EET-i Top of the News
Week of August 7, 1995
- August 10, 1995
 NEC targets set-top box
- Report from Siggraph: 3-D coming to the Net
- Sharp expands LCD role
- Matsushita to build Super Density CD-ROM drives
- NEC introduces largest flat-panel display for notebooks
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- August 9, 1995
- Laser effect seen as cleaning alternative
- Neural VOR predicts illness
- Altera makes it easy to add functional blocks to its FPGAs
- Internet software-development tools arrive
- Microtec eyes PowerPC tools
- Surprise! Gallium arsenide is successful
- August 8, 1995
- New platform alternatives for Spice
- CD-ROM chip ups speed ante
- Maxtor spins 2.5-inch drives
- Ethernet switches on the way
- August 7, 1995
- Intel-Microsoft rift threatens native signal processing
- NEC drops burst EDO DRAMs to pick up SDRAM lite
- Cinematographers add dissent to boiling ATV pot
- Media processors may hijack Hot Chips symposium
- Avert thine eyes: Intel lifts a corner of Appendix H's cover
Other news sources on Techweb:
NEC targets set-top box
By
Junko Yoshida
KAWASAKI, Japan -- Maneuvering to strike while the market's still hot, NEC Corp.'s AV System LSI Development Lab has sent its engineers in pursuit of the elements for the definitive digital TV set-top box. The lab is preparing an arsenal of silicon, ranging from analog front-end channel decoders to
error-correction technology to MPEG chips, that will target service providers in markets here and abroad.
NEC recently became the first Japanese chip manufacturer to unveil a 64 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) decoder IC, which will sample to cable-service providers this fall along with a separate front-end chip and Reed Solomon IC. Two other offerings--a single chip integrated with a QPSK (quad phase-shift keying) demodulator, Viterbi decoder and Reed Solomon error correction and a separate front-end chip--will target the European satellite-service market.
The company is already shipping custom MPEG-2 decoder chips to a European service provider, and NEC's chip division captively supplies MPEG-1 audio/video decoders to its PC operation.
Report from Siggraph: 3-D coming to the Net
By
Alexander Wolfe
LOS ANGELES -- New technologies
that could turn the Internet into a venue for 3-D images and video are being talked up at Siggraph '95 here this week by Apple, NASA, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.
Silicon Graphics launched its World Wide Web contest, challenging players with what it's billing as "the first interactive 3-D gaming experience on the Net." The game, called "
The Rift
," takes players on a hunt across Web, as they solve puzzles and "navigate through VRML worlds." SGI is offering a first-place prize of an Indigo 2 workstation worth $36,000.
Sun Microsystems highlighted the latest enhancement to HotJava, its popular interactive Internet browser. HotJava has been upgraded to support VRML, the virtual-reality markup language. The new capability will let developers embed 3-D clips and images in their HotJava Web pages.
At a session on "3-D graphics through the Internet," Val Watson, a senior staff scientist at NASA Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, Calif.), detail
ed FastExpeditions. The new twist in the software tool is its ability to run user-generated scripts that perform visual analysis.
"People want more than 3-D objects they can look at," said Watson. "Instead of movies you can't do anything with, FastExpeditions allows you to perform your own analysis."
Sharp expands LCD role
By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO -- Bidding to expand the application of liquid-crystal displays, Sharp Corp. in September will begin marketing low-priced, direct-view LCD televisions and the first LCD rear-projection TVs in Japan.
"Sharp intends to offer TVs using LCDs from diagonal 3-inch to 200-inch," said Seiji Shiotsu, senior executive director in charge of Sharp's TV and Video Systems Group.
"In the near future," Shiotsu said, "Sharp will introduce direct-view LCD TVs up to 21-inch size. For the size larger than 21-inch to about 62-inch, the TVs will be in the form
of rear-projection TVs. And for applications larger than 62-inch, Sharp will offer front-projection systems."
The direct-view LCD TVs are 8.4-inch and 10.4-inch diagonal TVs with suggested retail prices of $1,209 and $1,648, respectively. The price is roughly half that of previously marketed products of similar size from Matsushita and NEC costing $2,700 to $3,100.
Matsushita to build Super Density CD-ROM drives
TOKYO -- Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics Industries Ltd. (MKE; Takamatsu, Japan) has announced that it will market ROM drives based on the Super Density (SD) format proposed by seven companies, including Toshiba and Matsushita, by next summer.
MKE, a subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industries Co. Ltd. that manufactures VCRs and storage drives, will develop ROM drives that can read disks in SD-5 (5-Gbyte), SD-9 (9-Gbyte) and SD-10 (10-Gbyte) formats, said an MKE spokesman.
The global PC market will reach 55 million to 60 million units in 1997, and 10 percent of them will have a built-in SD-ROM drive, MKE projects. "Since we are supplying CD-ROM drives to major personal-computer vendors on an OEM basis, we are expecting orders for SD-ROM drives from these clients," said the spokesman.
Parent Matsushita is promoting PD disk drives, which can read and write on PD phase-change-disk and can read CD-ROM disks, too. "Various combinations will be possible--from PD and CD-ROM and PD and SD-ROM to SD-RAM and SD-ROM--depending on customer demand. These disk formats do not conflict," said a Matsushita spokesman.
NEC introduces largest flat-panel display for notebooks
LOS ANGELES -- NEC Electronics Inc. this week introduced an 11.3-inch color Super SVGA LCD, claiming it is the largest flat-panel display that can fit into a notebook computer.
Designated NL8060BC29-01
, the LCD features 800 x 600 resolution for crisp displays; a 6-bit per color (18-bit) display with a palette of 262,000 colors; a low-power-consumption design to ensure longer battery life in portable computers; and a small form factor that reduces the overall weight and thickness of a system.
Sampling is expected this month at $2,200 each in single-unit quantities.
Laser effect seen as cleaning alternative
By
Chappell Brown
BETHESDA, Md. -- A laser-based technique that uses quantum mechanics, rather than chemistry, to remove particles from the surface of wafers is showing promise as a cheap alternative to standard cleaning systems on fab lines.
The new approach, patented by Radiance Services Co., which was founded to exploit the method, is being proved out at the Interuniversities Microelectronic Center (IMEC) in Belgium. IMEC is work
ing with a prototype laser cleaning system built under license at Exitech Ltd. (Oxford, U.K.).
"This is a completely dry method that eliminates a lot of costly equipment such as a water-deionizing plant and all the plumbing," explained Donna Fitzpatrick, president of Radiance.
The dry-clean method does not require reactive or toxic chemicals. Instead, contaminants are carried away by chemically inert gases such as argon or nitrogen, which are already constituents of the atmosphere.
The cleaning method resulted from an accidental discovery made by one of the founders, Audrey Englesberg, while a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y). "Audrey wanted to lay down aluminum lines using laser-assisted chemical vapor deposition, which required a high-powered laser that she couldn't get access to," explained Fitzpatrick. "She borrowed a lower-power laser, which, to her surprise, not only failed to lay down the aluminum but also removed everything else on the surface of the wafer."
Neural VOR predicts illness
By
R. Colin Johnson
WASHINGTON -- A complete model of the vestibular-ocular reflex (VOR) was demonstrated here recently at the World Congress on Neural Networks. The neural-network-based model accurately mimics not only the behavior of a normal VOR but also the abnormal behavior of damaged VORs.
Separately, the author estimated that at least two months' exposure to inaccurate virtual-reality (VR) simulations could damage healthy VORs.
The VOR coordinates eye movement with the sensor data from the ear's semicircular canals, indicating the orientation of the head, its angular momentum and which way is "down." In humans, hair cells in the semicircular canals detect the head's orientation and acceleration. That information is relayed to a biological neural network, the vestibular nucleus, which automatical-
ly stabilizes the visual field by shifting the orientation of the eyes whenever the head moves.
Altera makes it easy to add functional blocks to its FPGAs
By
Ron Wilson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Recognizing that multi-thousand-gate designs going into its new Flex families will often employ third-party megafunctions, Altera Corp. has created a marketing partnership program that will let independent function-block designers reach Altera's customers more efficiently. Under the program, called Altera Megafunction Partners Program (Ampp), partners will be able to submit useful functional blocks to Altera in synthesizable Verilog or VHDL form. Altera will examine them to verify that they synthesize with Max+2 tools, and then list them in a database.
Customers would purchase rights to the blocks directly from the suppliers, and would presumably work w
ith the suppliers on synthesis, debug and timing tasks.
Initial members of the program include 3Soft Corp. (San Jose, Calif.,) Cast Inc., Eureka Technology, Ravicad (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Silicon Engineering. Altera claims to be working with about 20 additional companies that could potentially participate in the partnership.
Internet software-development tools arrive
By
R. Colin Johnson
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Abraxas Software Inc. has released its PCYACC/Hypertext 2000 package, a comprehensive set of tools that allow software developers to include in their applications a variety of graphic and text standards now common on the Internet.
With the new tools, Hypertext systems can be built that include Abstract Syntax Notation, Hyper Text Markup Language, Rich Text Format, PostScript, and Apple Computer's HyperTalk. The system will generate
object-oriented C++ hypertext applications for both Windows 95 and Macintosh operating systems.
"Multimedia systems are going to take us away from ASCII-based text systems, but what we have now is a Tower of Babel out there," explained Patrick Conley, president of Abraxas. "What we are offering developers is the basic tools to address this problem to build systems of the future."
Also, the popular Sugal (SUnderland Genetic ALgorithm system) genetic-algorithm software for engineers and researchers has entered its second generation.
Sugal V2.0
, has just become available for free downloading.
Microtec eyes PowerPC tools
By
Brian Fuller
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Microtec Research Inc.'s decision late last month to support a pending embedded version of PowerPC proves the company lear
ns from mistakes.
The tool vendor said it will support the MPC821 high-performance, integrated PowerPC processor from Motorola with its Xray Debugger development software, a compiler package, and its VRTX operating system.
A little more than a month ago, Microtec announced that it expected lower-than-anticipated revenues for its first fiscal quarter of 1996. The reason: "a shift in the embedded-systems market toward the PowerPC microprocessor, for which Microtec Research does not currently have a product offering," the company said in a news release.
"We didn't anticipate the rapid growth in PowerPC as it actually has occurred," said Microtec president and CEO Jerry Kirk in an interview last week. "We made a decision to focus on base technology, rather than port an older generation of technology to PowerPC, so when we do that, we'll have a much better offering."
Surprise! Gallium arsenide i
s successful
By
Brian Fuller
WARREN, N.J. -- Suddenly, GaAs is going great guns.
Once mired in such high-margin but stagnant markets as military and aerospace, gallium-arsenide-IC vendors have surged into the mainstream in the past few years, riding the wave of the booming communications business. Nowhere can the robust growth be seen better but through the eyes of the three GaAs companies that have gone public in the past two years: Anadigics Inc. (Warren), TriQuint Semiconductor Corp. (Beaverton, Ore.) and Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Camarillo, Calif.).
All three have struggled in one form or another to transform their businesses into shipshape commercial-IC entities and launch successful IPOs. Now they're now working to sustain the growth rates demanded by shareholders.
"GaAs has arrived," asserted Ronald Rosenzweig, president of Anadigics, the last of the triumvirate to go public.
The vendors had a tough row to hoe in the first half
of the 1990s as they worked to overcome high manufacturing costs and quell customers' second-source concerns and general wariness of the technology.
Steve Sharp, TriQuint's chairman, president and chief executive officer, joined the company in the dark days of 1991. "I joined when we merged three losing GaAs companies. The question then was, How do we survive? That's much different than [today's] How do you grow your output six times in a quarter?"
New platform alternatives for Spice
By
Richard Goering
SAN PEDRO, Calif. -- New platform alternatives for the Spice circuit simulator include a "keyless," floating-license version of the Windows-based ICAP/4 simulator from Intusoft, and a native program for the Power Mac from Vamp Inc. (Los Angeles).
While most Unix-based EDA software is available today under floating licenses, nearly all PC so
ftware is provided on a single-platform basis and protected by a key or "dongle" that sits on the PC's parallel port. Taking the Unix floating-license concept into the Windows world, Intusoft's keyless networked version of ICAP/4 is licensed for a specific number of copies that float on a network.
The ICAP/4 package includes IsSpice 4, a 32-bit program based on Berkeley Spice 3. IsSpice 4 features analog behavioral modeling, a mixed-signal capability, and interactive analysis and parameter sweeping. The ICAP/4 package also includes waveform analysis, model libraries with more than 6,000 parts and integrated schematic entry. ICAP/4 is available under Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT.
"We decided we could meter how many versions you get from the server, so you don't need a key unless you want to run the software directly on the server," said Charles Hymowitz, vice president at Intusoft. "Now you can buy one version and serve all the engineers in your department."
CD-ROM chip ups speed ante
By
Ron Wilson
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Oak Technologies Inc. has pretty much had the CD-ROM-controller market to itself all through the explosion of multimedia PCs and Windows 95 systems. But it's getting some head-on competition from startup Sigmax Technology Inc., which claims a speed advantage for its new chip over Oak's just-introduced controller.
The speed battle is not over the data rate coming off the drive; rather, the conflict is over how efficiently the controller can get data from the read channel into PC main memory. The struggle is one of error-correction management, buffering strategy and bus utilization.
In the Sigmax device, the controller performs read-ahead caching, on the assumption that the CPU is likely to come back after a while and ask for the next sector. There is a provision to buffer up subsequent sectors coming from the drive
while the error-correction hardware is working on a particularly recalcitrant sector.
Maxtor spins 2.5-inch drives
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Leveraging its design expertise with 1.8-inch drives, Maxtor Corp. is jumping into the hotly competitive market for thin, high-capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drives for notebook computers. The Laramie drive packs up to 1.3 Gbytes of storage into a drive just 12.5 mm high, which Maxtor claims gives it the current lead in capacity for drives of that size.
"Market experts are predicting that demand for 2.5-inch drives with a Gbyte or more of capacity is going to explode over the next couple years," said John Hagerman, vice president of mobile products at Maxtor, "so to be a player we are working very hard to expand the capacities of our products."
Indeed, the high-capacity portion of the 12.5-mm-high, 2.5-inch disk-drive market is becoming a hotly contested ar
ea. IBM has launched its TravelStar LP drive, believed to employ magneto-resistive heads to allow it to use just two platters, compared with four platters on Maxtor's 1.3-Gbyte drive. Toshiba is currently shipping an 814-Mbyte drive in the form factor, the MK 1926. And Integral Peripherals is preparing a 1-Gbyte drive in the form factor that will use just three platters.
Ethernet switches on the way
By
Rick Boyd-Merritt
FREMONT, Calif. -- Aggressively pushing the concept of private or dedicated Ethernet switching, Grand Junction Networks Inc. next Monday will officially roll out a line of Ethernet workgroup switches that expand a user's configuration options at lower per-port prices than the company's existing products. At the same time, the company is halving the price of its current desktop switches to broaden market penetration.
"For
people who were thinking about moving to private Ethernet connections but thought they were still too expensive, this will make it a no-brainer," said Jean Young, product line manager for Grand Junction.
The FastSwitch 2000 line offers 25 switched 10-Mbit/second Ethernet ports, with each supporting multiple MAC addresses--as many as 8,192 in some configurations. In addition, the Model 2100 offers two 100 Base TX ports for server or backbone connections; the Model 2800 offers two high-speed expansion slots for the company's 100 Base T or FDDI add-on products. Grand Junction has also said it will offer Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) modules for the switches in 1996, probably at 155-Mbit/s speeds.
Intel-Microsoft rift threatens native signal processing
By
Ron Wilson
and
Ashok Bindra
HILLSBORO, Ore. -- A di
rect confrontation between Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. over software-based audio processing has brought much of the industry-wide native signal processing (NSP) initiative to a standstill.
Intel has withdrawn its release schedule for the IA-SPOX real-time kernel that underlies much of its audio NSP work, while Microsoft has virtually ordered third-party applications developers not to use the IA-SPOX services. Until the conflict is resolved, many developers have put their NSP plans on hold.
Indeed, multimedia developers will find themselves in a quandary "until the two 800-pound gorillas stop fighting," as one executive put it. Moreover, the conflict raises a host of technical issues surrounding support for audio data streams in Windows 95.
Signs of trouble surfaced early this year, when it became clear that Intel and Microsoft were proceeding in different directions on applications programming interfaces (API) for signal-processing applications. But the problem broke into the open this spring at
the Microsoft Windows 95 Games Developers Conference, when Microsoft speakers reportedly told developers it would be inadvisable to use NSP services in their applications.
The latest developments came to light last week, when EE Times learned that Intel has restructured its IA-SPOX development effort. Now, according to industry sources, Intel Architecture Labs has stopped work on IA-SPOX for Windows 3.1.
NEC drops burst EDO DRAMs to pick up SDRAM lite
BY David Lammers
TOKYO -- NEC Corp. has decided to abandon burst EDO (extended data out) DRAM development and concentrate on low-cost synchronous DRAMs (SDRAMs) for Pentium PCs with no L2 cache. The move will set up a direct confrontation between a new Pentium-specific SDRAM from NEC and other Japanese vendors, and EDO parts from U.S. and Korean companies. At the same time, NEC is continuing development on a next generation of SDRAMs that cou
ld zoom along at 250 MHz in main memory applications.
The specifications for the new SDRAM-lite parts were agreed upon by many of the largest DRAM manufacturers, and the line of 168-pin DIMMs (dual in-line memory module) that NEC will soon ship in sample quantities are compatible with existing Jedec-standard SIMM
The 66-MHz SDRAM-lite parts are aimed at a new segment of the PC industry: Pentium systems that leave out expensive L2 cache, depending on the Pentium's on-chip primary cache and a fast main memory to achieve high performance. Recent studies have shown that such systems can actually run faster than motherboards with asynchronous L2 caches. And the extreme shortage of the alternative--burst synchronous SRAMs to implement a 66-MHz synchronous cache--has created an avalanche of interest in fast main memory designs.
Cinematographers add dissent to boiling ATV pot
By
George Leopold
and
Junko Yoshida
WASHINGTON -- The technical and political clouds swirling around the advanced TV standards decision are thickening. For even as federal regulators reopen deliberations on how best to allocate the spectrum, the feud between broadcasters and computer makers over proposed digital video formats has a new combatant: Hollywood cinematographers, who have voiced strong reservations about the 16 x 9 aspect ratio in current advanced TV proposals.
A Federal Communications Commission advisory panel is approaching the finish line in setting specifications. But some industry observers opposed to the proposed video formats view the FCC proceeding as the beginning of a critical six-month period when regulators must sort out the issues, and the computer and movie people get their last crack at the proposals.
Indeed, some computer companies and the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), which claim they have n
ever been included in the decision making process for standard-definition TV (SDTV), are now trying to bring their concerns directly to the FCC.
Media processors may hijack Hot Chips symposium
By
Ron Wilson
and
Junko Yoshida
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The seventh annual IEEE Computer Society Hot Chips symposium is set to start on the Stanford University campus next Sunday with an impressive procession of papers on the latest RISC and x86 CPUs. But before the first CPU paper, the show already may have been stolen by a contingent of upstart special-purpose media processors.
Big CPUs, the traditional core of the Hot Chips program, will be out in force. The conference will hear technical updates on the Intel P6 and AMD K5 processors, Fujitsu's HaL SPARC architecture, UltraSPARC and the MIPS R10000. In addition, th
e embedded processing and x86 arenas will get their time in the sun. AMD will detail the new superscalar implementation of the 29K family--also the hardware basis for the K5. LSI Logic will give the first public details of its scalable family of 64-bit MIPS ASIC cores, and National Semiconductor will unveil for the first time its NS486 embedded CPU. Motorola and IBM will chart their course for the PowerPC architecture in PDA and purely embedded applications.
Yet much of the attention is likely to focus on special-purpose architectures, which are rapidly overtaking general-purpose CPUs in complexity and throughput.
Avert thine eyes: Intel lifts a corner of Appendix H's cover
By Alexander Wolfe
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. last week released a portion of Appendix H--the highly confidential document that describes a series of advanced features of the Pentium microprocessor--but served
notice that it still plans to keep much of the information under tight wraps.
Appendix H burst onto the Internet last month, when a German hacker revealed the operation of the Pentium's performance-monitoring registers. The registers tally data on some 40 different aspects of chip operation, including memory accesses and cache hit rates. The hacker, Christian Ludloff, said he obtained the information by reverse-engineering techniques.
Last week, Intel released its own official documentation on the registers, publishing details in the updated version of its three-volume "Pentium Processor Family Developer's Manual." However, the books still cite the existence of Appendix H, referring engineers to that document for "confidential information on architecture extensions...which are non-essential for standard applications." Indeed, an Intel spokesman confirmed that only the performance-monitoring information is being released. "The whole of Appendix H isn't going public," he said.
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