Sony plant fire chops lithium-battery supply
SGI, Sun vie to serve up your Web platform
By Larry Lange
NEW YORK -- The battle over who will rule the desktop market for weaving businesses into the World Wide Web intensified this week. Two Unix platform giants, Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Sun Microsystems, both announced a-to-z Web authoring and server packages that look poised to step up the demand for more commercially viable "look and feel" Web sites.
SGI has announced an ambitious umbrella project, called WebForce, for all of its Web products. Officially launched back in January, the package has seen technical and creative innovations that c
alled for an almost complete re-introduction. WebForce now offers businesses several media-rich Web-authoring and high-performance Web-serving tools--including VRML--that enable businesses to compete with the new breed of graphically rich and technically sound sites finding an audience on the Web.
Sun is bundling Java-a dynamic Internet application language that enables animation and interactive games-with its proprietary Hot Java Web browser, along with a collection of applications and tools called Ultra Pack. Included are other Web tools, such as Netscape Navigator, and multimedia tools, such as an MPEG-2 movie player and a music player.
Sony urges digital-TV specs
By George Leopold and Rick Boyd-Merritt
LAS VEGAS -- Sony will seek government-mandated deadlines for standards development needed to launch digital-TV services by the end of the century, a company official said.
Carl
Yankowski, president and CEO of Sony Electronics Inc., said the TV maker will seek help from the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) to press regulators to set a date for completing work on a digital-TV standard. "The [Federal Communications Commission] should mandate a date by which the industry should have decoders available in TV sets for a whole range of digital-broadcast schemes," Yankowski said in an interview to be published in the February issue of OEM Magazine, a sister publication of EE Times.
"We would like to see those standards generated voluntarily, but right now what we are hoping is we can get some guidance from the FCC in terms of dates by which they want to force us to get those standards done," Yankowski added.
Asked what date regulators should set for completing digital-TV standards, Yankowski said January 1998 was "doable."
Broadcom's QAM chip takes ride in HP's Kayak
By Loring Wirbel
IRVINE, Calif. -- Broadcom Corp. has introduced a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmission chip that it said will form the heart of Hewlett-Packard's Kayak digital set-top box, expected to be shown by several carriers at the upcoming Western Cable show in Anaheim, Calif.
As a result of a deal with General Instrument in May, Broadcom was able to support DigiCipher II algorithms in the third-generation, 64-constellation chip. "HP, and GI as well, were very active in assisting with this design, but HP has also been very open about letting us bring this device to the merchant market," said Tim Lindenfelser, vice president of marketing at Broadcom. "HP and GI want to drive this architecture as a standard."
The BCM3115 dual-channel receiver integrates quadrature phase shift key (QPSK) demodulation and Viterbi/Reed-Solomon forward error-correction in the same IC as the 64-QAM.
Nonetheless, the 3115's debut does not mean instant obsolescence for the earlier BCM3100
QAMlink. Lindenfelser said that OEMs developing cable modems don't want the expense of on-chip forward error-correction or QPSK demodulation, giving Broadcom a big market in which to continue to sell the 3100. But since HP already has received advance orders for 1 million Kayak units, "this product will be high volume going out the door," Lindenfelser said. Tele-Communications Inc. has committed to purchasing 750,000 Kayaks, Comcast is ordering 150,000 and Cox Cable is ordering 100,000.
FireWire drafters firing up Gbit spec
SAN MATEO, Calif. - Leaders of the IEEE 1394 high-speed-bus effort said last week that they have formed a working group to develop faster speeds for the multimedia serial bus.
The standard, called FireWire by its proponents at Apple Computer Inc., currently offers bandwidth of 100 to 400 Mbits/second for consumer devices, such as camcorders. The working group is trying
to push that up to 1 Gbit/s in its bid to outperform Intel Corp.'s proposed Unified Serial Bus. A solid proposal is expected from the working group in January, said Adaptec's Myles Suer, one of the leaders of the 1394 effort.
Symbionics' digital-TV tester allows MPEG, DVB testing
By Peter Clarke
CAMBRIDGE, England -- Looking to fill a gap in the test market, Symbionics Video Ltd. is developing what it claims is the most advanced test instrument yet for digital-TV-broadcast systems.
The MPEG Stream Station enables designers of encoders and multiplexers to run MPEG and Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards-conformance tests on the MPEG-2 transport streams produced by their equipment. Set-top-box decoder developers can use the Stream Station as a source of test bit streams to exercise their designs.
Symbionics is part of a group of companies bearing the Symbionics name that speci
alizes in wireless technology, personal communications and digital video. The group employs more than 100 engineers at its base here and often develops technologies for license by equipment makers. Symbionics is now using its expertise to create a digital-TV test solution based on techniques it has developed for internal use.
Infinity, Thomson, Litton do 3-D sans glasses, headsets
By Margaret Ryan
LOS ANGELES -- Entertainment-technology startup Infinity Multimedia reached agreements earlier this month with Thomson Multimedia and Litton Industries to commercialize a 3-D display technology that doesn't require glasses or headsets.
The companies, together and separately, plan to design by late next year video-arcade game monitors and other consumer-electronics and defense-electronics products using the technology. Infinity said that the technology is easier to use than virtual reality
, which requires headsets or special glasses, and produces a truer 3-D stereo image than one created using computer-generated model simulations. These characteristics, Infinity contends, make the technology better suited for videogames, computer monitors and three-dimensional television devices than existing 3-D technologies.
IC growth showing signs of slowdown
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The torrid growth in semiconductors might be showing the first signs of slowdown. Figures released this week by the Semiconductor and Materials International (SEMI) trade association suggests that the equipment business, a capacity indicator, could soon begin tapering off.
SEMI's preliminary equipment book-to-bill ratio for North America fell to 0.96 in September--meaning more shipments than bookings for future business. That marked the first time the ratio has dropped below 1.00 since April 1994. Howev
er, SEMI market analyst Elizabeth Schumann noted that September is normally a seasonal low point in the North American market.
The number continues a steady decline since the high-water mark of more than 1.40 in February, indicating that equipment purchases for 8-inch fabs expected to come on-line next year have slowed dramatically.
On the upside, the $1.07 billion in billings for September set a record.
Motorola sets Russian R&D lab; TI to follow?
By Peter Clarke
MOSCOW -- Progress in capitalizing on Russian chip-making capacity has been slow since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but there are signs of a pickup in activity. A contingent from Texas Instruments Inc. visited the country last month to investigate opportunities for collaborative R&D or perhaps a wholly owned R&D center. And Motorola's Semiconductor Sector opened an R&D center here in October t
hat employs 25 people directly and that works with 75 contract researchers.
Motorola is also in talks with Integral (Minsk, Belarus) on a manufacturing collaboration.
Dave Thomas, European corporate R&D manager for TI, was among the corporate and semiconductor R&D executives who traveled here last month. He said the main purpose of TI's visit was to assess R&D activities and to determine possibilities for extending TI's distributed research.
National Semi puts searchable parts catalog on Web
By Brian Santo
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- A three-year-long effort to create a searchable database of semiconductor products will bud in December, when National Semiconductor puts its parts catalog on the World Wide Web. With a search engine called Krakatoa, which Cadis Inc. (Boulder, Colo.) wrote as a Java applet and will make available in early 1996, engineers will be able to c
onduct parametric searches through all 30,000-plus National's products.
In operation, an engineer will need a browser that supports Java (Netscape's Navigator 2.0 is due for general release before the end of the year). He would then download a copy of the Krakatoa search engine and initiate a search for the target device, perhaps an embedded microprocessor. National and Cadis say it will not be necessary to know part numbers, data-sheet naming schemes or description text; all an engineer has to do is enter the desired parameters--for example, clock frequency, temperature range, power levels, tolerances and package types.
The Krakatoa search engine will sift through National's database and return a list of all parts that meet the specifications.
It will also "bring up a URL, which will get you to a screen with a data sheet for that product, along with application notes, a Spice model, and a budgetary price," said Karl Schulz, principal Internet analyst for National.
Codec claims smooth transmission
By Peter Clarke
SALISBURY, England -- A British company claims it has solved one of the problems that restricts the use of speech compression in conventional telecommunications networks. Delphi Systems Ltd. has added a signaling and modulation capability to its codec, allowing it to prevent the decompression and recompression that usually occurs each time compressed digital traffic traverses an intermediate exchange.
Delphi's SMC series of speech-compression codecs includes coder, decoder and channel synchronization. It makes use of Codebook Excited Linear Prediction (CELP), which was developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the mid-1980s to achieve synchronous data rates as low as 9.6, 6.4 or 4.8-kbits/second. At 9.6 kbits/s, Delphi's system has been assessed as exceeding the speech quality of 32-kbit/s adaptive differential pulse-coded modulation.
On a pc-board measuring
only 2 x 3 inches, Delphi also includes a Group 3 fax relay. The main functionality depends on the DSP32C, a 32-bit floating-point digital signal processor from AT&T Microelectronics with customization implemented with an Actel FPGA.
Peter Schwarz, a Delphi Systems executive, explained that because telephone-line cards are designed to carry either analog signals or 64-kbit/s digital signals, in a conventional telephone network it is standard practice to decompress traffic and recompress it at each exchange.
Analog computing reexamined
By R. Colin Johnson
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Analog computation, thought by many to have been made obsolete by the skyrocketing success of modern digital computers, is on the rise again at the Analog VLSI and Robotics Laboratory at Indiana University.
The lab's director, professor Jonathan Mills, has filed patents for a new kind of extended anal
og computer (EAC) based on the Lukasiewicz logic array (LLA), which has been known as a theoretical entity for many years. Several application-specific VLSI chips are being fabricated at Mosis to prove the concepts in real-world situations.
"It is high time we bring general-purpose analog computing back into the mainstream of computer science," Mills said in an interview. "Neural systems opened the door; now it's time to knock down the wall.
"I am not an evangelist, and I don't want to be accused of hype. But I sincerely believe that analog computing should be carefully reexamined in the light of LLAs and EACs."
Intel deals its flash Minicard
By Rick Boyd-Merritt
LAS VEGAS -- Intel formally took the wraps off Minicard, the new small-memory add-on it is promoting with a number of other NOR flash makers including Advanced Micro Devices, Fujitsu and Sharp Corp. A draft specifica
tion for Minicard is available now and Intel's own branded cards will ship in the second quarter of next year.
Minicard is designed as a matchbox-sized memory add-on for digital cameras, tapeless audio recorders, cellular phones and organizers. The spec supports cards using RAM or ROM memory in densities from 1 to 64 Mbytes, though Intel is focused on supplying NOR flash Minicards.
"We're planning on making a lot of these cards ourselves, but we will release the spec to others to make them as well," said Curt Nichols, marketing manager in Intel's Memory Components division in Folsom, Calif. "We will probably have a formal association or group supporting Minicards early next year."
Minicards measure 38 x 33 x 3.5 mm, about a third the size of today's PCMCIA cards. The cards could snap into recessed areas in handheld devices, using a 60-contact elastomeric connector. Minicards will support operation at 5 V, 3.3 V and a to-be-defined 2.X-V rating.
The cards will replace film and cassette tape in
future digital devices. "We are focusing these cards on cameras and audio recorders," Nichols said. "The PDAs and cellphones are essentially getting a free ride."
Hitachi rolls parallel RISC based on IBM's power2
By Loring Wirbel
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Hitachi Data Systems Inc. has launched a scalable parallel-processor system based on the IBM Power2 microprocessor. In addition, the company has unveiled LAN-storage hubs and a midrange disk series of storage servers.
The HDS SR4300 Scalable RISC Complex represents one of the first commercial uses, outside IBM, of the Power2 architecture.
On-line processing
The 4300 family is intended for on-line transaction processing and similar decision-support applications. It can serve as a central resource manager for mixed networks of mainframes, servers and desktops. The system runs on IBM's AIX operating system and is compatible w
ith RS/6000 applications. Hitachi offers a range of control workstations to manage the 4300--from a system based on a 66-MHz PowerPC 601 to one using a 67-MHz Power2. Standard systems from two to 128 processors can be ordered, and custom configurations can range to 512 or more processors.
Mentor Graphics tool identifies DFT errors
By Stan Runyon
WILSONVILLE, Ore. -- In keeping with its strategy to supply design and test tools for high-end ICs and top-down ASIC design, Mentor Graphics is releasing DFTInsight, an automated graphical testability analysis tool.
DFTInsight takes a different tack as it helps engineers debug their designs and identify design-for-test (DFT) rule violations. Instead of making users wade through reams of messages and schematics to find problems, the tool generates and displays only the pertinent schematic fragments.
Consequently, engineers can interact
ively trace designs and see the source of DFT problems and errors, unencumbered by irrelevant gates or other components, which DFTInsight filters out. Only the portion of the design that contributes to the problem is displayed, even if that portion resides across multiple levels of hierarchy.
According to Mentor, those capabilities can slash debugging and rule-checking time by as much as half.
Sparc servers target Internet use
NEWBURY PARK, Calif. -- Integrix Inc. has configured two Sparc servers specifically for Internet-service-provider applications. The Supersparc-based CS20E and Hypersparc-based CS1000 offer bundled Ethernet and basic-rate ISDN ports, pre-installed Solaris 2.4 and full configuration scripts. A software-based router is included in the communication servers, as is a graphic interface based on HTML.
Both families provide expandable communication channels throu
gh optional T1 cards, Fast Ethernet interfaces and optional 16-port serial-interface cards. The serial-interface cards have on-board direct-memory-access control.
The CS20E, based on a 50-MHz Supersparc, ships with 32 Mbytes of RAM, a 1-Gbyte SCSI hard drive and 1.44-Mbyte floppy drive. There are four open SBus slots, which can provide the capacity for up to 64 remote dial-in users. An external SEC160 SBus chassis allows six additional SBus interfaces. The price is $8,995 for the CS20E, and $1,995 for each SEC160 expansion chassis.
Matsushita, AER offer improved rechargeable batteries
By Ashok Bindra
SECAUCUS, N.J. -- Battery suppliers continue to advance the cell performance of rechargeables to meet the stringent size, weight, cost and energy-density requirements of notebooks, sub-notebooks and other portable electronics. At the recent Wescon show, Matsushita Battery Industrial
Co. (Osaka, Japan) announced the development of an improved nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery that offers an unprecedented 300-Wh/liter energy density from a small size. At the same time, AER Energy Resources (Smyrna, Ga.) has made changes to its rechargeable zinc-air cell that achieves 50-percent improvement in energy density while increasing the power output by 78 percent. Those improvements will permit the company to cut the size and weight of zinc-air batteries by half, according to AER Energy.
Matsushita Battery Industrial also recently established a Materials Division in Columbus, Ga., for the production of cylindrical steel casing for alkaline, NiCd, lithium-ion and other batteries. According to Matsushita, the materials division will start producing DI (Draw & Ironing) cans next summer.
AMCC devises serial backplane technology
By Terry Costlow
SAN DIEGO -- As syste
ms become more complex and run at higher speeds, parallel-backplane architectures no longer fill the bill. To meet the needs of many switch vendors, Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) has come up with serial-backplane technology that can move 48 Gbits/second for a 32-port crosspoint switch that has 1.5-Gbit/s channels.
AMCC has developed a chip set that makes it far easier to create serial backplanes, which have a number of benefits. Power consumption is lower, hot swapping is simplified and connector pinouts are reduced. Furthermore, speed is improved and routing complexity is greatly reduced.
The chip set includes four ICs that form the basis of the serial backplane. These chips are the S2048/S2049 serializer/deserializer and the S2016 and S2025 crosspoint switches.
The chip set lets designers create three types of backplanes, using point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and ring architectures. The point-to-point scheme can be built with 16- x 16- or 32- x 32-point crosspoint switches that run at
up to 1.5 Gbits/s in a non-blocking mode. The point-to-multipoint version moves data at more than 1 Gbit/s. The loop architecture has lower performance due to sharing of bandwidth, but it also uses the least power.
Audio chips from Crystal, Yamaha, pile it on
By Ron Wilson
AUSTIN, Texas -- According to industry watchers, about 80 percent of the new personal-computer motherboards leaving factories these days have an audio chip on them. Crystal Semiconductor's CS4236 is a pin-compatible follow-on to the company's widely used CS4232, the part adds a plug-and-play interface and two external peripheral buses to the audio subsystem. Another is Yamaha's OPL4-ML, a wavetable engine that integrates its sample ROM onto the die.
As an audio codec, Crystal's chip offers 16-bit full-duplex operation, on-chip FM synthesis and digital volume control, as well as SoundBlaster Pro and AdLib game comp
atibility.
But the chip doesn't stop with audio. It also includes an interface to an external wavetable-synthesis engine, an IDE-compatible CD-ROM port and an MPU-401-compatible UART to serve as a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) port.
Yamaha, meanwhile, is not standing still. The SoundBlaster cards made Yamaha king of the audio-chip business with its OPL series FM-synthesis chips. But as the leading edge has moved from FM to wavetable synthesis, Yamaha has had to catch up.
Yamaha has been shrinking the footprint of wavetable synthesis. The latest step in that process is the OPL4-ML wavetable engine, with sample ROM integrated on-chip. It includes an FM engine and a general MIDI interface but requires an external SA-1 codec.
Hitachi microcontrollers take on VFDs
By Ron Wilson
BRISBANE, Calif. -- As microcontrollers continue their penetration into low-end consumer a
ppliances, they are coming into contact with a somewhat foreign display technology: vacuum fluorescent displays (VFD). VFDs require considerably more power than liquid-crystal displays, but they do have the virtue of being visible in nearly all lighting conditions and viewing angles.
But along with power consumption, VFDs have another pressing need--high voltage. The displays are typically driven by -40-V signals, well beyond the reach of conventional CMOS microcontrollers. That means that the consumer product--which was, after all, supposed to be simple and cheap--requires external high-voltage drivers for its display.
Hitachi Ltd., a major appliance manufacturer as well as a semiconductor company, was aware of the problem. Its chip designers were assigned the task of driving VFDs directly from an 8-bit MCU without having to build the chips in a weird process. Their response was the H8/37xx family of MCUs.
In most regards, the new chips are mainstream H8/300 microcontrollers, with the C-friendly
, register-based H8 instruction set, wide operating voltage range, elaborate peripheral set and large on-chip memory. But the parts have one unique feature.
There is a display voltage input, intended for connection to an external -40-V supply. That input runs to specially designed, voltage-tolerant drivers in the pad ring, allowing up to 36 of the outputs to drive -40-V VFD segment and digit pins.
LSI Logic baseband chip for satellite TV
MILPITAS, Calif. -- Following the integration curve, LSI Logic has combined two of its already-dense digital communications chips--the L64705 Viterbi decoder and Reed-Solomon decoder and the L64706B quadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) demodulator--to form a one-chip baseband demodulator for satellite-receiver applications. Compliant with both Direct Broadcast by Satellite (DBS) and Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) standards, the L64704 is aimed at the emer
ging market for home satellite receivers worldwide.
The chip combines several of the baseband functions necessary for a complete receiver. Specifically, it offers a decimation filter, a set of matched digital finite-impulse-response (FIR) filters for QPSK decoding, a Viterbi decoder and a Reed-Solomon back end. Digitized baseband goes in, and a digital bit stream comes out, ready for use by an MPEG transport-layer decoder.
The chip operates at up to 90 Mbits/second, necessary to span the huge range of bit rates specified by the DVB standard.
Comdex Report: Toshiba chips push into multimedia
Las Vegas -- Among the vendors clambering onto the multimedia express at Comdex this week is Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. The company, better known as a powerhouse in DRAMs and MIPS microprocessors, is also beginning to source chips for multimedia PCs and consumer products.
Two c
ases in point are being highlighted at the show. The higher-profile of the two was a single-chip MPEG-2 video and audio decoder. The part is an integration of Toshiba's earlier TC81200 MPEG-2 decoder that adds audio capability.
The TC81211 is aimed at PC multimedia boards as well as standalone applications, such as set-top boxes and digital-video-disk players, Toshiba said. Not quite an autonomous chip, it is designed to work in conjunction with a control microprocessor, which presumably would split the MPEG-2 system stream into its audio and video components and feed them to the 81211.
There are, of course, some risks involved in doing an MPEG integrated decoder at this point. One of the big ones is that there are still two options as to what format MPEG-2 audio arrives in. The chip neatly dodges this bullet by doing neither--instead, it decodes MPEG-1 audio.
The part includes a proprietary scheme for synchronizing the decompressed video and audio streams. It also has a DRAM controller for the ne
cessary 2 Mbytes of external DRAM. In addition, Toshiba has included an on-screen display module that gives the external CPU a way to put text in a window in the decompressed video stream.
Sony to show 25-inch wall TV using PALC technology
By David Lieberman
LAS VEGAS -- A prototype 25-inch hang-on-the-wall TV, 4 inches deep, will be demonstrated by Sony Electronics Inc. (Park Ridge, N.J.) at this week's Comdex show, as the company outlines its plans to start selling these first large flat-panel TVs in Japan next year.
The technology, which Sony is tentatively calling Plasmatron, is based on the PALC (plasma-addressed liquid crystal) technology developed by Tektronix Inc. and, since 1994, managed by Tek spinoff Technical Visions Inc. PALC licensee Sony Corp. (Tokyo) has no plans at this time to sell Plasmatron panels to other TV makers, according to a company spokesman.
With its w
ell-established Trinitron CRT technology, Sony has been a major player in TVs over the years, but until recently it stood on the sidelines in flat-panel displays, consuming considerable numbers of 3- to 4-inch active-matrix (AM) LCDs for the Watchman and other products. However, the company has made several moves within the past few years to gain a role in the flat-panel future.
For example, it made a development arrangement with Tek after display lab staff demonstrated a 16-inch-diagonal, 640 x 480-pixel, full-color PALC display at the Society for Information Display conference in mid-1993. First disclosed by Tek at SID 1990, PALC development at the Beaverton, Ore., firm was supported in part by public funds under ARPA's High Definition Systems Development program.
Big players muscle into Windows-based EDA business
By Richard Goering
BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Two prominent names are poised
to enter the Windows-based EDA market this week, as Mentor Graphics Corp. announces its Antares spinoff, and Data I/O Corp. (Redmond, Wash.) launches an autonomous division, Synario Design Automation, to market its software products. These announcements follow by one week Cadence Design Systems' entry into the PC market with Allegro for Windows.
Antares is starting out with Mentor's Exemplar Logic and Model Technology subsidiaries, but it plans to become a broad-line vendor with support for FPGA, ASIC and pc-board design. According to Pepe Piedra, Antares president, the independent company hopes to grab 30 percent of the Windows-based EDA market by 2000, a market that Antares believes could reach $1 billion. Coming anywhere close to that goal will make Antares the first real powerhouse in a deeply fragmented market that totaled sales of about $100 million in 1994.
Synario Design Automation is beginning life as an autonomous division, but could someday grow into an independent company like Antares, ac
cording to Dave Kohlmeier, director of marketing. He said the division will handle all Data I/O software offerings, and retain a focus on front-end design tools. Both Antares and Synario are starting out with about 50 employees and annual revenues of $10 million to $15 million.
Intel to take another shot at multimedia while making nice to Microsoft
By Ron Wilson
HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Still smarting from its confrontation with Microsoft over Native Signal Processing (NSP), Intel Corp. is preparing to reintroduce its multimedia concept in the first quarter of next year. This time, the company will actively avoid contention with Microsoft over software interfaces. But Intel will also load the deck--just in case--offering capabilities beyond the scope of Microsoft's Windows 95, and holding an ace of trumps up its sleeve: the P55C multimedia instructions.
"We are still on target for a Q1 rele
ase of NSP for Windows 95," stated Intel vice president Craig Kinnie. "The underlying hardware changes to support NSP--the version 2.1 PCI spec, new DMA modes and so on--have gone out under non-disclosure to systems vendors for some time now, so many new hardware platforms already comply with the needs of NSP.
"Working with the systems vendors on this has caused us to change our rollout strategy a bit," Kinnie continued. "The systems vendors were leery of making hardware changes unless we could point to applications that would exploit them. So this time, we will roll out the NSP software not by itself, but as an ingredient in compelling applications from third parties."
Kinnie also said that this time, every effort will be made to avoid a confrontation with Microsoft. "We won't include pieces of NSP that are still in controversy between Intel and Microsoft," Kinnie said. "In rewriting NSP software for Windows 95, we have used Win95 facilities wherever we could. In areas where that wasn't possible, we
have agreed with Microsoft on a roadmap to bring our approach together with their plans for the future of Windows 95, so we won't be asking customers to follow two divergent roads."
HDTV may slip, opening way for other services
By George Leopold
WASHINGTON -- Members of the HDTV Grand Alliance last week predicted that HDTV programming originally expected to be offered in 1997 may slip by a year or more. They warned this could give cable and satellite competitors even more time to roll out new and cheaper services and provide regulators an opportunity to whittle away at the 6-MHz advanced TV channel for other services.
The head of federal advisory panel steering development of the HDTV standard told industry officials last week that proposals to use "slivers" of the spectrum for data services or multiple channels of non-HDTV broadcasts would be disastrous. "This is simply not possible w
ith the Grand Alliance system," said Richard Wiley, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission's Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service.
Offering other services over the advanced TV spectrum would require additional testing of the HDTV system and erode U.S. leadership in the technology, Wiley warned at a meeting on HDTV sponsored by Maximum Service Television (MSTV), a Washington-based trade group representing TV station owners.
Indeed, Congress is considering a proposal to auction the 6-MHz channel as part of its efforts to come up with funds for deficit reduction. The effort could lead to non-HDTV services being offered over the spectrum. Grand Alliance members who argue their $200 million investment in HDTV development entitles them to use the second channel without additional cost say mixed-use proposals would create interference with HDTV signals. Ultimately, the Senate auction proposal and additional uncertainty about HDTV's future would threaten free broadcast TV and waste th
e investment in advanced TV, warned MSTV Chairman Edward Reilly.
IBM will power Thomson set-top
Fishkill, N.Y. -- Billing it as a major foray into the consumer chip market, IBM Microelectronics confirmed last week that it will supply the embedded PowerPC for a huge set-top-box order won recently by Thomson Consumer Electronics.
In September, Indianapolis-based Thomson was selected by an interactive-TV alliance to supply up to 3 million wireless set-top boxes. Last week, Thompson selected IBM's 32-bit PowerPC microcontroller for the new box expected to be available in selected markets in 1996.
The embedded PowerPC 403 will run OS/Open, a bare-bones kernel from IBM.
Sony plant fire chops lithium-battery supply
By David Lammers
TOKYO -- Fire has destroyed a Sony Energy
tec Inc. factory that produced roughly half of the total commercial supply of lithium-ion batteries, clouding the Christmas production schedules at cellular-phone and portable-computer makers worldwide.
The cause of the Nov. 4 blaze at the Koriyama facility--which had been producing more than 3 million lithium-ion batteries per month--was being assessed last week, but a Sony spokesman said that the damage was heavy. The Koriyama City fire marshal said that the building itself was destroyed.
Sony officials were trying to determine whether some or all of the heavy capital equipment on the first floor of the three-story building could be salvaged, moved to another facility, and restored to production. It is undetermined when production might resume.
Sony Energytec has three factories at its Koriyama facility, located several hours north of Tokyo. The fire destroyed the top two floors, which contained the assembly-and-test operations, while the production equipment was on the bottom floor.
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