EET-i Top of the News
Week of July 24, 1995
- July 27, 1995
 Digital-phone industry weathers storm
- PCS providers find an edge over cellular rivals
- DSP Communications debuts voice-data wireless chip
- Three establish digital-voice recording standard
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- July 26, 1995
- $5 IC combines speech synthesis/recognition
- Micromirror video projector developed
- Report warns of R&D shortfall in the U.S.
- ATP's last gasp? Office funds 24 R&D projects
- Mitel will support Israeli firm's hubs
- July 25, 1995
- FCC considers alternative HDTV technology
- Spectrum Lands DSP Deal With Lockheed Martin
- Ashtech focuses on precision side of GPS
- TI ships SDRAMs
- Austrian IC firm takes over South African foundry
- July 24, 1995
- Computer makers delay digital TV standard
- German Cold War technology sparks commercial effort
- Intel positions NSP in a video embrace
- Rockwell buys United Technologies' Colorado fab
- Takeover by South Korea's LG to bolster Zenith HDTV effort
- Europeans plan 'Jessi Jr.' -- successor to submicron chip initiative
- IPC road map raises interconnect alarm
Other news sources on Techweb:
Digital-phone industry weathers storm
By
Ron Wilson
SAN MATEO, Calif. -- First came excited early customers, then a growing number of comp
laints about lost connections and sound quality. Then an article in the
New York Times
decried the whole rollout of digital cellular telephone service in the United States in terms that made it sound like an unrelieved disaster. From the scattered reports, you'd think digital service was already on the ropes.
But as is often the case in such public outcries, the growing U.S. digital cellular network is not in such bad shape as word of mouth suggests. Conversations with users, service providers and technical gurus reveal that much of the initial disappointment arose from unrealistic customer expectations fed by a clash between marketing plans and technical realities.
In fact, industry leaders remain sold on digital cellular, and confidently predict that many of the startup bumps will smooth out next year when the feature-rich IS-136, the follow-on to today's technology, rolls out.
The digital service currently being deployed in the United States is based on the IS-54 standard, using existing
analog cellular telephone frequencies and technologies. This is the reason it is so appealing to providers. It is also the reason for some of the early glitches.
PCS providers find an edge over cellular rivals
By
George Leopold
Chicago -- With digital wireless communications poised to take off, service providers have turned to packet data communications to distinguish themselves from analog cellular providers. At an IEEE conference on wireless technology here, proposals surfaced for cracking the data market with systems based on rival multiple access technologies that are expected to underpin coming personal-communications services (PCS) networks.
The proposals ranged from frequency- and channel-hopping schemes designed to squeeze more out of available cellular spectrum to a PCS system based on a U.S. variant of the European Global System
for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard. The digital technologies demonstrate that interest in the estimated $180-billion wireless market is heating up, as several wireless consortia prepare to roll out PCS services in the coming year.
Since the government spectrum auctions were completed this year, industry analysts have stressed that new PCS companies must move beyond voice services.
Ronald LeMay, a Sprint Corp. official who heads the long-distance company's wireless partnership with cable operators called WirelessCo. L.P., acknowledged here that the consortium is seeking "functional differentiation" in information services. "We're a communications company, not a wireless company," LeMay said.
With wireless data networks growing in importance, the Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) standard grabbed attention here as a way to use idle cellular voice channels to transfer data packets between subscribers within cell sites and other basestation cell sites. Michael Sushko, of Minneapolis-based Kensin
gton & Icknield Ltd., said that 11 commercial CDPD sites have begun operating since the technology was introduced in 1992.
DSP Communications debuts voice-data wireless chip
By
Ashok Bindra
CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Leveraging its wireless-systems expertise and digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities, DSP Communications Inc. has created a dual-mode chip set that enables voice and data communications for a broad range of cellular digital packet data (CDPD) applications.The D5101 marks the company's entry into the wireless-data-communications market, which is predicted to see dramatic growth in the second half of this decade. According to market-research firm BIS Strategic Decisions, the number of wireless data users in the United States will rise to nearly 10 million by the year 2000, up from an estimated 500,000 last year.
"CDPD, while
just beginning to be deployed in the United States, is expected to be one of the leading wireless data services by the end of this decade," said Bill Ablondi, vice president of BIS. Analysts project that CDPD and other wireless data services will drive the use of cellular networks for data communications. BIS also expects significant growth in the Far East.
To provide a complete CDPD module design to users of its new chip set, DSP Communications (DSPC) forged partnerships with vendors that provide RF components, Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) call-processing software, software development and integration, as well as module design and manufacturing. DSPC, however, was reluctant to reveal the names of its partners.
Three establish digital-voice recording standard
By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO -- Three makers of voice recorders have established a standard for digital voice recording on sem
iconductor-based systems. The three are Olympus Optical Co., Grundig Professional Electronics GmbH and Philips Dictation Systems GmbH.
Dictation machines, and the handheld tape recorders used at conferences and interviews, are the immediate target. But the companies also expect that the format will find its way into personal computers and communications networks, including the Internet.
"The dictation-machine market itself is not big--about 6 million units a year worldwide. But if the algorithms are compact enough and offer good cost/performance, there should be wider demand," said an Olympus spokesperson.
September decisions
By September, the three companies will decide on the medium, the algorithm and the architecture for voice recording. "We are going to use semiconductor memory for the recording medium, but it is too early to tell whether it will be flash memory, SRAM, DRAM or some other form," said the spokesperson.
$5 IC combines speech synthesis/recognition
By
R. Colin Johnson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Sensory Circuits Inc. has crammed voice recognition, speech synthesis, audio recording and audio playback onto a single chip--all for under $5. The consumer-oriented RSC-164 achieves its balance between low-cost and high-performance by employing a patented neural-network technology.
The on-chip RAM holds up to 40 seconds of speech or other audio and can be expanded off-chip for recording any-length audio track at 20 kbits/second or less. On-chip, 64 kbytes of ROM can house typical vocabularies of up to 100 words, with larger vocabularies accommodated by additional off-chip ROM.
The key to the successful balance of low cost and high performance is attributed to an intelligent strategy to train many different neural networks and choose the best one, devised by Sensory Circuits chief scientist Mike Mozer. "We train about 500 neu
ral networks for each new application vocabulary, which takes about three or four days on a high-end PC, and then choose the one that works the best," said Mozer.
Micromirror video projector developed
MANCHESTER, England -- Rank Brimar Ltd., a manufacturer of specialist CRTs and display equipment, has demonstrated a prototype projector based on Texas Instruments' digital micromirror display (DMD) technology.
The projector, measuring 3.5 feet x 2 feet x 15 inches deep, was used to create a 12-foot x 9-foot image of about 2,000-lumens brightness. By the time production shipments of the projector start, due around the end of 1996, Rank Brimar aims to have doubled the brightness. Applications for the projector are expected to include pop concerts, conferences, advertising and promotional events, and data display. The prototype unit includes the necessary electronics to convert data from
either a VHS video tape recorder or a PC to drive the DMDs.
A basic advantage of the DMD-based projector is efficiency. Projectors based on LCD panels operating as shutters have difficulty reaching high brightness because they are absorbing light within the liquid-crystal material.
Report warns of R&D shortfall in the U.S.
By
George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- America's high-tech industries will be unable to compete globally unless government and industry can find new ways to make up the growing shortfall in R&D funding, a private think tank warns in a study aimed directly at congressional budget cutters. The group advocates restoration of government funding to 3 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product.
"Fifty years of societal accord on R&D are over," said Gregory Schmid, one of the authors of the report, released here t
his week by the Institute for the Future (Menlo Park, Calif.).
The end of the Cold War, growing international competition, rising product-development costs, shorter product life cycles and corporate downsizing have all contributed to the breakdown of the national consensus on R&D spending. Corporate research budgets have declined steadily since 1991, and federal spending--long driven by military requirements--is likely to be substantially reduced as GOP lawmakers focus on funding basic-research programs while slashing government-sponsored precompetitive R&D. Up to $6 billion of the $34 billion requested by the Clinton administration for civilian R&D has been targeted for cuts.
The study, "The Future of America's Research-Intensive Industries," warns that U.S. competitiveness will decline unless R&D spending is revived. "If the decreasing trend in overall U.S. R&D investment is not reversed quickly, the consequence may be irrevocable, and American society may rue that decision for yea
rs to come," the study concludes.
ATP's last gasp? Office funds 24 R&D projects
By
David Lieberman
and
George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- As Republican lawmakers work to dismantle the Advanced Technology Program, it is about to begin what could be its last great act: 24 R&D projects, including three in electronics and one in computing and information processing, for which the ATP has committed $60.5 million in cost-sharing funds for 1995.
The charter of the ATP, which is administered by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, is to help fund "high-risk R&D projects with the potential to spark important, broad-based economic benefits for the United States," according to a Commerce Department spokesman. "By reducing the early-stage R&D risks for individu
al companies, the ATP enables potentially important R&D projects that industry would not undertake on its own, or would be developed too slowly to compete in rapidly changing world markets."
One of the recipients of new government cost-sharing largesse is a multi-disciplinary team led by field-emission display specialist FED Corp. (Hopewell Junction, N.Y.). The goal is the componentized computer, or what Susan Jones, FED's executive vice president, dubs "the smart display." The project is budgeted at $15,575,000, half to be provided by public funding.
"We're partnering with suppliers and end users to develop core technologies to integrate computer functions and high-performance flat-panel displays into a single, compact, cost-effective unit," she explained. The vision is a multilayer ceramic module with an FED on one side and flip-chip electronics on the other, effectively "integrating the display and computer functions into a single component."
Mitel will support Israeli firm's hubs
By
Loring Wirbel
TEL AVIV, Israel -- Lannet Data Communications Ltd., the switching-hub specialist that recently announced an intent to merge with Madge Networks Ltd., has signed a development pact with Mitel Corp. under which the Canadian company will bring voice PBX support to Lannet's MultiNet hubs.
Mitel, (Kanata, Ontario) will develop a special daughtercard for Lannet broadband 155-Mbit interface modules. The development project will be funded in part by the intergovernmental Canada-Israel Industrial Research Foundation.
The two companies are still negotiating terms under which Mitel's PBX division will sell Lannet hubs on a non-exclusive basis. Paul Mosher, director of product marketing at Mitel, said his company will have exclusive worldwide reseller rights for the module with PBX capabilities.
FCC considers alternative HDTV technology
By
George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- An expert group formed by the federal Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services met recently to work out details of a controversial testing program for an alternative high-definition TV transmission technology developed in Europe called coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM).
The team was formed in May to review a proposed testing program. Advisory Committee Chairman Richard Wiley has said the proposed COFDM modem must be "demonstrably superior" to the HDTV Grand Alliance's vestigal sideband tranmission subsystem before it can be tested. If the standard is met, a two to three week "bake-off " could be initiated.
Wiley said last week a testing program could set back the advisory panel's planned schedule for wrapping up its work and recommending a digital TV standard to the Federal Comm
unications Commission by mid-fall.
Spectrum Lands DSP Deal With Lockheed Martin
BURNABY, B.C. -- Spectrum Signal Processing has been awarded a $750,000 phase one contract by Lockheed Martin Corp. to design and fabricate digital signal processing (DSP) boards for use in autonomous precision approach and landing system (APALS). Spectrum will design and develop C40-based DSP boards for integration with other system hardware such as power supplies, backplanes, inertial navigational units, global positioning system boards, and embedded Sparc boards. The company will also provide a software platform, which includes real time operating system and drivers. The entire APALS hardware prototype is expected to be delivered to Lockheed before the year-end, said Tim Marchant, product manager at Spectrum.
Meanwhile, Spectrum is also readying proposals for phase two of the contract, which i
s a fully audited and FAA certified follow-on production contract. According to Lockheed, Spectrum is a key candidate for this multi million dollar contract. However, final decisions have yet to be made, said Lockheed. APALS is a novel airliner landing system that operates independently of ground aids and relies instead on radar, airborne GPS equipment and the creation of reference database for specific airport terrain. Initially a defense technology, Lockheed Martin is in the process of establishing an avionics business division to commercialize it.
Ashtech focuses on precision side of GPS
By
Loring Wirbel
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- In the past two years, the Global Positioning System network utlilizing 24 Navstar satellites has become one of the hottest growth areas in mobile communications. Because GPS transceivers provide three-dimensional loc
ational information with tight time and space accuracy, companies such as Rockwell Telecommunications, Trimble Navigation, and Magellan Systems have found heavy interest in GPS integration within Personal Digital Assistants, cellular phones, and auto modules for Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems.
But one of the first GPS pioneers, Ashtech Inc., argues that true growth markets for GPS may come in special vertical applications requiring precision levels approaching that of military GPS applications. These new realms require the simultaneous development of hardware, generic software modules, and user-specific application packages for uses as diverse as high-accuracy dredging, earthquake prediction, and "precision agriculture," where farmers use space-based bearings to improve harvest efficiency and reduce pesticide use.
Ashtech has pulled in several high-profile executives in recent months, including new president Charles Boesenberg, formerly of MIPS Computer Systems and Apple Computer Inc., and vice
president of product development Todd Townsend, formerly of Compression Labs Inc. The company's 1994 annual revenues of $31.8 million represent a 43 percent growth over the year previous, and Ashtech turned a profit of $1.9 million in 1994. Townsend said that an initial public offering is in the works for 1996.
Ashtech no longer refers to itself as a GPS company, but instead refers more generically to "precision solutions in global positioning." One of the reasons for this is that Ashtech is exploring opportunities to use the Russian GLONASS competitor to GPS, and is considering dual-mode receiver platforms capable of taking both GPS and GLONASS bearings. The company recently opened a Moscow Technology Center, and Ashtech founder Javad Ashjaee has moved to Russia to head up the new center.
"The motivation for this was not only to work on GLONASS, but to tap into the underutilized talents of Russian mathematicians familiar with positioning systems," Townsend said.
TI ships SDRAMs
HOUSTON, Texas--Following in the wake of major global DRAM vendors, Texas Instruments is shipping its first synchronous DRAMs (SDRAMs.)
TI has chosen to enter the SDRAM market with 16Mbit, rather than 4Mbit parts, aiming right out of the starting gate at the server main memory and personal computer unified memory markets. But the company is taking a relatively conservative architectural approach. It is delivering strictly JEDEC-compliant parts, not wandering from the spec into the alluring but untried fields of specialty graphics SDRAMs or simplified low-cost SDRAMs. Both of these approaches have been explored, and in some cases announced, by vendors such as Hitachi, Samsung and Toshiba.
The initial TI parts will be 4Mx4 and 2Mx8 chips. Both 66MHz and 83MHz speed grades will be available initially.
The SDRAM configurations that have stirred the most interest--100MHz and 1Mx16 organization--will have to
wait. At TI, as at other vendors, this combination of speed and width is under development, but not yet shipping.
Austrian IC firm takes over South African foundry
By
Peter Clarke
UNTERPREMSTATTEN, Austria -- In a second fab acquisition in as many weeks, Austria Mikro Systems International AG (AMS) has taken a 51 percent stake in a wafer fab in Pretoria, South Africa, for an undisclosed amount.
Two weeks ago AMS acquired 51 percent of European semiconductor maker Thesys Microelectronics GmbH (Erfurt, Germany). It's latest move is for South African Micro-Electronic Systems (Pty) Limited (SAMES), which was founded in 1979 to make ICs for the South African telecommunications industry.
Horst Gebert, president and chief executive officer of AMS, said: "The AMS group is now in a position to immediately provide ASIC-specific know-how t
o customers worldwide." AMS specializes in mixed-signal customer and application specific circuits for the communications, industrial and automotive sectors.
Computer makers delay digital TV standard
By
George Leopold
and
Junko Yoshida
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The emerging U.S. digital TV standard ran into computer-industry opposition last week as system proponents once again sparred over the the issue of video-display formats.
The latest blip arose when a federal advisory panel developing specs for digital TV approved a pair of standard-definition (SDTV) video formats that some computer makers say could hamper the interoperability of future digital television and computer systems.
The formats were endorsed last week by the Federal Communications Commission's Advisory Committee on Advanced Television
Service (Acats), which is in the final phase of completing a digital TV standard. At the commission's urging, Acats moved in May to incorporate the SDTV formats into the proposed high-definition standard as a way to ease broadcasters' path into digital TV.
But computer makers, led by Apple Computer Inc., launched a counteroffensive last month to persuade the panel to reconsider.
"In the process of forming SDTV specifications in the past few months, no public discussions have ever been made on how to prevent proposals for computer-incompatible interim systems from becoming the permanent new systems," complained Gary Demos, digital advanced TV consultant for Apple' s Advanced Technology Group.
German Cold War technology sparks commercial effort
By
Peter Clarke
HEILBRONN, Germany -- An anti-Star Wars laser-display project begun in the forme
r East Germany soon could unleash a potent force in projection television.
Schneider Rundfunkwerke, a local TV maker that reportedly picked up the technology shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is designing a pint-sized system built around three-color semiconductor lasers and scanning optics. The projection-TV, which is expected to debut by the middle of next year, will project a high-definition TV image on a wall.
Schneider Rundfunkwerke has just signed an agreement with Daimler-Benz (Stuttgart, Germany) to form a joint venture, Laser-Display-Technologie GmbH & Co KG (LDT; Heilbronn, Germany), to move the project to market. The Daimler-Benz half will be run by the automotive giant's Temic subsidiary, in Heilbronn.
The new outfit also plans to license the technology to equipment and component makers. The project is being subsidized by the German Federal Ministry for Education, Science, Research, and Technology and by the Bavarian Research Foundation.
Early demonstrations of the
projector were said to be impressive. An initial version was based on diode-pumped gas lasers in a system about the size of a refrigerator. Frank D. Maier, president and chief executive officer of Temic, said his company is prepared to put up half of about $75 million to fund the venture over the next few years in the belief that the technology can be converted to solid state.
Intel positions NSP in a video embrace
By
Rick Boyd-Merritt
and
Ron Wilson
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Intel Corp. is wooing systems vendors here with a new promise: nearly free videoconferencing on Pentium-based computers. By pulling together three technologies -- native signal processing (NSP), ProShare videoconferencing software and a new generation of third-party LCD graphics controllers -- Intel aims to eliminate almost all the increme
ntal hardware required for this application.
The effort could prove particularly significant for notebook computers -- where vendors face serious price competition next year and are looking for margin-boosting features.
However, companies here contacted by
EE Times
reported some skepticism, both about the computing capabilities of NSP and the availability of a sufficiently powerful generation of LCD controller chips to do the job.
Rockwell buys United Technologies' Colorado fab
By
Ron Wilson
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Rockwell Telecommunications, the Newport Beach, Calif., modem and multimedia silicon supplier, last week agreed to buy the United Technologies Microelectronics Center (UTMC) fab here for an undisclosed amount of cash. The move adds nearly 3,000 wafers per month to Rockwell' s CMOS capacity, but leaves UTMC in the unique
position of being a fabless vendor of high-reliability and radiation-hardened ICs.
"This purchase brings us some desperately needed near-term capacity," said Rockwell Telecom president Dwight Decker, citing "extraordinary demand across our product lines."
"We are in a time when you can' t get additional foundry capacity for love or money," Decker said. "We have just announced a substantial expansion plan for our internal facility. But to meet our immediate commitments, we had to purchase additional capacity now."
Rockwell is buying a 61-acre site and a 300,000-square-foot fab building. The plant's 1.25-micron line, in a 25,000-square-foot Class-10 clean room, cranks out 3,000 five-inch wafers per month, said UTMC president Nick Ide. "But most of the building has not yet been facilitized. Capacity is up to 10 times that figure."
Takeover by South Korea's LG to bolster Zenith HDTV effort
By George Leopold
GLENVIEW, Ill. -- Last week's $350 million deal that gives South Korea's LG Electronics majority control of Zenith Electronics Corp. is expected to bolster Zenith's efforts to enter the high-definition TV market.
Zenith is a key member of the HDTV Grand Alliance, which is expected to recommend a digital-TV standard to the FCC this fall. Zenith officials and members of a government advisory panel on HDTV specs said last week the deal will not affect Zenith' s participation in the Grand Alliance.
The seven-member Grand Alliance has agreed to pool patent rights on technologies created under the HDTV effort. Specifics of the agreement must still be worked out. Nevertheless, LG would have to pay Zenith royalties for any Grand Alliance technologies it uses, officials said.
The deal between Zenith and LG Electronics, formerly Goldstar Co., culminated a relationship of more than 20 years between the companies. Observers said Zenith had little choice but to accept LG's offer after
posting financial losses over most of the last decade. Zenith lost nearly $15 million last year after a $97 million loss in 1993. LG will own 57.7 percent of the outstanding common stock of Zenith when the deal is completed in October.
Europeans plan 'Jessi Jr.' -- successor to submicron chip initiative
By
Peter Clarke
MUNICH, Germany -- Micro-Electronics Development for European Applications (Medea) is the likely name for Jessi Jr., a pan-European support program that will succeed the Joint European Submicron Semiconductor Initiative when Jessi finishes its work at the end of 1996. But current indications are that Medea will be smaller than Jessi, which is funded to the tune of roughly $600 million a year.
According to sources, talks among company executives and national governments have been going on over the last few months as the players
sound each other out over how the new consortium should be defined. "We're at the squabbling stage," said an industry consultant familiar with the discussions.
Barring serious disagreements, the first proposals could surface around October. However, there are hints that Medea will be scaled down from Jessi' s $600 million annual budget, which now funds about 75 projects and a broad range of semiconductor process modules and equipment technologies.
IPC road map raises interconnect alarm
By
Terry Costlow
LINCOLNWOOD, Ill. -- The interconnection and packaging industry's newly completed 15-year technology road map concludes that today's board-production techniques won' t cut it for tomorrow's chips and systems. Research into new techniques must be stepped up, the road map warns, if board fabricators are to meet future requirements for via holes, s
ignal traces and other characteristics.
"Existing mechanical methods are not going to scale down to the miniaturization requirements of future systems," said Jack Fisher, technical staff member at IBM's PC Co. (Austin, Texas). "New methods will be essential to achieve reliability that is imperative for electronic systems."
Fisher headed the team that drafted the National Technology Road Map for Electronic Interconnection. The report was prepared for the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC) with the input of chip makers and system OEMs.
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