EET-i Top of the News

Week of July 17, 1995

July 20, 1995

Have CD-ROMs hit a speed wall?

Taiwan to develop set-top box

PicoPower chip will allow 'hot' docking of notebooks

'Salutation' spec gains 24 backers

Conner shipping 4-gig drives; will support Fiber Channel

First Virtual, Cisco eye ATM-to-ISDN links

Fuzzy-logic processor challenges MCUs
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

July 19, 1995

Sony mulls offshore manufacture as yen climbs

AEA raps Japanese on market access

Teacher-prep class opens

EE jobless rate drops in Q2

Single-electron era nears

Video processing goes parallel

FPGAs spawn self-healing ICs

July 18, 1995

Code-hopping keys Exel's lock-opening chip

Copper ATM devices fit fiber footprint

Verilog goes switch-level

Motorola fills midrange gap with PowerPC 603e

Cisco suite targets SNA

July 17, 1995

Taiwanese plan P6/P7 project

Signs point to 300-mm wafer move

Sematech launches an EDA initiative

SGI, Digital heat workstation war

Mead envisions new design era

UMC, two U.S. firms ally for 8-in. Taiwan fab

Other news sources on Techweb:

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

Have CD-ROMs hit a speed wall?

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

SINGAPORE -- Makers of CD-ROM drives, already concerned about a potentially rocky transition to Digital Video Disk technology, are seeing a new pothole emerge as they look down their road maps. The latest generation of products--6x players, which spin disks at rates above 3,000 rpm--may be reaching their speed limit. Drive makers say current designs can't reliably read disks spun at the 4,000-plus rpm rates a generation of 8x drives would require.

"The biggest challenge is with the stability of the optical pickup unit," said Ng Choon Tiong, hardware-development manager at Aztech Systems Ltd. (Singapore), a company that claims to assemble 100,000 CD-ROM players a month for such customers as Packard Bell.

"You cannot push to 8x speeds a unit based on the current 4x or 6x mechanisms. Y ou will have too much vibration, noise and heat."

Current 6x players are already suffering minor performance hits due to errors in tracking and focusing at high speeds. To a great extent, the problem lies with the compact disks themselves, which are sometimes of an uneven thickness or pressed slightly off center, said P.S. Tang, executive vice president of Wearnes Peripherals International Ltd., which also assembles CD-ROM players in Singapore.

Taiwan to develop set-top box

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

HSINCHU, Taiwan -- A group of some 15 Taiwan-based companies have banded together to develop a production prototype of a set-top box, targeting a model that could sell for around $300 to $400 and be ready for production in the third quarter of 1996. The project is the linchpin of a grab bag of R&D projects and service trials designed to p ropel Taiwan's electronics companies into the emerging market for interactive television (ITV).

The set-top consortium is expected to build a 486-based set-top designed for a hybrid fiber-coax network. It will have expansion capabilities via a Peripheral Component Interconnect bus for an upgrade to ATM-based networks. A PCMCIA slot will also be built in for expansion.

"We will make a computer-oriented set-top box," said Lance Wu, deputy director of the Computer and Communications Research Laboratories (CCL), a systems research group that is part of the government-assisted Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). A new Vision Technology Division of CCL is organizing the consortium whose members include Acer, Mitac, Sampo, Tatung and Taiwan Philips.

PicoPower chip will allow 'hot' docking of notebooks

By Ron Wilson

FREMONT, Calif. -- Joining a growing industry consensus about how to arrange docking for portable computers, Cirrus Logic subsidiary PicoPower announced today how it will provide for hot docking of notebook computers in all of its future core-logic chip sets. The system uses a repeater to extend the notebook's PCI bus into the docking station, which will be enhanced by new features to deal with complexity.

The recent intense interest in hot docking has been quietly led by Compaq Computer, according to industry sources. Compaq has determined--and many chip vendors agree--that current docking techniques, which require turning off or halting the computer before insertion or removal of the unit from the docking station, are unacceptable.

Instead, the companies have been searching for a design that would allow a user to insert a powered-up notebook PC into a powered-up dock, and to have the system automatically reconfigure itself to take into account the change in peripherals. In addition, there has been a strong preference to use the PCI bus as the primary means of communication between the notebook and the dock.

'Salutation' spec gains 24 backers

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- "Salutation," an architecture promoting interactivity among office equipment, PDAs and personal computers, has drawn the support of 24 of the largest office-equipment vendors. The Salutation consortium is based on the former Smart Office project founded by IBM.

Microsoft Corp., which has been promoting its "At Work" approach to the problem, will be invited to join, participants said.

The consortium plans to publish the first version of the Salutation specification this fall and to demonstrate working products at various shows, with the Nov.13 opening of Comdex Fall in Las Vegas as a key target date.

Conner shipping 4-gig drives; will support Fiber Channel

By Terry Costlow

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Conner Peripherals Inc. this week started shipping 4-Gbyte disk drives with a Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) interface. The company also will support Fiber Channel serial links in drives that are expected out early next year.

SSA is first in Conner's lineup because interface chips for that are more readily available than for Fiber Channel. Though some observers predict that serial interfaces won't see much market acceptance in the near term, Conner predicts that a number of OEMs will begin unveiling SSA-based systems before year's end, claiming that designers need the big speed improvements offered by the serial channels.

"We've got about 12 good, solid candidates looking at our drive, with more each week," said Greg Goelz, marketing director for high-performance drives. "I expect a fair amount of activity in Q4, with some of it rolling over into Q1 next year. I think we'll see a lot of action at Comdex."

First Virtual, Cisco eye ATM-to-ISDN links

By Loring Wirbel

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- First Virtual Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are among the first companies to look at practical ways to combine the wide-area circuit-switched Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) with local implementations of the cell-switched Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) standard. First Virtual, in particular, is looking at a radical implementation employing the time-division Multi Vendor Integration Protocol (MVIP) bus, so that "ISDN links will not have to go directly to the desktop," said First Virtual marketing director Doug Tsui.

Cisco (San Jose, Calif.) is opting for a slightly more conventional vision, in which its remote-office 4000/4500 router platform is upgraded with links for p rimary-rate ISDN and local ATM. Both companies are driven by an understanding that ATM in the wide area is still several years from full implementation, whereas ISDN is finally making it to many business sites worldwide.

Fuzzy-logic processor challenges MCUs

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Adaptive Logic Inc. has quietly launched a $2, 18-pin mixed-signal chip that promises to slash design time and eliminate traditional microcontroller chips from many real-time embedded-control applications. The second generation of a hardware fuzzy-logic processor, it takes in analog signals, fuzzifies them, processes rules, defuzzifies results and produces analog outputs, all without external memory, data converters or any fuzzy run-time software. In its new implementation, the part may have the right combination of speed and features to take on a signific ant portion of small control jobs.

Fuzzy logic slowly has been gaining popularity as a design technique for control systems, particularly in areas such as appliances, where systems can be wildly non-linear but where high signal frequencies are not an issue. Adherents have claimed that using fuzzy techniques instead of conventional automatic-control theory can cut design time by 90 percent while often producing better control results on non-linear systems.

Sony mulls offshore manufacture as yen climbs

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Sony Corp. president Nobuyuki Idei has confirmed that the yen's appreciation "is having an immeasurable impact on our operations" that is causing Sony to rethink its entire business. That reassessment, he said, could result in the offshore manufacture of such promising new products as multimedia CDs to keep a lid on labor costs.

Acknowledging reports that Sony may produce its Multimedia CD (MMCD) in Malaysia, Idei said, "We believe the key parts, such as the optical pickup and the laser diode, will be made in Japan for the time being. But our manufacturing plan has not been decided. Eventually, manufacture of the players, and the major components, could be done overseas."

Toshiba Corp., which along with Matsushita Electric Industrial Corp. has provided the leadership for the Super Density (SD) digital-video-disk format, also is considering Asian production, possibly in the Philippines. "We have not decided, but overseas production is being considered for both the consumer and computer drives," a Toshiba spokesman said.

AEA raps Japanese on market access

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Japan is going backward in government procurement of computers and telecommunications equipment, said American Electronic Association (AEA) president William Archey, who assailed an attempt that would have software quality inspected by Japanese auditors.

Archey, who took on the top job at the AEA six months ago, said access to the Japan market will be the primary world-trade issue over the next decade: "Japan is the second-largest market for electronics products. How much longer can we tolerate a situation where the single biggest beneficiary of the world-trading system contributes very little to that system? We cannot let the second-largest economy in the world play by a different set of rules."

Archey put himself squarely in line with the so-called "revisionist" thinkers about Japan, who argue that collusion between government and industry prevents foreign companies from getting established here. "Something isn't right" in the Japan market, Archey said. "We are not talking about an American-style, capitalistic system. Japan is a different ball game. Some people say t hat Japan is becoming more like us, but it's not happening," Archey said. He added that the Japanese government "tacitly condones" a number of anti-competitive practices, including "cartels and exclusive business relationships" that limit access for foreign companies here.

Teacher-prep class opens

By Robert Bellinger

LOS ANGELES -- Sixteen former defense-industry professionals, including two electronics engineers, have been selected for the first class of "teaching fellows" here as part of a Defense Reinvestment Initiative (DRI) program. The 16, picked from a pool of 65 applicants, started a 13-month retraining program two weeks ago that will enable them to teach math or science at inner-city secondary schools.

The DRI's teacher-preparation program is one of many set up to reintegrate former defense workers into the economy. The class began two weeks ago at California State University's Long Beach campus.

According to DRI director Maureen Shiflett, "Every school I've talked to says they desperately need qualified math and science teachers."

EE jobless rate drops in Q2

UNION, N.H. -- EE unemployment rates plunged in the second quarter, as semiconductor vendors and systems companies scrambled to fill orders and launch products.

Robert Rivers, publisher of Engineering Manpower Newsletter , took the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobless numbers and estimated that the EE rate fell to 1.7 percent, down a dramatic 1.2 percentage points from the first quarter's 2.9 percent.

The news marks a stunning recovery from a few years ago, when EE unemployment had reached 6 percent.

Single-electron era nears

By Peter Clarke

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Silicon chips based on the transfer of single electrons through quantum-effect transistors could be practical sooner than expected thanks to progress made by researchers based at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. The latest work has displayed increased voltage gain in multiple-tunnel junction (MTJ) single-electron transistors. In addition, the researchers have found room-temperature single-electron effects in fabricated metal structures built on silicon.

"We have shown that silicon-on-insulator technology can be used to demonstrate the Coulomb blockade effect as the basis of single electronics. We have also demonstrated that we can make 2-nm metallic structures which enable us to observe single-electron effects at temperatures approaching room temperature," said Haroon Ahmed, Professor of Microelectronics at Cambridge University, and one of the team leaders. "Of course, we still have many p roblems to overcome before we can truly realize single-electron circuits. However, we have taken a significant step towards this objective."

Video processing goes parallel

By Chappell Brown

MORRISTOWN, N.J. -- The axiom that only dedicated hardware will be able to crunch high-volume multimedia data is being questioned in a joint project between Bell Communications Research Corp. (Bellcore) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The two research groups are running image-processing and video-compression algorithms on high-end parallel processors from Maspar Computer Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), looking for ways to parallelize standard code and experimenting with parallel video-compression approaches. Initially designed as a testbed for comparing different algorithms, the recoding of serial algorithms for parallel machines may have near-term app lication in the burgeoning multimedia market.

"As microprocessors become cheaper, desktop systems are becoming multiprocessors," said Bellcore computer scientist Pierre Moulin. "Those systems will be able to take advantage of parallel image-processing and -compression algorithms."

Maspar, in fact, is about to roll out an MPEG-based product for its machines, according to Moulin. "Video-signal processing is an ideal application for parallel processing since image data is localized in both space and time," he said.

FPGAs spawn self-healing ICs

By Peter Clarke

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Envisioning circuits that can repair and reproduce themselves, a research team here at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Logic System Laboratory is developing an embryological-electronics architecture based on field-programmable gate arrays. Becaus e FPGAs can be rewired on the fly, they offer what the team calls an ideal medium for simulating the "self-reproducing automata" envisioned by the late U.S. computer theoretician and architect John von Neumann.

So far, the lab's work involves such rudimentary systems as a 2-bit up/down counter. But team leader Daniel Mange believes the approach shows potential as a basis for the embryonic synthesis of logical systems.

"Our dream is to realize von Neumann's dream," Mange said. "He completed the design for a cellular computer just before he died, but at that time it was not possible to implement it or even simulate it."

Code-hopping keys Exel's lock-opening chip

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- With the increase in keyless entry systems has come a natural increase in the sophistication of keyless burglars. That has naturally brought about a countermeasures war, in which the keyless entry chip vendors have tried to create systems that can't be cracked by somebody with an RF scanner and a bad attitude.

Exel Microelectronics has been leading the countermeasures war with its Keeloq code-hopping encoder and decoder chips. Code hopping is relatively simple: you transmit a code that appears to be random. Only you and the receiver understand that it is an elaborate polynomial modification of the code you sent last time. So only you and the receiver agree on what code will open the door this time.

There are, of course, some issues to confront. If the code scheme is too complex, you need to carry a Pentium around on your key chain to get into your car. If it is too simple, your neighbor's kid in junior high may monitor your transmissions and crack the code for the fun of it.

There are also problems with synchronization. If your 3-year-old plays with your key chain, sending off a series of transmissions that the receiver doesn't hear, the transm itter and the receiver may not be able to agree on what code comes next. You may have to find your mechanical door key, unlock the car the old fashioned way and manually resynchronize the two chips.

Exel thinks it has excellent solutions to all these issues. The Keeloq architecture uses a 56-bit code, with 24 fixed bits and 32 code-hopping bits. The company claims its algorithm will not repeat a code in 65,000 transmissions. Yet computing the code is simple enough that the latest version of the encoder, the XL106, can run at 2.7 V and draw only 50 nA at standby.

Copper ATM devices fit fiber footprint

By Loring Wirbel

PLEASANT HILL, Calif. -- Tut Systems Inc., the analog line-conditioning specialists working on high-speed twisted-pair networks for LANs and cable TV, has introduced its long-awaited solution for 155-Mbit/second Asynchronous Tran sfer Mode over voice-grade or data-grade copper wiring. For networks with existing fiber connections, Tut is offering a unique "Fast Copper" fiber-to-copper converter as a standalone box the size of an external modem. For new add-in boards or motherboards, Tut is introducing a transceiver that matches the footprint of multimode fiber transceivers.

"The form factor was purely the result of customer demand," said Tut president Sal D'Auria. "We went around to the customer base with two different sizes of OEM daughtercards to implement the PMD (physical medium dependent) functions. Both times, customers said they wanted smaller transceivers. We had to redesign the magnetics, but we managed to match the footprint and pinout of a duplex fiber module."

Verilog goes switch-level

By Richard Goering

LOS ALTOS, Calif. -- Taking aim at deep-submicron-IC design, InterHDL Inc. is readying a switch-level Verilog simulator that can calculate resistance-capacitance (RC) interconnect delays. Viper RCsim works with the company's Viper Verilog clone simulator.

Though Cadence's Verilog-XL simulator provides some transistor-level modeling, it doesn't offer full RC analysis, said Eli Sternheim, InterHDL president. He said that RCsim is similar to an RC switch-modeling feature that Cadence used to have but has subsequently dropped.

The new simulator also offers capabilities similar to the TimeMill dynamic timing analyzer from Epic Design Technology (Santa Clara, Calif.), according to InterHDL. "It's like taking Verilog-XL and Epic TimeMill and merging them into one product that is Verilog," said Dick Bosenko, vice president of marketing and sales at InterHDL.

However, RCSim isn't necessarily a replacement for TimeMill. Bosenko conceded that TimeMill has more library interfaces and might offer some performance advantages.

Motorola fills midrange gap with PowerPC 603e

By David Lieberman

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Filling the middle ground between its PowerPC 603- and PowerPC 604-based offerings, Motorola Computer Group is bringing the 100-MHz PowerPC 603e processor to bear on its line of VMEbus single-board computers (SBC) and OEM motherboards.

With 256 kbytes of level-two cache in place, the boards deliver balanced performance, cranking out 90 to 100 SPECint92 and 90 to 100 SPECfp92.

The new motherboards--the full-sized Ultra and the baby-AT-sized Atlas--both contain the expected complement of PC-type peripherals and I/O on-board: a parallel port, two serial ports, floppy-disk-drive port, IDE hard-disk-drive port, and mouse and keyboard ports. But they also sport on-board DMA-equipped mass-storage and LAN interfaces, 8-bit SCSI-2 and 10 Base-2/10 Base T Ethernet, both residing on the local PCI bus that links the processor-memory complex to the system peripheral controllers.

The Ultra adds 16-bit stereo audio capability to the mix, as well as a Super VGA graphics controller accommodating 64,000 colors at resolutions up to 1,024 x 768 non-interlaced and 1,280 x 1,024 interlaced.

Cisco suite targets SNA

By Loring Wirbel

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Cisco Systems Inc. will roll out a suite of network-management products in the next few months to give IBM System Network Architecture (SNA) networks the same visibility and manageability as the TCP/IP world. While the bulk of "CiscoWorks Blue" consists of homegrown code developed at Cisco's new IBM division here, the company has also tapped software partners, including NetTech Systems Inc. (Raleigh, N.C.), NetSys Technologies Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) and Metaplex Pty. Ltd. (Sydney, Austral ia), to fill holes in its suite. Donna Cronheim, product manager for network management at Cisco, predicted the combination of native and licensed features will give the Blue package "unparalleled" manageability for SNA.

The first and perhaps most important element of the Blue package, slated for September arrival, is the creation of a Native Service Point (NSP), allowing routers to be fully visible from a host application from IBM or Sterling Software. The Simple Network Management Protocol is not used; instead, the host mainframe's Network Manager Vector Point is used.

Taiwanese plan P6/P7 project

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

HSINCHU, TAIWAN -- Out of a climate of fear and a determination to ensure its future role in the computer industry, the Taiwan government has formulated a plan to back the simultaneous development of its own P6 and P7 gen erations of X86 microprocessors. Seeking first silicon as early as mid-1997, researchers here hope the effort will help unshackle the information-technology industry from the increasingly dominant role of Intel Corp.

"It's not a question of whether we will try to design our own CPU; the debate now is only over how," said one senior government researcher who has submitted to Taiwan's minister of economic affairs a multiyear plan for designing the processors at a minimum cost of $16 million per year.

The plan has been accepted by the minister and implementation details are being worked out among the government, local research institutes and semiconductor and systems makers here.

United Microelectronics Corp., which, despite suits from Intel, will press ahead with sales of its own 486DX/2 products in the fourth quarter, is discussing what role it will take in the development. And local researchers are expected to canvass processor makers outside

Taiwan early next year on what role they might play.

Intel's dominance in processors, chip sets and motherboards sparked the move. "We understand Intel has a 3-2-1 strategy," said Ming Chien, chairman of First International Computer Inc., arguably the country's largest motherboard maker. "It wants to sell 30 million CPUs, 20 million Triton chip sets and 10 million motherboards. Taiwan's whole industry produces only about 10 million motherboards in its domestic plants."

While Chien downplays the impact of Intel's motherboard business on First International Computer, the company has hired a former executive vice president of Wang Laboratories -- new CEO Horace Tsiang -- to start a notebook business that the company hopes will generate more revenue by 1997 than its motherboard business.

"Fear is the best way to characterize the mood in Taiwan,"said Daniel Heyler, semiconductor analyst for Dataquest in Asia and a longtime resident of Taiwan. "You have a whole IT industry in Taiwan based around the motherboard."

"Recently, some small motherboard companies in Taiwan have gone out of business or gone bankrupt," said C.S. Ho, chairman of PC maker Mitac Group and longtime chairman of the Taipei Computer Association, which has held many informal meetings on the issue of Intel's growing motherboard and systems business. "More Taiwan motherboard companies will probably disappear. It's part of the normal industry consolidation; the Intel motherboard strategy just accelerated the whole process. In the past, if you didn't have economies of scale, you couldn't survive. But, recently, even if you have economies of scale, you have to focus your business very carefully or Intel will kill you."

Local core-logic companies say they don't get enough early information on Intel's CPUs or its new native signal processing (NSP) software initiative to design leading products of their own. "When we get a spec, they sample the chip," said K.G. Tan, vice president of R&D for Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SIS), a core-logic maker here.

"Right now, we are trying to design a chip set for the P6 that could sample internally by the end of the year, primarily targeting the desktop market,"Tan said. "We want to build in NSP hooks for things such as fast DMA and audio. But, basically, we are all guessing what features Intel will bring into the chip with NSP and what will be left for us to integrate. And that's the way they want it to be -- we all guess until they come out with something."

Though SIS expects its business could almost double this year, growth could have been even stronger if not for Intel's Triton chip set and Triton-based motherboard sales, Tan said.

Responding to the perceived threat with a dual-track development planýsimilar to what Intel follows -- Taiwan will simultaneously work on a P6 and P7. Its National Science Council has set up a group consisting of 20 professors at the National Chao Tong University to research such areas as very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) design that would lead to a P7-class processor. Within the next few days, a meeting between th at group and other government researchers is expected to divide that task into working groups.

Taiwan's Computer and Communications Research Laboratories (CCL), part of the government-assisted Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), is believed to have a small team at work on a 686-class design. "There has been a lot of pressure on us to do something [about the Intel situation]," said a senior ITRI manager.

However, work on the 686 design might ultimately be turned over to a separate group either within a company such as UMC or another agency.

The ITRI manager estimates Taiwan could transfer the P6 technology to multiple local IC makers. About half of Taiwan's motherboards currently ship without processors, because of rapid fluctuations in CPU prices. Locally designed and made CPUs, expected to sell for less than Intel's chips, could fill many of those slots, he estimates, opening up a potential market for 5 million chips per year.

That has been part of the strategy UMC has adopted with i ts 486SX product, which the company has been primarily selling in plastic quad flat packages for less than $30 in Hong Kong to China-based motherboard factories. Many of those factories are backed by Taiwan motherboard companies, who export their boards mainly to Europe and Asia. The UMC chips have actually been labeled "Not for sale in the USA," in an effort to avoid Intel's legal department. That effort failed recently, when Intel sued UMC and its distributors in a number of Asian and European countries.

Nonetheless, UMC will continue with its X86 plans, said Tai-Shing Ho, director of the 50-person CPU products division of UMC. He estimates the company will have shipped just over 1 million of the 33- and 40-MHz processors by yearend, when it will launch its 486SX/2 and DX/2 chips running at 50 and 66 MHz. The chips will sell for roughly $50, continuing to contribute just a few percentage points to the company's total revenue, which should hit $780 million this year.

"From a strategic point of view, it 's very important for Taiwan to have this product," said Ho. "If you look ahead three or five years, maybe we will begin to have good revenues."

Ho said that UMC expects next year to market 80- and even 100-MHz versions of the 486 chips, though it will not commit resources to a DX/4 design. "We will decide by the end of this year whether we want to begin work on our own 586 or maybe a 686 project," said Ho, alluding to the fact UMC is still trying to determine what its role in the government project will be.

Whether Taiwan's plan can succeed is anyone's guess. The project faces enormous technical and management hurdles, as it tries to unite the sometimes divisive forces in the local industry around a single approach to building the critical multimillion-gate CPUs.

About four years ago, CCL tried to develop a Sparc-compatible CPU. Though the resulting silicon was technically successful, it was a commercial failure. Government researchers said they have learned that they can develop core technologies f or the local industry but should leave development of specific commercial products to local companies.

The Taiwan electronics industry is known for its government-backed consortia, which have had mixed results over the years. A submicron technology consortium helped transfer 0.35-micron technology to local IC makers and has been spun off into a new commercial SRAM plant. However, the terms of membership and the ultimate spin-off plan were often the focus of controversy in the local industry.

Signs point to 300-mm wafer move

By Brian Fuller

SAN FRANCISCO -- Signs of a faster-than-expected transition to next-generation semiconductor wafers emerged here last week at Semicon West, as equipment makers offered glimpses of prototype tools for processing silicon on 300-mm (12-inch) platters.

The debate over the role of chip makers in driving 300-mm -wafer standards also intensified last week, when Japan's semiconductor giants hinted that they will compete -- rather than cooperate -- with a new Sematech-affiliated consortium for developing 300-mm capability.

Sematech launches an EDA initiative

By Richard Goering

AUSTIN, TEXAS -- In a major effort to bring EDA up to speed with the semiconductor industry's aggressive deep-submicron road map, Sematech has launched an initiative to fund R&D for the software needed to enable 0.25-micron design by 1998. The consortium's ECAD program, this month, is circulating its first "requests for technology," which spell out requirements for 0.25-micron hierarchical timing-driven design.

SGI, Digital heat workstation war

By Alexander Wolfe

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. -- The workstation world's frenzied contest of 3-D graphics one-upmanship went another round last week, as Silicon Graphics Inc. unveiled its Indigo 2 Impact family and Digital Equipment Corp. debuted its AlphaStation 600.

Featuring proprietary graphics subsystems with custom ASICs, both the Digital and SGI machines underscore the latest engineering battle that's embroiling workstation designers: building souped-up architectures to speed the performance of complex lighting, shading and texture-mapping algorithms.

Indeed, workstation stalwarts IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. fired their own 3-D graphics salvos in recent weeks, separately launching systems hailed by industry observers for achieving price/performance breakthroughs. Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems is not standing idly by, readying Ultrasparc-based machines incorporating new 3-D random-access-memory technology.

Mead envisions new design era

By R. Colin Johnson

The dual task of discovering the underlying principles of neural operation and then building silicon analogs has proved more difficult than Carver Mead predicted. But the effort required to leap those hurdles is beginning to pay off in new insights that could transform the field of VLSI design.

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.

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