EET-i Top of the News
Week of July 10, 1995
- July 13, 1995
 Actel eyes complex logic
- MPEG-4 on object-based audiovisual track
- Memory maker thinks EDO solution is 'simple'
- UMC, two U.S. firms ally for 8-in. Taiwan fab
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- July
12, 1995
- Philips takes silicon RF power to 3 volts
- Hitachi, CompCore, team to bring MPEG-2 to market
- SGS shows 32-bit embedded chip
- TI 'HyperSAR' boosts ATM
- Apple to offer Fujitsu's M-O drive for Powerbooks
- Hayes pushes reorganization plan
- July 11, 1995
- IEEE to raise dues again, by $6
- 'Women in technology' meet for first time
- Minority enrollment in engineering declining
- Elantec line driver suits HDSL, ADSL
- Aldec's State Editor tool generates synthesizable VHDL
- 'Open' emulator handles 8-, 16- and 32-bit MCUs
- July 10, 1995
- NEC plans shift to 0.35-micron for 16-mbit drams
- Flash from Hitachi: AND cells for ATA cards
- PRML ready to take driv
e market by storm
- Telefunken to build SiGe devices
- Switch to digital TV is more difficult than expected
Other news sources on Techweb:
Actel eyes complex logic
By
Brian Fuller
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- FPGA vendor Actel Corp. next week will unveil a new family of devices aimed at helping board designers to better integrate logic functions.
The Act
el 3200DX family, also called the Integrator series, combines the functionality of field-programmable gate arrays with complex programmable logic features and dual-port SRAM. It directly targets neither the gate-array replacement market nor the PAL/GAL upgrade market, but the 10,000- to 40,000-gate range where more-sophisticated logic and memory functions can and should be swept up into a single chip, Actel vice president of marketing Tom Todd said.
"It's all around the move to higher-complexity design," he said.
The antifuse family, which breaks with Actel's former practice of naming new series "Act," makes use of 3.5 kbits of SRAM, arranged in 256-bit blocks, 32 x 8 or 64 x 4, and embedded in the logic array. The memory offers 5-ns synchronous access times and offers the design the ability to integrate once-separate functions such as FIFOs and scratch RAM into a single logic chip.
The SRAM also offers dual independent read and write ports with separate clocks, a feature that could serve video and g
raphics applications, said Bruce Weyer, FPGA product-marketing manager.
MPEG-4 on object-based audiovisual track
By
Junko Yoshida
SAN JOSE, Calif -- The Moving Picture Experts Group, creators of the prevailing audio- and video-coding standards known as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, is shifting its focus from frame-based to object-based audiovisual coding as it readies MPEG-4, scheduled for completion in 1998.
The group began work on MPEG-4 work nearly two years ago with a mandate to develop audiovisual coding schemes at very low bit rates for wireless telecommunications. Since then, the scope of the work has been expanded to target a broader spectrum of applications with what would be the industry's first object-based audiovisual coding standard.
The MPEG-4 committee thus will draw from the emerging software discipline of object-oriented programmi
ng. By enabling the coding of audiovisual objects at the source, committee members hope to drive efforts toward content-based interactivity.
"Our mission is to design a standard that allows interactivity, high compression and/or universal accessibility," said MPEG-4 chairman Cliff Reader, associate director of strategic planning for the Multimedia Technology Center at Samsung Information Systems America (San Jose, Calif.)
Memory maker thinks EDO solution is 'simple'
By
Brian Fuller
and
W. David Gardner
SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Simple Technology Inc., a low-profile memory vendor, has set out to solve two of the thorniest problems plaguing main memory: performance and capacity.
The company has revealed a patented solution to the acute EDO (extended data out) memory shortage, using traditional page-mode D
RAM with a twist.
What's more, the company today is expected to disclose a stacking technology that allows system vendors to quadruple main-memory capability.
To date, EDO, which has risen in demand with faster Pentium-based systems that cry out for improved memory performance, has been in short supply--shorter than the rest of the tight DRAM market. Even engineering samples can be difficult to get.
"We're in the memory business, and a number of customers are requesting EDO memory. We are unable to get enough EDO memory to put into module form," said Mark Smith, engineering product manager.
UMC, two U.S. firms ally for 8-in. Taiwan fab
By Mark Carroll
HSINCHU, Taiwan -- United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) and two Silicon Valley fabless semiconductor companies--memory specialists Alliance Semiconductor Corp. and graphics powerhouse S3 Inc--have agreed to add an 8-inch fab line to
a UMC building at the Science-Based Industrial Park (SBIP) here.
The partners will create a new company, Lien Hsing Integrated Circuits Co., which becomes the 14th 8-inch line announced in Taiwan since last October. First silicon is expected by the third quarter of next year.
The first phase will be located in Module B of UMC's fab III. At full capacity, it will be capable of producing 25,000 8-inch wafers/month, a spokesman said. UMC began building fab III in April 1994 and is slated to begin its sampling run in September.
Philips takes silicon RF power to 3 volts
By
Peter Clarke
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- Engineers at Philips Research Laboratories have developed a double polysilicon self-aligned bipolar transistor running at 1.8 GHz that can generate up to 600 mW of output power at a gain of 14 dB. Most important for applications is
the 3.5-V supply voltage and the 60-percent efficiency, making the new technology viable for portable systems.
Though only a development device at the moment, the structure could serve the market for portable communications equipment operating at frequencies above 1 GHz, which has given rise to a growing demand for low-voltage RF power transistors.
These applications, at around 1.8 GHz for the European personal-communication networks and at 1.9 GHz for those in the United States, can be, and frequently are, met by GaAs-based transistors.
Hitachi, CompCore, team to bring MPEG-2 to market
By
Junko Yoshida
BRISBANE, Calif. -- Hitachi America Ltd. and CompCore Multimedia Inc. are teaming up to steer MPEG-2 silicon into the emerging consumer markets for TV set-top boxes and digital video disks (DVDs). Under an agreement to be announced ne
xt Monday, Hitachi will hang a three-pronged product strategy on an MPEG-2 audio/video-decode engine licensed from CompCore, with the first product slated to debut early next year.
That maiden product will be a single-chip, standalone MPEG-2 audio/video decoder. A customized MPEG-2 ASIC core for system-specific solutions will be up next, followed by a portable MPEG-2 ASIC core shrinkable to a 0.35-micron process.
CompCore (Santa Clara, Calif.) is a small, privately held company specializing in the development and licensing of MPEG-based algorithms and system architectures.
SGS shows 32-bit embedded chip
By
Peter Clarke
BRISTOL, England -- The first processor in SGS-Thomson Microelectronics' (STM) ST20 family of 32-bit dedicated microcontrollers, the ST20450, has begun sampling to key customers. STM will ramp production of the device
during the fourth quarter of 1995.
STM is aiming the ST20 family at applications in laser printers, set-top boxes, disk drives and telecommunications infrastructure.
The company believes customization is key to winning design-ins. The ST20 family initially offers four CPU cores to choose from with a variety of performance and power consumption trade-offs. In the future, higher-performance cores will include more highly pipelined arithmetic logic units and will add DSP-like arithmetic accelerators.
The first standard chip, the ST20450, offers up to 40-Mips performance at a 50-MHz clock frequency with 16 kbytes of on-chip static RAM cache.
TI 'HyperSAR' boosts ATM
By
Loring Wirbel
DALLAS -- Texas Instruments Inc. has designed a new segmentation/reassembly (SAR) chip for Asynchronous Transfer Mode that TI networking executives hope w
ill add a midlife kicker to the company's ATM product family. HyperSAR, developed in conjunction with Ascom Nexion Inc., joins client-side SAR products for SBus and the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus, to form a product suite that TI now calls ThunderCell.
HyperSAR provides an interesting bridge between existing ATM devices using ATM Adaptation Layer 5 and future devices for multimedia support, which will use AAL-1 to handle continuous-bit-rate (CBR) voice and video. The new SAR chip uses unique scheduling to allow CBR traffic to be handled in AAL-5. TI's ATM product manager, Stevan Plote, said that TI and Ascom Nexion jointly defined an "early segmentation" mode--two pins on the HyperSAR chip allow the device to be put into a high-priority segmentation mode, where voice and video ATM cells are stored in certain high-priority memory areas.
Apple to offer Fujitsu's M-O drive for Powerbooks
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- Fujitsu Ltd. has scored at least one key design win for its newly developed thin-line magneto-optical disk drive, called DynaMO 230 Portable, aimed at the portable computer market. Apple Computer Corp. (Cupertino, Calif.) is expected to offer a 230-Mbyte M-O drive, forecast to cost less than $500 at retail, as an option for the new line of Powerbook portables due out next month.
Certain models of the PowerPC-based notebooks are expected to have a slot that could be used to swap an extra battery or hard drive, or either a CD-ROM or M-O drive in the 17-mm height format, sources here said.
The Fujitsu portable M-O drive is the latest salvo in the contest for removable high-density media, which are expected to sell in greater numbers as more people store and transfer multimedia data. Magneto-optical drives are competing for attention with the 100-Mbyte ZIP floppy disk format supported by Iomega Corp., and the 120-Mbyte Flop
tical format developed jointly by Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics Industries Inc. (MKE), Compaq Computer Corp. and 3M Corp.
Hayes pushes reorganization plan
ATLANTA -- A judge has pushed bankruptcy protection proceedings for venerable modem vendor Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. closer to completion.
Judge Hugh Robinson this week approved the company's disclosure statement for its 100 percent plan of reorganization, meaning that plan will be the only one he reviews, Hayes officials said in a statement.
The plan, which calls for creditors to be paid 100 cents on the dollar, could be approved by the fall.
Hayes, which announced the execution of a letter of intent for a merger with Boca Research Inc. a week ago, will use the combined assets of the two companies to obtain the approximately $60 million to $85 million needed to fully fund emergence from Chapter 11.
IEEE to raise dues again, by $6
PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- The IEEE is raising dues again, by $6, "to offset uncontrollable paper and postage increases."
Approved by the board of directors at the June 25-26 meeting, the $6 hike follows a jump of $2 last year. With the IEEE-USA assessment, U.S. members were paying $107 in 1994. Not only have paper prices soared for member publications such as
The Institute
and
Spectrum
magazine, but U.S. postage went up 19 percent (12 percent outside the United States).
IEEE spokespeople said, "the board is considering a deficit general fund budget for next year in the area of $3.5 million to $4 million. . . Unlike 1994, [the deficit] will hopefully be offset by investment gains, which consistent with the market, are very strong in 1995."
The general fund does not include revenue gains from the intellectual property and conferences. Treasurer V. Thomas Rhyne sa
id the general fund covers "a corporate office and cost center."
'Women in technology' meet for first time
By
Robert Bellinger
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Call it a "power" conference, an attempt to assemble individual components of the technical industry into a functioning network.
Some 1,200 women from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Cisco Systems, Xerox and a host of other technology businesses gathered here last week for the first meeting of its kind in the industry: the International Network of Women in Technology Inc. (WITI).
Over the years, there have been many meetings involving women engineers, or women managers, or women academics. But WITI, as the group calls itself, claims to be first to round up a cross section of engineers, managers, human-resources vice presidents and marketers in a field dominated by men.
Only one in f
ive graduating engineers is a woman. Half the technology companies in the Fortune 1000 don't have a woman board director. Women CEOs and presidents remain a rarity. Though women make up 46 percent of the work force, only 5 percent are vice presidents or above.
Minority enrollment in engineering declining
By
Robert Bellinger
ATLANTA -- "Signaling a disturbing trend," the number of minority freshmen entering engineering declined last fall, according to a new survey from the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME).
The 7-percent drop in minority freshmen marks the second straight year of decline, following a 60-percent increase from 1986 to 1993.
African-Americans, American Indians and Hispanics make up 15.9 percent of the freshman engineering class this year, the lowest level since 1991-92, NACME said.
Enrollment
also fell off for whites and Asians, "but only at half the rate of minorities [3.9 percent]."
"This second-year downturn presents a real challenge to industry, to educational institutions and to NACME," said George Campbell Jr., president of NACME. "High school and college students, particularly African American, Latino and American Indian students are not getting the true message--that engineering and technology-related fields continue to provide pre-eminent career opportunities."
Some have blamed the well-publicized layoffs at large engineering employers for turning off engineering students. But Campbell points out "engineering unemployment is only half that of the remaining work force, and engineering graduates still command the highest starting salaries by wide margins."
Elantec line driver suits HDSL, ADSL
MILPITAS, Calif. -- Elantec Inc. has introduced an innovative differential l
ine driver suitable for any form of digital subscriber line, either High-Bit-Rate (HDSL) or Asymmetric (ADSL). The Slide (Subscriber Line Interface Device) circuit is appropriate for sending high-speed data over copper twisted-pair wire and can be used for general video-distribution amplification and video-line driving.
HDSL and ADSL are Bellcore standards for high-speed digital service over twisted-pair wire. HDSL is a bidirectional method for providing T1 (1.5-Mbit/second) service without using repeaters. ADSL provides a high-bandwidth incoming path and low-bandwidth return path for video-to-the-home systems.
The Slide, or EL1501C, comprises dual high-voltage drivers and dual receiver amps, making it applicable for full-duplex, high-drive transceiver applications. It can interface directly to A/D and D/A converters and to telephone wires.
Aldec's State Editor tool generates synthesizable VHDL
By
Richard Goering
NEWBURY PARK, Calif. -- Easing into the electronic system design automation (ESDA) and FPGA synthesis marketplaces, Aldec Corp. has introduced Active State Editor, a PC-based tool that generates synthesizable VHDL code. The product can be used alone or in conjunction with Active CAD, a schematic editor that includes the Susie logic simulator.
Active State Editor allows users to enter device-independent state-machine diagrams. It supports hierarchical bus-based state machines, along with mixed Moore and Mealy state machine types. When used with Active CAD, users can directly simulate the graph and view the flow of control signals in real-time.
Although Aldec has focused on schematic entry until now, many Aldec users are starting to use FPGA synthesis tools, according to Gregor Siwinski, Aldec's director of R&D. "From our research, we find that people would like to use tools that are easy to use and graphical, rather than ha
ving to learn VHDL from scratch," he said.
'Open' emulator handles 8-, 16- and 32-bit MCUs
By
Stan Runyon
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Citing the application-specific nature of many of today's embedded designs, Emulation Technology Inc.'s Development Tools Division (DTD) offers what it calls the first PC-based open emulator for 8-, 16- and 32-bit microcontrollers.
The ET-iC2000 is a multifunction, real-time in-circuit emulator (ICE). Its OpenEmulator environment supports a wide range of current and future microcontrollers--more than 160 at present--from Advanced Micro Devices, Dallas Semiconductor, Hitachi, Intel, Microchip, Motorola, NEC, Philips, Siemens, Toshiba and Zilog.
Also supported are a host of third-party tools, which should help shorten development cycles and boost design efficiency.
According to a survey conducted by research fir
m Embedded Systems Research, 68 percent of developers use more than one microprocessor for testing. "Emulation Technology's universal strategy is a response to this trend and answers a definite need," stated senior analyst David Shear at the research firm.
NEC plans shift to 0.35-micron for 16-mbit drams
By
Brian Fuller
and
David Lammers
TOKYO -- NEC Corp., the world's No. 3 memory vendor, has revealed that it will shift to a 0.35-micron process for its 16-Mbit DRAMs over the next year, because of inadequate yields with the half-micron process that was expected to be the mainstream technology at 16 Mbits.
The move highlights the difficulty memory makers are having handling issues such as product mix, changing PC designs and the worldwide capacity shortage.
Indeed, vendors worldwide say they're struggli
ng to strike a balance between satisfying customers' demands and achieving the best margins.
Some SRAM capacity is being sacrificed for DRAM; foundry strategies from major semiconductor makers are expanding; next-generation equipment is being aired out on present memory devices to ease the transition and improve the economics of the current generation; and internal forecasters are struggling to determine whether customer anxiety is prompting order hedging or whether companies are double-ordering from multiple vendors, thereby skewing actual demand.
"The problem that everybody has is that the industry geared up for 16M x 1 because historically that's a volume-runner," said Dan Hutcheson, a market analyst with VLSI Research (San Jose, Calif.). But "people in the PC industry wanted by-16, and by-16s just don't yield very well."
Flash from Hitachi: AND cells for ATA cards
By
Brian Fuller
BRISBANE, Calif. -- Hitachi America Ltd. will lean on its unique AND-cell flash-memory parts to pry its way into the ATA flash-card business, perhaps as early as the end of the year, the company revealed last week.
News of Hitachi's future push into the ATA card market surfaced during an interview last week as the company described its first AND-based product offering, a 32-Mbit flash IC aimed at solid-state disk applications. The strategy marks a big shift for Hitachi, which announced its entry into the flash-card business last year with a family of 2-Mbyte to 10-Mbyte execute-in-place (XIP) cards but has all but pulled out of that poorly developing market.
"We have not announced our [ATA] card program but we are going to participate in the card market," said Narayan Purohit, product marketing manager for flash memory. "We think there's a lot of firmware and software sophistication that needs to be implemented into the card." The card market offers components
designers a chance to add a significant amount of value to the end product, he said -- and, by extension, squeeze good margins out of the cards.
PRML ready to take drive market by storm
By
Terry Costlow
MONTEREY, Calif. -- Partial-response, maximum-likelihood read channels are poised to displace peak-detect read channels in hard-disk drives, and that's got chip makers scrambling to bring out PRML-tailored silicon.
Veteran as well as rookie chip suppliers to the disk-drive market are poised to field ICs that run at 120 Mbits/second, and up to nearly 150 Mbits/s, blazing past the 80- to 90-Mbit offerings that were state of the art only a year ago.
Chip companies stormed the Dataquest Storage Track conference recently, lured by the promise of ever-rising volumes. A whopping 69.3 million drives shipped last year, as the trend to disk arrays cr
eated a substantial market beyond the 47.9 million disk drives earmarked for personal computers, according to Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.).
"It's fair to say everything is up for grabs at the drive makers," said David Karlak, product-marketing manager at Hitachi America Ltd.'s Semiconductor and IC Division (Brisbane, Calif.). "There's a big window of opportunity. That's why all the chip makers want to get in now, before it closes."
Hitachi last week entered the market with a PRML chip clocked at 148 Mbits/s. Later this year, Motorola Semiconductor's Analog IC Section (Tempe, Ariz.) will roll out a chip that will run at more than 150 Mbits/s. Analog Devices Inc. (Wilmington, Mass.) will unveil a 120-Mbit/s chip later this month, and National Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is completing a chip in that speed range. Those chips are slower than PRML devices headed for servers and workstations but are aimed at a far broader market.
Telefunken to build SiGe devices
By
Peter Clarke
HEILBRONN, Germany -- Telefunken Semiconductors could soon be the first company to bring the high-frequency performance of silicon germanium (SiGe) to the commercial market. The company plans to ship samples of a discrete RF transistor and an analog RF IC in the second half, with volume production slated for first half 1996.
According to Telefunken--part of the Temic subsidiary of German automobile and aerospace giant Daimler-Benz--the key to commercial viability is the use of chemical-vapor-deposition (CVD) equipment for the production of the heterobipolar SiGe structures.
Traditionally, researchers have used molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) to produce wafers with the correct wafer properties. MBE, although useful as a research tool, is too slow for wafer throughput on a commercial production line.
The potential of SiGe material--in which germanium is mixed
with silicon at the topmost layers of the wafer to produce a strained crystal lattice structure--has been demonstrated by a number of companies, including IBM Corp., Philips, Siemens and GEC Plessey Semiconductors. Though SiGe can achieve operational frequencies above those of GaAs and pure silicon, Telefunken's first commercial process, called UHF-SiGe, has a cutoff frequency of around 50 GHz and will yield circuits that will operate below 10 GHz. The first application of the technology will be in the power-amplifier front end of European mobile telecommunications equipment operating at 1.8 GHz.
Switch to digital TV is more difficult than expected
By
George Leopold
and
Junko Yoshida
WASHINGTON -- The leap from analog- to digital-TV services is proving to be a trickier proposition than many thought. In the
two months since EE Times brought together some of the electronics industry's leading experts to dissect the nascent market for digital set-top boxes, a consensus is emerging that the interactive-TV industry will see a period of hybrid analog-digital systems before the bits really begin to fly.
As Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt sees it, "The path to the digital future has a lot of S curves." The state of play is driven as much by regulatory and compatibility issues as by technology considerations. A key factor is the FCC's backing of standard-definition TV formats as a way to hasten the switch to digital TV broadcasting
"To a large extent, a number of the issues that will later be common to the digital set-top box are ones that may be present in the advanced-digital-television world," said the FCC's Mark Corbitt. As director of technology policy for the commission's Office of Plans and Policy, Corbitt heads an effort to develop a framework for addressing digital set-top compatib
ility issues. The task force is focusing initially on the analog domain but will gradually shift its attention to digital-equipment compatibility.
Nonetheless, in light of the 200 million analog TV sets in use today in American households, the commission suspects the NTSC broadcast format could be around another decade, Corbitt said.
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