EET-i Top of the News
Week of October 2, 1995
- October 5, 1995
 Tele-TV hedges set-top bet
- DVB standard runs into glitches
- U.S. to auction more spectrum
- VHDL hits snag at NEC
- QuickLogic rebounds with new
FPGAs
- EuroDAC audience airs EDA-tool gripes
- New disk spec debuts
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
- October 4, 1995
- Reich backs tighter rules for temporary professional visas
- Genetic algorithm trains Matlab's fuzzy system
- Smart compilers puncture code bloat
- Disk-drive read-channel IC operates at 3.3 V
- 'Holes' dot road to ultrafast opto switches
- EE/CS grads are being wooed again
- October 3, 1995
- Intel's Triton core-logic chip set goes portable
- Cirrus LCD controller puts full-screen video on portables
- Macronix enters Fast Ethernet market with controllers
- Skytel taps Tango, LX for two-way pagers
- Stanford Telecom packs VSAT receiver on small board
- SCM rolls out PC card drive for Windows 95
- HP intros upgraded logic analyzers
- October 2, 1995
- Industry leaders fight anti-immigration moves
- Sanyo turns out LCD on ordinary glass
- New telecom-targeted DSP architectures sweep into market
- Rival memory-card schemes to go head to head
- PowerTV preps single-chip set-top solution
- Hitachi eyes interactive TV
- Congress spares Sematech
- Europeans launch digital radio trials
Other news sources on Techweb:
 Tele-TV hedges set-top bet
By
George Leopold
and
Junko Yoshida
NEW YORK -- Tele-TV, the ambitious phone-company foray into interactive TV, has hedged it bets by planning to deploy next year a wireless-only set-top box with very limited two-way interactive capability. Company officials said last week they don't expect to launch the next-generation box until 1997.
The Tele-TV partners, Bell Atlantic, Nynex and Pacific Telesis, announced Sept. 21 that Thomson Consumer Electronics (Indianapolis) would supply up to 3 million set-tops over three years at a unit cost in the mid-$300s. Though New York-based Tele-TV had originally promised to announce a supplier for a so-called "Unity Box
"--a deluxe box designed to provide advanced two-way interactivity regardless of network systems--at the end of June, the partners instead came back to say that they were buying a scaled-back set-top based on a wireless cable technology called multichannel multipoint distribution systems (MMDS).
DVB standard runs into glitches
WINCHESTER, England -- Europe's Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) project is reconsidering the terrestrial standard.
Some set-top manufacturers have argued that the 8,000-carrier orthogonal frequency-division multiplex (OFDM) transmission system originally proposed is too computationally demanding, leading to excessive costs. Terrestrial-DVB divides compressed video and audio digital data streams for efficient use of spectrum
Jeff Gledhill, who heads digital terrestrial R&D at National Transcommunications Ltd. (NTL) here, said a recent DVB working group meeting
the 8k-carrier system was thrown out in favor of a 2k-carrier system. "Basically, the more carriers you use, the longer the echoes you can tolerate at a receiver, but also the more complexity required at the receiver. An 8k system requires an 8k-point FFT [fast Fourier transform]. To compute it in the time budget requires 3 or 4 million transistors equivalent to a Pentium, but it needs to cost tens of dollars at most."
U.S. to auction more spectrum
WASHINGTON -- A second chunk of government spectrum has been transferred to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for reallocation to the private sector.
The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications Information Administration said it has transferred 45 MHz to the FCC as part of a congressionally mandated plan to sell 200 MHz of spectrum to reduce the budget deficit. The agency has since identified another 35 MHz to be sold.
So far,
95 MHz has been shifted for spectrum auctions. Another large transfer is expected in January 1997, the agency said. The entire 235-MHz transfer is expected to be completed by 2004.
VHDL hits snag at NEC
By
David Lammers
KAWASAKI, Japan -- A top-down push by management to use VHDL throughout NEC Corp. is being resisted by some of the working-level engineers there.
Long accustomed to using NEC's proprietary tools for low-gate-count logic ICs, many of the company's chip designers remain loyal to those tools and "hand crafting" during the layout stage.
Verilog-based tools also have proliferated at NEC and will continue to be used there and supported for outside customers. But NEC's senior management has peered into the future, where million-gate devices must be designed with portable cores to cope with increasing time-to-market pressures. The r
esult is a companywide training effort in VHDL-based designs.
"For 20,000-gate arrays, handcrafting by our experienced engineers gives the smallest die size and the best performance," said Kenji Kani, an NEC vice president in charge of the micro and ASIC divisions. "But pretty soon, many engineers will have more than 200,00 gates at their disposal. We have to get ready for that, and we decided to emphasize VHDL throughout our company."
Kani acknowledged that inertia must be overcome, but he denied reports that an outright rebellion against VHDL was developing within the company.
QuickLogic rebounds with new FPGAs
By
Brian Fuller
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Once teetering on the edge of viability, QuickLogic has bounced back and next week will announce its second-generation FPGA family, scaling to 20,000 usable gates.
Its manufacturing partner
and second source, Cypress Semiconductor Corp., also is coming to market with the updated architecture, which takes advantage of a third metal layer to improve routing and speed.
The introduction finds QuickLogic flush with $16 million in new equity capital and a surging, if small, revenue stream to tap into a field-programmable-gate-array market that's forecast to grow roughly 20 percent this year to more than $600 million. The company, thanks in part to its alliance with Cypress, has survived a shakeout in the FPGA industry that has seen companies disappear or be absorbed into other semiconductor vendors after failing to build critical mass in a market dominated by Xilinx Corp. (San Jose, Calif.)
QuickLogic, whose fine-grained architecture has always won praise for its performance, has spent engineering time developing a second-generation family that highlights lower cost as well as higher density.
"We were missing the sweet spot of the market," said Ed Smith, QuickLogic's marketing director. "We'v
e now become price-competitive."
EuroDAC audience airs EDA-tool gripes
By
Peter Clarke
BRIGHTON, England -- Engineers in Europe are dissatisfied with the software tools and service they receive from EDA vendors, particularly the U.S. vendors that dominate the EDA market.
The two messages that came over from an evening panel session held at EuroDAC here were dissatisfaction with the way vendors present and repair buggy software and a sense of remoteness in Europe. Europe's engineers would rather buy from European sources, if they could, not out of a sense of geographical loyalty but because they believe the support would be better.
The session was entitled "What does Europe require from EDA vendors?" Engineers from the floor explained with exasperation that because of the problems caused by discovering bugs on the latest releases of EDA soft
ware, it is often policy within their companies to use a version that is one or two releases old. The danger is that when the engineers need to ask for the bug patches and workarounds, which they presume will have been developed by this time, they will be told the release is no longer supported and that the problems have been fixed in a subsequent release--which will have new features and new bugs.
New disk spec debuts
By
Terry Costlow
LAKE MARY, Fla. -- Conner Peripherals Inc. and Intel Corp. have teamed to create a specification they claim will improve reliability and make it easier for OEMs to buy disk arrays and other peripheral subsystems from different vendors. The document, which has already been endorsed by some disk-array providers, offers a standard way to monitor power supplies, cooling systems, disk drives and other peripherals.
Cal
led SCSI Accessed Fault Tolerant Enclosures (SAF-TE), the spec will also facilitate OEMs' shifting from one storage subsystem to another. Most redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) currently monitor the status of fans and power supplies, but there are no common ways to perform the task.
"We're mainly looking at the drives, the cooling systems and the power supplies," said Bernie Wu, vice president at Conner Storage Systems, the division that makes RAID systems. "Those three elements are responsible for up to 86 percent of the hardware outages in servers. We're providing a standard way of monitoring them. It will benefit people who might want to integrate controllers from various companies."
Reich backs tighter rules for temporary professional visas
By
George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration is leaning toward tighter re
strictions on issuing temporary visas for professionals, including foreign scientists and engineers.
At a Sept. 28 Senate hearing investigating the use of temporary workers, U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich proposed an overhaul of U.S. work-related immigration programs, particularly the H-1B temporary-visa program, and repeated his call for more training of U.S. workers. Reich suggested reducing the time temps can stay in the United States from six years to three years. He also wants to limit the program to employers that have not laid off U.S. employees just before or after applying for foreign workers, and to restrict participation to companies that have recruited U.S. workers.
Reich said the Clinton administration supports a proposal to charge fees to businesses importing foreign workers. The money would go into a fund to pay for better training of U.S. workers.
"Employment-based immigration to fill skill shortages . . . is sometimes unavoidable," Reich said, "but I firmly believe that hiring fo
reign over domestic workers should be the rare exception, not the rule. And I believe such exceptions should be even rarer, and more tightly targeted on gaps in the domestic labor market, than is the case under current policy."
Genetic algorithm trains Matlab's fuzzy system
By
R. Colin Johnson
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- Flexible Intelligence Group LLC has instilled evolutionary learning capabilities into the Matlab simulation environment. The FlexTool Genetic Algorithm (GA) learns the optimal parameters for a problem using the survival-of-the-fittest principle. When combined with the company's FlexTool Fuzzy Systems tool (FS), the combination is more than the sum of its parts. It's called the turnkey FlexTool Evolutionary Fuzzy Modeling (EFM) add-on to Matlab.
Matlab, an industry-standard simulation environment from MathWorks Inc. (Natick, Mass.), a
lready has its own Neural Network Toolbox and a Fuzzy Toolbox for its Matlab, but until now engineers have had to write their own genetic algorithms.
GAs can adjust parameters that ordinarily must be hand-tuned by an engineer. Genetic algorithms work by maintaining a "gene" pool of possible parameter settings and a performance metric. Each member of the pool is evaluated for Darwinian "fitness"--that is, how well that particular parameter set fits the desired performance characteristics defined at the outset by the design engineer.
Smart compilers puncture code bloat
By
Chappell Brown
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- As system and applications software increase in sophistication, offering the end user higher-level features, evidence of the "code bloat" phenomenon is on the rise. The prospects for correcting the problem have seemed bleak, since many of the
important breakthroughs in software engineering that have made today's sophisticated desktop computers possible--notably, modular design and object-oriented programming--have directly contributed to it. But a new view of the role of compilers coming from a project at MIT here suggests that the problem may not be insoluble.
As each new operating-system release hogs more of the system RAM, and as application upgrades swell in size, cheaper RAM and disk memory are quickly devoured by the rampant software inflation.
The key to the new software-analysis approach being studied at MIT is incorporation of a "smart" compiler in the running of a program to recompile and optimize code continuously in the run-time environment. The premise is that compiler would not be restricted by the abstract boundaries of the original compile run and thus could actually produce more robust, "self-maintaining" code.
Disk-d
rive read-channel IC operates at 3.3 V
By
Gail Robinson
TUSTIN, Calif. -- Development of the first single-chip disk-drive read-channel IC to operate at 3.3 V may give portable-computer makers more ammunition in the struggle to minimize power dissipation. Aimed at 2.5- to 1.8-inch disk drives used in battery-operated laptop and notebook computers, the mixed-signal ASIC contains all of the electronics needed for hard-drive recording, according to Silicon Systems Inc., which developed the device in a 1-micron, 13-GHz Bi-CMOS process.
A unique aspect of the design is its ability to run at either 3 or 5 V. "We realized early on that there was a strong need for backward compatibility, with many users asking for a chip that operated at 5 V as well as 3," said Shunsaka Ueda, a senior design engineer with the company. "Our customers were looking for battery-operation capability and, at the same time, the ability to operate off the power supply.
"Essen
tially, they were after a portable hard-disk module that could be plugged into a laptop and then pulled out and plugged into a desktop PC."
'Holes' dot road to ultrafast opto switches
By
Peter Clarke
CAMBRIDGE, England -- A fundamental physics experiment has demonstrated the coherent destruction of electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor. By stimulating laser-light pulses, the speed at which charge carriers can be generated and destroyed in optical and optoelectronic systems can be determined by the delay between light pulses rather than by material properties. If the technique can be harnessed, it promises to improve the speed of optical switching by more than two orders of magnitude.
The work has been reported by a team of scientists at Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, working in collaboration Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University.
EE/CS grads are being wooed again
BETHLEHEM, Pa. -- Technical majors enjoyed more job offers at higher salaries this year, according to the latest survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
A surging electronics and PC market created a raft of new jobs for EE and computer-science grads.
Electronic- and electrical-equipment employers extended 9.5 percent of all the job offers to new technical graduates in 1995, up from 8.4 percent last year, NACE reported. Leading the way were manufacturers, followed by automotive- and mechanical-equipment manufacturers. Consulting firms, anxious for technical expertise, once again snapped up a fair share of engineering grads.
With electronics employers itching to fill a record number of openings, freshout EEs saw a 3.5 percent increase in salary offers, to $36,049-- double the increase of the leading engineering discipline, ch
emical engineering. ChemEs averaged $39,880, a 1.7 percent increase over last year. In greatest demand, according to NACE, were graduates in computer science, programming and information systems. Software houses extended the most offers, followed by consulting firms and computer- and business-equipment manufacturers. Their starting-salaries for computer grads averaged $33,712--up a substantial 6.1 percent over last year.
For MBAs, there's a huge difference in offers depending on whether they have a technical undergraduate degree and whether they have any work experience.
Intel's Triton core-logic chip set goes portable
By
Ron Wilson
FOLSOM, Calif.--Intel Corp. has moved to extend its dominance of the core-logic business from the desktop to the notebook market. The long-rumored Mobile Triton core-logic chip set, officially called the 82430MX, will
bring to the notebook motherboard the Peripheral Component Interconnect optimizations and fast memory control that have made Triton the dominant chip set in desktop Pentium PCI systems.
But the design, for all its sophistication, shows that Intel is still a novice in the intricacies of portable computing.
The strong suit for the Mobile Triton is, of course, Triton performance. The original Triton, through deep buffers on the PCI controller and careful design of the integrated L2 cache and DRAM controllers, did what it set out to do: open the PCI bus and memory bottlenecks that were blocking the performance of Pentium motherboards. Those same performance features are in the Mobile version of the set.
Cirrus LCD controller puts full-screen video on portables
By
David Lammers
TOKYO -- Cirrus Logic Inc. has come out with an LCD graphics controller
that displays full-screen video on medium-priced notebook computers with the normal 1 Mbyte of extended-data-out (EDO) buffer memory. A second controller, which supports 64-bit color, targets the premium notebooks coming on the market next year that have 2 Mbytes of buffer memory.
Both devices extend to the notebook realm the Cirrus-designed V-Port, earlier adapted on desktops. The V-Port can supply the frame buffer with a video data stream, provided from either a CD-ROM or an outside source such as a camcorder. The V-Port either can be part of the motherboard design or it can be added later via a PCMCIA card.
"The V-Port allows multimedia functionality to be easily added," said Ramon Cazares, product marketing manager at Cirrus (Fremont, Calif.).
Full-screen video on color notebooks is expected to take off, as lower-cost thin-film-transistor and dual-scan passive color displays offering Super VGA resolution (800 x 640) begin to hit the market.
Macronix enters Fast Ethernet market with controllers
By
Loring Wirbel
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Macronix Inc., a company known primarily for its ROMs and specialty memories, will be moving into Fast Ethernet markets with a 100 Base TX/FX controller for repeater applications. Macronix has offered a 10 Base T Medium Access Controller compatible with a National Semiconductor device, but Chang-Chi Liu, director of strategic marketing at Macronix, said that the MX98741 was Macronix's first proprietary design in LAN markets.
It is no accident that Macronix chose repeater applications rather than client-side network-interface card (NIC) chips.
"The MAC chip business for a NIC is extremely tough right now. There are many Fast Ethernet players and many board companies like 3Com and Intel use ASICs anyway, to provide differentiation," Liu said. "We see much better opportunity in the repeater world. Grand Junction
has owned that business up to now and there is room for many more OEMs."
The MX98741 supports eight ports, which can be individually programmed to support TX (Category 5 wire) or FX (fiber optics). Multiple devices can support eight to 24 ports of Fast Ethernet, for a wide range of hub sizes. Three Media Independent Interfaces are on-chip, though Liu emphasized they are used to interface with bridges in a cascading design, rather than physical-layer devices.
Skytel taps Tango, LX for two-way pagers
by
Loring Wirbel
JACKSON, Miss. -- Motorola Inc.'s new Tango two-way pager unit and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s LX palmtop will be the initial platforms on which SkyTel Corp.'s new two-way paging service will be offered. SkyTel 2-Way, announced last week, is based on the Nationwide Wireless Network (NWN), a narrowband personal communication service for which
SkyTel's parent, Mobile Telecommunications Technology (Mtel) Corp., won a pioneer's preference from the FCC in 1993.
The Tango unit will allow users to send back one of a series of canned messages in response to an incoming page, while the LX connector kit will allow HP palmtop users to type out short messages of their choice for return pages. SkyTel is offering immediate service in 300 U.S. cities by year's end. The system uses a paired 50-50 frequency scheme, with transmission at 940 MHz and return messages at 901 MHz.
Early next year, Wireless Access Inc. of San Jose is expected to launch a device that links to the SkyTel network. It will sport a touch-sensitive display with an on-screen keyboard for tapping out short reply messages.
Stanford Telecom packs VSAT receiver on small board
By
David Lieberman
SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Building on i
ts own digital demodulator and downconverter ASICs, the Telecom Products Group of Stanford Telecom has introduced a VSAT receiver that packs flexible input capabilities and forward error correction into a low-profile 4- x 6-inch board.
The STEL-9236A's Viterbi correction keeps typical bit-error rate down to 0.4 dB, said Hatch Graham, corporate vice president and general manager of the group, "reducing overhead and assuring the highest signal integrity." Configurable data rates, said Graham, provide "for economical distribution of broadcast data, digital audio and video information."
The board provides either binary or quad phase-shift keying (BPSK/ QPSK) demodulation using a coherent-demodulation technique and it accepts a direct 70-MHz IF input. With an optional L-Band downconverter on board, however, it becomes programmable for handling signaling in the 950 to 1,450 MHz range of operation in small 50-kHz steps with continuous interpolation.
SCM rolls out PC card drive for Windows 95
By
Rick Boyd-Merritt
LOS GATOS, Calif -- A year after it launched its first PCMCIA card readers for the desktop, SCM Microsystems Inc. has added a new member to its line of PC-card drives. Grabbing the coattails of Microsoft Corp.'s recent OS marketing wave, the company has launched the SwapBox Plug 'N Play for Windows 95.
The new PC-card drive, whose shortened handle is the SwapBox SBI-D2P, uses a new PCMCIA controller from Vadem which SCM could have optimized either for support of Direct Memory Access (DMA) thus opening a door to new sound-card functions or for plug-and-play. Not surprisingly the company chose the latter route, in part to win a Windows 95-compatibility sticker.
According to BIS Strategic Decisions, SCM currently holds the lion's share of the PC-card drive market with its existing products. SCM holds 47.4 percent of the PC-card drive ma
rket compared with 33.1 percent for Databook, 4.6 percent for Cardwell and 3.4 percent for Maxtor, according to BIS. However, it is admittedly a leading share of a slowly developing market as PCMCIA cards have not yet caught on broadly in today's desktops.
HP intros upgraded logic analyzers
By
Stan Runyon
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Hewlett-Packard has packed two new series of logic analyzers with three significant features, some standard, some optional: up to 500 kbytes of acquisition memory, Ethernet LAN connectivity and software-performance analysis.
That trio will help embedded-design teams get to the root of circuit problems, but that much in a benchtop logic analyzer could also command top dollar. With cost-per-seat a major concern today, HP says it has priced the HP 1670 Series at about half the price of most full-featured logic-analysis systems.
"We're setting new price points even for benchtoppers," said product manager Gregg Buzard, "and have configured the new units to appeal to both software and hardware engineers, with tools for source-code and timing analysis."
Three models in the new HP 1670 series offer software developers 64 kbytes of acquisition memory, with 500 kbytes optional but affordable. Deep-acquisition memory lets software designers see long periods of code execution, useful to spot the cause of a problem that may occur much earlier than a symptom.
Industry leaders fight anti-immigration moves
By
Robert Bellinger
WASHINGTON -- Congressional moves to reform immigration have triggered debate from here to Silicon Valley over the role foreign-born engineers play in maintaining national technological competitiveness.
Riding the biggest electronics boom in years, indu
stry giants are denouncing reform efforts, claiming that development cycles are already being pinched by an engineering shortage. "The availability of electrical, computer and software engineers on a timely basis is critical to our business success," a group of seven industry executives wrote in a Sept. 12 letter to Congress. "Intense competition in semiconductor chips, software, computer products and peripherals means that new products are always on the drawing board. . . . Delays in design, development and production mean a loss of market share that may never be recaptured."
But domestic engineers, and the organizations representing their interests, dispute these and similar claims, contending that a continued influx of immigrant designers is only worsening the employment picture for tens of thousands of U.S. engineers who have suffered through years of cutbacks in the defense and aerospace industries.
Uniting behind the Silicon Valley anti-reform lobbying effort are some 60 corporations, including ma
ny of the biggest names in the electronics industry--among them Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, National Semiconductor and Sun. They have begun to petition Congress to keep the doors open to current levels of temporary and permanent professionals.
Sanyo turns out LCD on ordinary glass
By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO -- Aided by a breakthrough in excimer-laser technology, Sanyo Electric Co. has developed a polysilicon-based liquid-crystal display using an ordinary glass substrate, rather than quartz glass. Measuring 2.4-in. on the diagonal, the prototype also integrates peripheral circuitry.
"We believe this is the world's first LCD in which all the pixels and drivers are fabricated together on ordinary glass," said Yukinori Kuwano, who is in charge of Sanyo's research.
Sanyo fabricated the vertical and horizontal CMOS driver ICs, together with the pixel transistors, in a 1.5-mm-wide space along t
he edge of the display, eliminating area normally needed to attach drivers via tape-automated bonding.
Based on Sanyo's current process and yield rate, building the drivers and controllers into the substrate along with the pixel transistors is a big cost advantage for LCDs up to about 6 inches on the diagonal, said Kuwano.
Although the circuitry will reduce yield rates, he said, it is more than made up for by the 30 to 45 percent drop in cost compared with the corresponding amorphous-silicon LCDs.
New telecom-targeted DSP architectures sweep into market
By
Martin Gold
and
Ashok Bindra
NORWOOD, Mass. -- Whipped up by burgeoning demand from telecommunications systems designers, a new wave of cellular-capable DSP architectures has crested. Revamped cores and chips are due from Analog Devices, AT&T Microele
ctronics, Motorola and Texas Instruments. Oki and the DSP Group are also developing new offerings,
EE Times
has learned.
The common design objective of the devices is support for emerging half-rate cellular phones and next-generation cellular base stations that simultaneously process multiple signals from multiple channels.
With a firm nod to base-station requirements, Analog Devices (Norwood) last week announced its 16-bit 21cspXX core, which permits concurrent signal processing. The previous week, Motorola's DSP division (Austin, Texas) brought out the 24-bit, 80-Mips 56300, the first member of a family of cores that will court base-station and cellular-handset design slots with a planned ramp to 100-Mips DSP performance in two years.
TI (Houston) is developing derivatives of its 16-bit C54X and 32-bit C8X cores that promise higher integration and will enable half-rate, enhanced full-rate and enhanced variable-rate implementations of a laundry list of telecom standards. And AT&T (Berkel
ey Heights, N.J.) is rolling out higher integration derivatives of its 16XX core for narrowband Personal Communications Services (PCS) applications.
EE Times
has also learned that Oki Semiconductor (Sunnyvale, Calif.) has licensed TCSI Corp.'s Lode core to develop a DSP for IS-136 digital-cellular and PCS applications. And the DSP Group (Santa Clara, Calif.) is defining its third-generation DSP core with the specific requirements of digital cellular and PCS in mind.
Rival memory-card schemes to go head to head
By
Rick Boyd-Merritt
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Rival and incompatible memory-card proposals are about to go public in a battle for slots in a new generation of low-cost digital consumer devices. Minicard, backed by a consortium of semiconductor and systems companies, and CompactFlash, from SanDisk Corp., aim to replace film, cassette ta
pes and full-size PCMCIA-type memory cards in digital cameras, audio recorders and other portable systems.
Intel Corp. and Philips NV are among the companies that by year's end will roll out the Minicard specification. An add-on memory device measuring 35 x 33 x 3.5 mm, the cards provide mobile systems with 64 kbytes to 128 Mbytes of flash, DRAM, SRAM, one-time programmable (OTP) or ROM memory.
Meanwhile, SanDisk (formerly SunDisk, San Jose) is preparing to make its matchbox-size CompactFlash product an openly available spec. SanDisk has been making the 36 x 43 x 3.3-mm flash-memory add-on Miniature cards vie in compact-flash derby card since October 1994 in 2-, 4-, 12- and 15-Mbyte capacities.
A third card is also hitting the streets. Toshiba began shipping samples of the Solid State Floppy Disk Card from Toshiba this summer; it is scheduled to go into production in January.
PowerTV preps single-chi
p set-top solution
By
Junko Yoshida
CUPERTINO, Calif. -- PowerTV Inc., an interactive-TV-platform company here, has unwrapped Version 1.0 of its PowerTV operating system together with the industry's first single-chip multimedia ASIC for set-top boxes.
"We see ourselves as a systems company," said Ken Mores, chief technical officer at PowerTV, differentiating PowerTV from other interactive-TV operating-system vendors, such as Microware (with 'David'). "To drive down the cost of a set-top, you have to be able to optimize both hardware and software."
In the fledgling interactive-TV market, PowerTV, majority-owned by Scientific-Atlanta Inc., is one of the few OS providers to succeed in scoring multiple design-wins from the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs). PowerTV OS-based boxes will be used in
trials by four RBOCs, including Ameritech and Pacific Telesis, Mores said. So far, the only announced set-top maker to have licensed the PowerT
V OS is parent Scientific-Atlanta.
The PowerTV OS is a 32-bit platform with a fully-preemptive, multithreaded kernel optimized for RISC processors. Designed for interactive TV, the OS can reside in 512 kbytes of ROM.
Hitachi eyes interactive TV
By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO -- Hitachi Ltd. and Oracle Corp. have agreed to co-develop a multimedia-oriented interactive-TV system that will combine Oracle's software with Hitachi's hardware. The plan is to develop both a video-on-demand server system and set-top boxes based on RISC parallel-processing, said Toshiakira Ikeda, division manager of Hitachi's information systems group.
Hitachi has not decided whether it will use the PowerPC or the PA-RISC processor, he said.
Oracle will provide its network software, including Oracle Media Network, Oracle Media Server and Oracle Media Object. The two companies will adapt the Oracle software to the Japanese ma
rket as well as develop applications that run on Oracle Media products.
The server will be a scalable parallel system, which will require thousands of CPUs to support interactive-TV service for the households in a single neighborhood.
Congress spares Sematech
By
George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- Electronics technology programs took their lumps in the fiscal 1996 defense-spending bill, which was completed last week. But they also made some unexpected gains, sparing both Sematech and the controversial Technology Reinvestment Project (TRP).
House/Senate conferees allocated $195 million to TRP, more than $300 million short of the Clinton administration's funding request. Still, the funding is considered a victory, since the House had TRP for elimination. The program funds a variety of dual-use technology efforts, including a handful of flat-panel display
initiatives, whose fate remains unclear.
Nonetheless, appropriations conferees agreed to earmark $5 million for plasma-enhanced chemical-vapor deposition equipment and for "development of manufacturing systems in a cluster-tool format specifically tailored for field-emission-display [FED] production." Industry officials said the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) and the Pentagon-funded U.S. Display Consortium are zeroing in on FED technologies, which many observers consider the industry's best hope for leapfrogging Japanese active-matrix LCD efforts. In September, the defense agency announced plans to step up research on FED technology.
Europeans launch digital radio trials
By
Peter Clarke
LONDON -- Radio broadcasting entered the digital age last week when the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) and Swedish Broadcasting Corp. (Stockholm) separ
ately launched the world's first continuous digital-radio services. Both offerings are based on the Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) standard.
Pilot trials of the DAB system continue in many countries across Europe and the momentum behind the technology could make it the next European-developed communications standard to find acceptance well beyond the continent's borders. If so, DAB would follow in the footsteps of the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) standard for cellular telephony and the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard for digital television.
Canada has proposed the standard for adoption and India and China are both looking at the system. Pilot trials are being run in Australia and South Korea.
In the United States, by contrast, efforts to launch a digital-radio system have been bogged down by incompatibility with the European standard and by disputes between terrestrial broadcasters and emerging digital-radio providers over the new technology's impact.
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