation of digital/interactive-video systems to market.
Part of the HP 89400 vector-signal-analyzer family, the AYH option allows the analyzer to characterize digital RF modulation. The tool verifies that the high-speed data streams containing the digital video have been transferred accurately onto the RF transport carriers.
Gap in Windows 95 about to hit PC-card flash
By W. David Gardner
REDMOND, Wash. -- When Windows 95 hits the market this summer, a critical enabling software technology for PCMCIA cards--the Flash Filing System (FFS)--won't be in the operating system,
EE Times
has learned.
Meanwhile, in meetings still in progress at press time last week, the PCMCIA committee was declining to include in its PC Card standard a competing flash software spec called the Flash Translation Layer (FTL).
Both developments are expected to roil the flash landscape, as vendors assess how to plug a looming flash-software gap. FFS is crucial because it enables flash devices to emulate hard disks or floppy drives in mass-storage applications.
late hard disks or floppy drives in mass-storage applications.
"The Flash Filing System is not in Windows 95," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "It's an add-on product that is available from Microsoft and other sources."
Key portions of Microsoft's FFS init
ially were provided by PCMCIA software leader SystemSoft Corp. (Natick, Mass.). But Microsoft has been working on FFS for months and the Windows 95 add-on product is expected to be a vast improvement over its older FFS version. Said the Microsoft spokeswoman: "Right now, our 100-percent support is behind FFS, [as an] add-on product."
Debate begins over new science agency
WASHINGTON -- Opponents in the congressional debate over whether to consolidate federal science and technology programs under a new Department of Science fired opening shots last week. Proponents argue that it would provide a unified vision of American research for the 21st century, while critics warn it would foreclose options for nurturing promising new technologies.
Whatever the outcome, GOP lawmakers seeking to reduce the role of government pledged to restructure the federal science and technology establishment they say h
as become too bureaucratic and fragmented. "We're talking about restructuring and rescoping government to meet the needs of the 21st century," said Rep. Robert Walker, R-Pa., House Science Committee chairman and chief architect of the proposed Department of Science.
A key question is whether the consolidation will save money, as House Republicans claim. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that merging science programs under a single department could save $2.1 billion over seven years. Walker's proposal entails forming a cabinet-level agency that would combine research offices in the departments of Energy and Commerce, the National Science Foundation, NASA, U.S. Geological Survey and Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Defense and Health and Human Services programs, which account for nearly 68 percent of federal research spending, are excluded.
Neural team bares silicon brain
By
R. Colin Johnson
Carver Mead has been working at CalTech for years to model the brain. His program's recent creation of the world's first single-transistor synapse is a seminal event. The turning point was rounded by an unlikely contributor: Chris Diorio, a circuit designer who worked in industry for more than a decade before pursuing a graduate degree under Mead. In building the complex behavior of neurons into a single device, Diorio devised a way to leverage the ever-increasing density of silicon technology to construct cognitive circuits that rival their organic equivalents.
Even more promising was Diorio's use of standard floating gates -- a well-understood area of current technology -- to mimic the variable synaptic connections the brain uses to store memory and adapt to the environment.
"My whole goal with the single-transistor synapse is to ma
ke adaptive systems--from simple ones, such as those that learn offset voltages, to complex networks that can learn to recognize faces," explained Diorio.
The synapse in an adaptive system acts as both a memory element and a processor element. Inputs to a neuron are multiplied by a stored value representing the connection strength of the synapse, and the full array of those synaptic weights determines the behavior of the entire network. At the same time, the synapse continuously updates the value of its weight (the variable part of a synapse) so that it learns as it computes. The behavior-determining data is distributed throughout the net for smooth fault tolerance in case elements fail.
Cadence-Mentor deal would eliminate obstacle to EDA outsourcing
By
Brian Fuller
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A major stumbling block in the emerging EDA outsourcing bus
iness -- one EDA vendor's use of another's tools under subcontracting arrangements -- would be eliminated in a deal being negotiated by Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Mentor Graphics Corp.
The companies have been talking for more than a month about an arrangement that would give each company case-by-case access to the other's tools under outsourcing agreements with silicon customers,
EE Times
has learned.
The outsourcing concept calls for DE vendors to go beyond traditional tools sales and support to offer consulting and other services. In the most-watched case to date, Cadence, in a $75 million deal with Unisys Corp. (Blue Bell, Pa.), took over responsibility for that customer's ASIC-design work, acquiring more than 150 Unisys engineers in the process.
At the time, some observers predicted that third-party tool vendors would balk at letting Cadence employees use their tools because of concerns about preserving trade secrets. They were right: Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has refu
sed to let the Cadence-cum-Unisys engineers use its industry-leading synthesis tools in the Unisys ASIC project.
That has forced Unisys to bring in a handful of its own engineers to perform synthesis. Cadence chief executive officer Joe Costello has called the workaround a "pain-in-the-butt solution" that won't be viable as the consulting model evolves.
The sticky situation brought Cadence and Mentor (Wilsonville, Ore.)--whose simulation and pc-board tools are widely used at Unisys--to the table in the weeks leading up to the Design Automation Conference.
U.S. partners sought for European Microprocessor Initiative
By
Ron Wilson
AUSTIN, Texas -- Member companies of the European Open Microprocessor Initiative met here last week with the U.S. Microelectronics and Computer Technology Consortium in a quest for companies willing to be the first
U.S. partners in OMI's programs. The two organizations outlined their technologies for each other at a string of closed meetings.
The reason for the scouting trip was a change in European Commission rules permitting non-European companies to participate in OMI projects, said OMI manager Jean-Marie Laporte.
"No one is seeking a Fortress Europe," said OMI executive Martin Ellison. "It is fanciful to suggest that Europeans, on their own, will beat the United States in the global microcomputer market."
OMI is a facilitator for cooperation among companies acting in their own interests, according to Ellison. Its major thrust is to build an open library and tool set for embedded microcontroller chips via the joint-development efforts of participating companies.
Conner makes tape drive look like removable hard disk
By
Terry Costlow
COSTA MESA
, Calif. -- Conner Tape Products Group has unveiled software that simplifies the use of a tape drive, making the drive look like a removable hard-disk. If PC owners store video and multimedia data on tape, the software could double the market for tape drives attached to PCs.
The Mega-Stor software is designed to change thinking about tape drives. Currently, communicating with a tape drive in DOS or Windows requires new commands, which PC users have been reluctant to learn.
"We have to get people thinking about tape in other ways than backup," said Robert Morris, marketing vice president at Conner Tape.
Morris said that the program, developed by Conner's Arcada software group, will spark a strong uptick in the number of PC users who purchase a tape drive. Only about 5 percent of the PCs now in use have tape drives attached to the system.
FCC to review HDTV rules
WASHINGTON -- High-defini
tion TV rules are expected to be on the agenda when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) meets here next week.
FCC officials said that commissioners will re-examine their 1992 ruling that led to the formation of the HDTV Grand Alliance. Also up for discussion is the effort to bring the best components of different proposed systems into a consensus standard that the FCC is expected to approve by as soon as the end of the year. The reassessment is based on "a higher degree of certainty" about what the final specification will look like, an official said.
The FCC also wants to consider questions such as whether broadcasters should continue to be exclusive licensees for HDTV and whether they should be obligated to offer HDTV services only or if they should be permitted to offer other services over the 6-MHz channel. Officials said it is unlikely the FCC would mandate that broadcasters carry HDTV services only.
"I don't think there'll be any surprises," an FCC official added.
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