EET-i Top of the News
Week of August 14, 1995
- August 17, 1995
 Creative Technology unveils 3-D game card
- Motorola lays off 185 in wireless data group
- Thin-film effort finds R&D allies
- IBM moves to cut disk power usage
- Motorola rolls MACs for VG-AnyLAN
- 64-bit Unix API backed
- Microsoft lures Bell from Digital Equipment Corporation
- Kashnow named Raychem CEO
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- August 16, 1995
- Networks draw on shared memories
- Simple oxide 'recipe' lays groundwork for new GaAs products
- Micro batteries edge closer
- VHDL International moves toward s
ynthesis tool interoperability
- Chip Express to enter military market
- August 15, 1995
- Chip set erupts for Pentium notebook use
- Cirrus MPEG-1 decoder finally chip ready
- Hewlett-Packard preprocessor targets the P6
- Mentor, Integrated Systems prep cosimulation interface
- Midisoft fields PC-multimedia interface
- Livingston routers dial into the Internet boom
- Samsung tunes flash for audio market
- August 14, 1995
- House bill gives broadcasters digital flexibility--at a price
- Sun, IBM, Microsoft prepare to break SGI's grip on Hollywood
- Toshiba and IBM to build 64-Mbit DRAM plant in Virginia
- EDA's future may be molded in a quiet Berkeley lab
- Next to unveil Web software
- Book/bill ratio shatters records
- Moto, Microware in pact
Other news sources on Techweb:
Creative Technology unveils 3-D game card
By
Junko Yoshida
SAN FRANCISCO -- As many hardware makers stood poised to embrace Windows 95 as the entertainment platform of tomorrow, Creative Technology this week unveiled a plan to cash in on the platform of today. Eyeing the installed base of more than 20 million 486-based PCs, the Singapore company introduced a three-dimensional game card it hopes will capture the 3-D graphics m
arket in the same way its SoundBlaster board dominates audio. Calling the new 3D Blaster card a "bridge to the future," Creative aims to dominate the 3-D games front during the Christmas selling season and beyond--until Windows 95 becomes widely available in November. 3D Blaster incorporates a new games version of the Glint 3-D processor chip co-developed by Creative and 3Dlabs Inc. It also packs RAMDAC, 1 Mbit of video RAM and another of DRAM, along with a chip to interface with the 486's VL bus. The card--which operates as a 2-D Windows accelerator and 3-D graphics accelerator--will come bundled with six 3-D interactive titles. It will be priced at about $349.
Motorola lays off 185 in wireless data group
By
Loring Wirbel
SCHAUMBURG, Ill. -- New evidence of a poorly developing personal-digital-assistant market surfaced this week, as Motorola
Inc. laid off 185 employees in its wireless data group and narrowed its focus in the business.
Mil Ovan, director of marketing for the wireless data group, said that "the entire industry is in an embryonic state, similar to where cellular was 10 to 12 years ago." He said that the cuts--described as 20 percent of the group dedicated to Personal Digital Assistants and Personal Communicators--would not significantly affect development of future spins of Motorola's Envoy or Marco PDAs, or offerings of wide-area PCMCIA cards and communication software.
The group will limit future development efforts in older technologies such as the Altair wireless LAN and the InfoTac radio, however. "Our R&D efforts will be oriented toward wide-area packet-data networking, and research programs outside those areas will be de-emphasized," Ovan said. Still, analysts said that Motorola's staffing for the group may not have been in line with market realities. While Motorola would not comment on numbers or percentages, ana
lysts agreed that, if the numbers were accurate, Motorola had been far too optimistic in staffing for development of a consumer product with an unproven market.
Thin-film effort finds R&D allies
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Two leading superconductor companies this week allied with universities and research groups to ease R&D costs of next-generation thin-film technology. Superconductor Technologies Inc. and Conductus Inc., which are developing high-temperature superconductor components, formed the HTS Thin-film Manufacturing Alliance (HTMA).
The effort will focus on establishing industry standards for substrates, films and testing and providing second-sourcing and technology transfer among the companies. Other participants include Stanford University, Georgia Tech University, New Focus/Focused Research and BDM Federal, MSCI and IBIS and Associates. Scientists at the Naval Research L
aboratory and at Sandia (Livermore) National Laboratories also will participate.
IBM moves to cut disk power usage
By
Terry Costlow
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Attacking the power problems in portable-system design, IBM Storage Products Co. is deploying an artificial-intelligence-like algorithm in disk drives. The company has taken an unusual approach to conserve power in 2-1/2-inch disk drives, effectively entering idle states less often than more-power-hungry drives. Since drives are one of the key power-draining items in a portable system, the technique can extend battery life by as much as 8 percent. The technology, disclosed last week, drops power consumption by using software that monitors drive usage, entering a low-power idle state only when the user isn't likely to access the drive again. Most drives drop to a full idle state after every com
mand, which often forces them to restart because there are more accesses coming.
Motorola rolls MACs for VG-AnyLAN
AUSTIN, Texas -- Motorola Inc.'s data communications operation has introduced Medium Access Controllers (MAC) for the new 100 VG-AnyLAN local area network standard, incorporating ISA or PCI bus interfaces with the VG MAC. Motorola, driving to lower implementation costs for the VG LAN, is promising low controller pricing by early next year. At a projected 1996 volume price of $12 for the MC68853 ISA master and $22 for the MC68852 PCI master, Motorola will provide some tough competition for AT&T Microelectronics' Regatta VG chip set, as well as for Texas Instruments Inc.'s ThunderLAN, which handles both VG and Fast Ethernet.
HP and AT&T. The VG-AnyLAN is a 100-Mbit/second LAN standard, developed by Hewlett-Packard Co. with input from AT&T and other vendors, that c
an handle low-latency traffic through special packet prioritization methods in the hub. When it was finalized two months ago in the IEEE's 802.12 standard, support was provided for mapping both Ethernet and token-ring frames into the VG packet protocol.
64-bit Unix API backed
By
Loring Wirbel
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Several system, OS and database companies this week announced a joint effort to promote common 64-bit application programming interfaces (API) for future versions of Unix. Intel Corp. took center stage in an unorthodox role as program manager for the unnamed group, a position that found favor with vendors ranging from SunSoft Inc. and Silicon Graphics Inc. to Oracle Corp. and Informix Corp. The large list of supporters included major EDA players Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Mentor Graphics Corp. The collaborative work will build
on the specifications of standard 32-bit Unix implementations as defined in the Spec 1170 group, and application/user-interface work defined in the Common Open Software Environment effort. Intel's participation has grown more critical since June 1994, when the company united with Hewlett-Packard Co. to merge X86 and Precision RISC architectures in a new 64-bit processor architecture for future platforms based on very long instruction words. While Intel Fellow Richard Wirt was reticent to discuss how the joint effort might have spurred Intel's Unix interest, the new microprocessor reportedly does not merely use 64-bit register extensions, but relies on a complete new 64-bit integer programming model.
Microsoft lures Bell from Digital Equipment Corporation
REDMOND., Wash. -- Digital Equipment Corp. appears to be reconstituting itself here. Microsoft announced this week that it has lured comp
uter industry legend Gordon Bell from Digital to join its Research Group. Bell, who is the father of the VAX minicomputer, joins at Microsoft Dave Cutler, who helped write Digital's VMS operating system and came to Microsoft to help develop Windows NT. Bell's job at Microsoft will be to examine human interactions via video and high-speed networks. He will also continue his work on scalable computing. Bell has served as first assistant director for computing at the National Science Foundation, where he led the National Research Network panel that became the National Information Infrastructure/Global Information Infrastructure (NII/GII), and wrote the High-Performance Computer and Communications Initiative.
Kashnow named Raychem CEO
MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Raychem Corp. this week named Richard A. Kashnow chairman, chief executive officer and president, effective Oct. 1. He replaces the retiring
Robert J. Saldich, who has served as the company's CEO and president since April 1990. Kashnow, 53, is president of Schuller International Group, where he has been since 1991. Before that, he spent 17 years as a manager at General Electric Co. As chairman, Kashnow will succeed Paul M. Cook, Raychem founder, who will remain a director until he retires next year.
Networks draw on shared memories
By
Chappell Brown
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Researchers at U.C. Berkeley's Department of Mechanical Engineering are leveraging knowledge gained during the sharp rise of shared-memory multiprocessing architectures in the late1980s to create a new communications paradigm for networking.
The new approach came from a need for flexible methods to quickly configure microprocessor-based control systems over a network. The problem is compounded by the glut of o
perating systems and network protocols on the market that combines with a wide variety of special controllers to create a system-integration nightmare. Instead of viewing the problem as simply linking processors over a network, the Berkeley researchers are writing specific drivers for each system that emulate a shared-memory pool over a network. Each CPU then interacts with the others through standard memory accesses only, while the drivers handle network-specific functions and maintain a coherent memory model. All the network- and machine-specific details are included in the driver, so that the engineer configuring a system only needs to think about task-specific details.
"You might have a number of microcontrollers connected to an IBM PC running a program that interfaces with some proprietary control panel with its own graphical user interface," explained researcher, Mark Lemkin. "Getting a system like that to work turns into a project in itself." By writing a driver for each controller, the PC and the
control panel, the components can be viewed as a CPU linked to a shared-memory pool, a standard architecture that remains the same no matter what network and hardware is being used.
Simple oxide 'recipe' lays groundwork for new GaAs products
By Gail Robinson
URBANA, Ill. -- A simple recipe for creating electrically insulating oxides in gallium arsenide, pioneered here at the University of Illinois by industry-veteran Nick Holnyak Jr., has been quietly laying the groundwork for a revolution in new products and devices. Discovered five years ago, the process is only now coming to light as devices such as vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and high-intensity LEDs near commercial realization.
VCSELs have recently emerged as a practical light source in optoelectronic innovations such as Motorola Inc.'s Optobus, an optical backplane for computer systems. Another area is the
growing popularity of bright, high-reliability AlGaAs LEDs, currently the force behind Hewlett-Packard's push into automotive electronics. The hard, native-oxide coating surrounding the LEDs is the key ingredient that allows the fragile, high-power GaAs devices to endure road conditions. The latest stir in the research community was the discovery that GaAs substrates, using an oxide-diffusion process, can be used to design curved wave guides, opening the door to all-optical integrated circuits. In a recent announcement, stemming from a joint project between Holnyak's team and a group at the University of Zurich, "light wires" were snaked around test substrates, suggesting that lasers, LEDs and high-performance transistors could be integrated without mediating electronics.
Micro batteries edge closer
By
Ashok Bindra
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- Resea
rchers at the Solid State Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory here are nearing the goal of integrating thin-film rechargeable lithium batteries with low-power electronic devices, multichip modules, sensors and many other common components of commercial electronics systems. Scientists have developed rechargeable micro batteries based on solid-state lithium materials using physical vapor deposition on a variety of substrates, including alumina, glass and polyester. The new process creates thin-film rechargeable cells with lithium metal anodes, an amorphous lithium-phosphorous oxynitride electrolyte called "Lipon" and cathodes made of amorphous and crystalline lithium-manganese oxide.
The development of these cells was made possible by the unique properties of the lithium-phosphorous oxynitride electrolyte, said John B. Bates, principal researcher for thin-film battery programs at ORNL. It enabled the fabrication of thin-film batteries with high operating voltage, long-term stability and long cycle life
. He said that the thin-film battery technology has been demonstrated in the laboratory and that the lab is now working with manufacturers such as Teledyne Electronic Technologies (Los Angeles), Dallas Semiconductor (Dallas) and Research International (Woodinville, Wash.) to transfer the technology to the commercial sector.
VHDL International moves toward synthesis tool interoperability
By
Richard Goering
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A new standards effort aimed at synthesis-tool interoperability was launched at Cadence Design Systems on Aug. 10, as VHDL International (VI) convened a meeting of EDA vendors and user representatives to define the problem. Members of the ad hoc group hope to take a proposal to VI within a three-month period, and eventually go on to a formal standards body.
The synthesis effort was initiated because each of today's
synthesis tools interprets VHDL and Verilog in its own way, making it difficult or impossible to carry HDL descriptions from one tool to another. "We felt it was the next important obstacle in using VHDL for design," said Victor Berman, director of language-based development at Cadence and chair of VI's technical advisory committee (TAC). "We have a very standard way of representing simulation data with VHDL, and we'd like to bring synthesis to that level."
The kickoff meeting included representatives from Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, LSI Logic, Ikos, Compass and Texas Instruments. One action item, Berman said, is for participants to get commitments from their companies to put time into the effort, and another is to review a "straw man" proposal for a synthesis subset developed by a European group.
He also noted that the group will start looking at user requirements and priorities, and may issue a survey or attempt to interview designers about their desires for a synthesis standard.
Chip Express to enter military market
By
Brian Fuller
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Chip Express Inc., which has built a solid $10 million business on the shortcomings of gate-array and FPGA vendors, is at it again. The company today will announce its formal entry into the military market, a low-volume business that ASIC vendors have shrugged off as commercial contracts have soared in the past two years.
Chip Express is making available its modest-volume QYH500 Onemask gate array screened to military standard 883B. The company has contracted with 883-qualified third-party test houses, such as Pantronics, to handle the mil screening of its gate-array replacement parts as a means to go after significant military business but not take the capital-investment risk required for such a move, noted Sharone Zehavi, manager for Onemask operations.
Chip set erupts for Pentium notebook use
By
Ron Wilson
FREMONT, Calif. -- Following up on a technology announcement last month, Cirrus Logic Inc.'s Pico Power group next Monday will disclose the first notebook PC core-logic set to use the company's new hot-docking technology. The set also packs a range of performance and power-management features Cirrus claims is second to none, albeit at a premium price.
The Vesuvius chip set is organized as three 208-pin packages: one for system control, one for data-path switching and one to serve as a PCI-to-ISA-bus bridge.
Somewhat surprisingly, the ISA-bridge chip lacks the bus-master IDE controller and PCMCIA controller that have become almost expected in this level of chip set. In fact, Cirrus doesn't offer a bus-mastering IDE controller, so CD-ROM users will be dependent on the company's claim that its PD7232 PCI-t
o-IDE bridge is just as fast as a bus-mastering device.
Vesuvius uses its PCI bus to connect the notebook to the docking station by means of a PCI-bus extended chip, the so-called Nile PCI bridge. More accurately, Nile is a bus extender, not a bridge. Its timing and logical operation is such that, according to Cirrus, it extends the primary PCI bus in the docking station. Thus, PCI slots in the dock appear on the main bus, and are visible to the extensive plug-and-play device-recognizer libraries of Windows 95.
Cirrus MPEG-1 decoder finally chip ready
By
Junko Yoshida
FREMONT, Calif. -- Cirrus Logic Inc. has introduced its long-awaited MPEG-1 video-decoder chip designed for personal-computer applications. The low-gate-count chip employs CompCore Multimedia's MPEG-1 video core, which Cirrus Logic licensed more than a year ago.
Designated t
he CL-GD5520, the graphics-chip giant's first MPEG chip features PCI bus mastering, VESA Advanced Feature Connector (VAFC) video output, and an integrated color space converter, providing a glueless MPEG solution for multimedia PCs that requires no additional video windowing devices or bus-interface chips.
Unlike currently available MPEG-1 decoder ICs that often have both audio and video decoding functions integrated into a single chip, the CL-GD5520 does not feature an MPEG-1 audio-decoding function.
The omission of an MPEG audio decoder on Cirrus's offering, is intentional, according to Saul Altabet, marketing manager of entertainment graphics at Cirrus.
"Our chip is not a point solution. It's a scalable solution," he said. By separating the MPEG audio-decoding function, "we are offering the lowest-cost MPEG implementation for a broad range of PC configurations."
Hewlett-Packard preprocessor t
argets the P6
By
Stan Runyon
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Developing hardware and software for embedded systems based on Intel's P6 microprocessor should get easier when Hewlett-Packard's new preprocessor hits the street.
Working with HP's modular logic-analysis system and its prototype analyzer, the HP E2466B P6 preprocessor interface lets users watch bus transactions as they occur. That is no mean feat, considering the 133-MHz clock rate of the P6.
"The challenge with the P6," said HP product marketing engineer, Chuck Small, "is that it is designed to work on a multiprocessing bus, which our transaction tracker must accommodate."
To that end, the HP preprocessor keeps track of the starting and ending points of each transaction. Tracking software prints out information about the length of a transaction, the number of occurring loop cycles, the total length of the transaction, number of wait states, if any, and so on.
Mentor, Integrated Systems prep cosimulation interface
By
Richard Goering
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In an ambitious step toward the holy grail of hardware/software codesign, Integrated Systems Inc. and Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) have developed SystemBridge, a cosimulation interface between ISI's SystemBuild product and the QuickVHDL simulator in Mentor's System Design Station. The interface lets users simulate embedded software and hardware together at a high level of abstraction.
Developed in cooperation with Fiat, an early user of the software, SystemBridge is aimed at embedded-control systems in such markets as automotive, telecommunications, consumer, computer and aerospace. "You get to simulate and model your entire system together, and then break down into implementation in a very structured manner," said John Huber, marketing manager at Mentor Graphics
.
According to Naren Gupta, founder and chairman of the board of ISI, the real benefit of SystemBridge is an ability to find potential problems early in the design cycle. SystemBridge is ISI's first cosimulation link into the EDA environment. "Our customers are asking for it," said Gupta. "They feel they should be able to understand how the whole system behaves."
Midisoft fields PC-multimedia interface
By
Rick Boyd-Merritt
ISSAQUAH, Wash. -- Focusing on the next-generation of small-office/home-office PCs expected to hit the market later this year, Midisoft Corp. has launched a software package that offers a real-world interface to control the multimedia features many such machines will offer. The company is aiming its MediaWorks package squarely at OEMs building consumer-oriented systems that incorporate voice-enabled fax modems to brin
g telephony functions to the PC.
NEC Technologies next week is expected to announce the first systems that will bundle MediaWorks. Midisoft has also signed a deal with a major modem manufacturer that will ship the software with Digital Simultaneous Voice Data (DSVD) modems it will launch later this year.
"Despite its new look, Windows 95 will still seem foreign to a new class of home- and small -office users," said Ronald Risdon, president and chief operating officer of the 75-person company, which was formed in 1986 by Raymond Bily, a former product manager for programming languages at Microsoft Corp. "The new generation of multimedia PCs that build in voice/data modems need an integrated interface that goes along with that functionality."
Livingston routers dial into the Internet boom
By
Loring Wirbel
PLEASANTON, Calif. -- Livingston Ent
erprises Inc. has introduced two routers that solve both the remote- and central-office ends of dial-in Internet service. For this developer of secure-access routing products, the arrival of a two-port PortMaster for small offices and 25-port versions for central sites represents an expansion of the architectural types in distributed Internet-access architectures.
Rather than follow an initial ISDN path for remote sites, Livingston has elected to look at low costs and standard analog telephone lines for its two-port PortMaster Office Router. Bruce Byrd, director of marketing at Livingston, said that the current Office Router can support dial-in ISDN through an external adapter, and that his company plans a full suite of ISDN introductions this fall.
But Byrd added that "particularly with the advent of 28.8-kbit modems, there's a lot of sites that won't be ISDN-enabled any time soon. If you're trying to pull together connectivity at a trade show, for example, we don't anticipate many hotels will be offer
ing ISDN ports in their ballrooms for the foreseeable future," Byrd said.
Samsung tunes flash for audio market
By
Ron Wilson
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Samsung this week unveiled a new category of low-cost, audio-RAM-like flash chips for the audio market. The KM29N040, when it hits volume production in the first quarter of 1996, will be a 4-Mbit flash chip selling at a market-friendly $6 each in thousands.
A number of digital voice-recording appliances, from telephone-answering machines to handheld voice recorders to specialized user-interface and security products, have emerged in the last couple of years. They have been based in part on the availability of inexpensive digital signal-processing (DSP) chips and in part on cheap memory devices. Historically, the latter have been audio RAMs (ARAMs)--reject DRAMs with a few bad bits.
Recently, howev
er, several factors have conspired to dry up the supply of ARAMs. First, the DRAM industry--with no consideration for its audio customers--conspired to improve yields on DRAMs, so that the chips are now among the highest-yielding of complex ICs. That eliminated much of the potential supply of ARAMs. Second, much of the capacity in the DRAM market is moving to 16-Mbit chips, while most of the telephone-answering devices and message recorders use 4-Mbit chips.
House bill gives broadcasters digital flexibility--at a price
By
George Leopold
and
Loring Wirbel
WASHINGTON -- Broadcasters would win
and
lose if legislation approved by the House becomes law. The provision, part of the House telecommunications reform bill approved on Aug. 4, would give broadcasters flexibility in how they use the digital TV spec
trum but would require them to return old broadcast licenses for auctioning.
Besides opening the digital TV spectrum to other services, the measure allows telephone and cable companies and broadcasters to enter each other's businesses. House-Senate conferees could meet as early as next month to work out differences between their versions of telecom reform. This is the first time both chambers have approved telecom legislation that would bring down 60-year-old regulatory barriers. However, the legislation faces a possible presidential veto.
The House bill would permit broadcasters to use the 6-MHz channel set aside for digital TV to offer other services like interactive TV or high-speed data transfers along with digital TV. The measure directs the Federal Communications Commission to develop regulations that would enable broadcasters to offer "ancillary and supplementary services," but would limit them to designated frequencies to "avoid derogation of any advanced television services, including high defi
nition television broadcasts."
The bill also authorizes the FCC to adopt regulations stipulating the minimum number of hours of advanced TV broadcasters must provide. Regulators say they want to promote high-definition TV without mandating it. However, they note the House provision falls short of boosting HDTV's prospects.
Broadcasters worried that HDTV could prove to be a money-loser have successfully lobbied lawmakers to include the spectrum flexibility provision as a way to reduce the risks they see in offering the new service. The Senate telecom reform bill approved earlier this year also contains a spectrum flexibility provision. Critics warn that the measure along with broadcaster-promoted standard-definition formats will kill HDTV while giving broadcasters valuable spectrum.
Sun, IBM, Microsoft prepare to break SGI's grip on Hollywood
By
Alexande
r Wolfe
LOS ANGELES -- Hoping to shatter Silicon Graphics' hegemony in Hollywood, three vendors--Sun, IBM and Microsoft--are launching separate assaults on the ultrahigh-end motion-picture animation and production markets,
EE Times
has learned. The news came to light last week at Siggraph '95 here in L.A.
None of the vendors has made public announcements yet, and none is planned anytime soon. But all three appear poised to take technology originally developed for scientific applications and drive it into the hands of savvy computer artists and video editors who don't have engineering degrees, but are nevertheless remaking the major movie studios from celluloid dinosaurs into digital-media giants.
For example, Sun said its workstations are being used by Disney to help produce the first completely computer-generated feature-length movie. IBM has turned an SP2 supercomputer in Hawaii into a part-time "rendering farm," which converts raw animations in full-fledged digital images. And Mic
rosoft plans to thrust its Windows NT operating system, and media-creation tools developed at its SoftImage subsidiary, into entertainment applications.
But Silicon Graphics won't be standing idly by. The company is cranking up a joint development effort with Dreamworks Inc.--the startup studio cofounded by Steven Spielberg--to create a suite of tools dubbed "Digital Studio for the 21st Century."
See
Report from Siggraph: Pixar hypes its contribution to Hollywood animation history
in
Editor's Notepad
.
Toshiba and IBM to build 64-Mbit DRAM plant in Virginia
By
Yoshiko Hara
and
David Lammers
MANASSAS, Va. -- The name of this Civil War battleground will now be carved into the semiconductor history books: Toshiba and IBM plan a 64-Mbit DRAM factory here, the fi
rst 8-inch wafer fab south of the Mason-Dixon line.
For IBM, which has vacillated in its commitment to merchant DRAM manufacturing, the Manassas-based joint venture is a stake in the ground of the merchant DRAM market. For Toshiba, Manassas represents its initial foray into DRAM manufacturing outside Japan, a venture prompted by the pain of the high yen and the success of Toshiba's advanced memory development alliance with IBM and Siemens at East Fishkill, N.Y.
At a Tokyo press conference, Masanobu Ohyama, executive vice president of Toshiba's electronic component business, said, "It is not simply the soaring value of the yen which caused us to decide on a U.S. fab. Now is the best time to step into overseas production because we have IBM as our partner. Toshiba and IBM stand on the same technical platform because of our joint R&D work into a 256-Mbit DRAM."
Asked why Siemens was not invited into the manufacturing venture, Ohyama said tat "for research work, three companies can make a good team,
but for production, three-headed decision making is not practical." He did not rule out the possibility that at some point Toshiba and Siemens might put up a joint venture fab in Europe.
EDA's future may be molded in a quiet Berkeley lab
By
Richard Goering
BERKELEY, Calif. -- In an unmarked office building on a quiet street in this university town, the next generation of electronic design automation software is taking shape. Here, members of Cadence Berkeley Laboratories--a unique research and development organization staffed by seven PhDs--is defining new directions in such areas as simulation, formal verification and hardware and software codesign.
The facility was established by Cadence Design Systems of San Jose, Calif., in October 1993 to take a long-range view of EDA technology, bringing a fresh perspective to an industry that is seen
as lacking in basic research. The Berkeley Labs staff is working on technology that may become common several years from now, such as a next-generation hardware description format called V++ and cycle-based simulation based on multivalued decision diagrams (MDDs).
Located some 50 miles from Cadence's corporate headquarters, Cadence Berkeley Labs provides relative isolation from day-to-day product development pressures. But this is not a remote ivory-tower facility. Researchers work directly with end users on real-world problems, and some of the technology is ultimately transferred back to Cadence's product development groups.
"We've been able to assemble the most talented team of design automation researchers in the world, and structure an organization that isolates them from the day-to-day trappings of traditional software product development," said Joe Costello, Cadence president and CEO. He said that interaction with customers provides real-world feedback that is "unprecedented" for academic research
ers.
Next to unveil Web software
SAN FRANCISCO -- Next Computer chairman Steve Jobs will come to Object World here today to launch his company's assault on the booming World Wide Web market. Jobs will use his keynote speech, sources said, to describe an upcoming suite of Internet authoring tools, which will let developers create Web pages and incorporate images, video clips and audio.
He's also expected to talk about the increased emphasis such software will have within Next's business strategy. The company has focused its efforts on building support for its object-oriented NextOS operating system. The OS work will continue but the company is expected to work to carve out an Internet niche.
Web tools are likely to become popular after the spectacular showing on Wall Street last week by Netscape Communications Corp. The company, which makes the popular Netscape Web browser, went public las
t week. Its stock debuted at $28 per share, rapidly rising to $74, before settling at around $58.
Book/bill ratio shatters records
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Semiconductor Industry Association reported last week that the semiconductor book-to-bill ratio hit an all-time high of 1.22 in July. The previous high-water mark was 1.20, left by the May 1995 order surge. The ratio is a seasonally adjusted three-month moving average, indicating trends rather than local variations in semiconductor activity.
The mark was shattered by record bookings -- $4.46 billion in July, up 3 percent from June, a 52.7 percent increase over July 1994. July billings, at $3.67 billion, struggled to keep up but could not get close enough to bookings to prevent a new record in the book-to-bill ratio.
After languishing below 1.1 at the end of 1994, the book-to-bill ratio began climbing in January and has shown increasing
strength in semiconductor demand through the first half of the year.
Moto, Microware in pact
By
Brian Fuller
and
Junko Yoshida
DES MOINES, Iowa -- Moving to secure an established software partner as it develops next-generation communications products, Motorola Inc. (Schaumburg, Ill.) last week bought 11 percent of embedded-software vendor Microware Systems Corp. The deal, which makes Motorola the largest outside investor in Microware, also calls for co-development of a next-generation operating system for communications devices -- a first for Motorola in this arena.
"The embedded world is changing. All of communications is shifting," said Bob Growney, president and general manager of Motorola's Messaging, Information and Media Sector. "You're going to see people who have, hopefully, thought out their vi
sion and are going to make alliances like this."
Ken Kaplan, Microware's president, CEO and co-founder, said the companies will work together developing software based on Microware's flagship OS-9 real-time operating system for Motorola communications products.
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