EET-i Top of the News

Week of 11/20/95

11/22/95

Europe outlines successor to Jessi R&D program

Stanford Telecom provides help for CATV head ends

General Magic frees Telescript

Congress delays digital-TV auction

C-Cube acquires Media Computer

Siemens invests heavil y in China
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

11/21/95

PowerPC trio launches common platform

Upstart card spec zooms in

CCT becomes source of autorouting for 14 customers

Nat'l Instruments turns PC into fast VME controller

Minc ports tools to Windows NT

11/20/95

From Comdex: Sony-Intel deal foreshadows Jap anese push into PCs

From Comdex & Mobicom: Can the PDA make a comeback? Stay tuned

Fire at Sony battery plant causes industry shuffle

From Comdex: 1394 serial bus standard leaps to the head of the class

From Comdex: Philips, Ricoh demo erasable CD-ROM

Data-storage world mulls 3M's pull-out

Europe outlines successor to Jessi R&D program

By Peter Clarke

MUNICH, Germany -- An outline proposa l for a $2.6 billion collaborative R&D program to follow the Joint European Submicron Semiconductor Initiative (Jessi) has been sent to national governments across Europe.

Jessi chairman Horst Nasko said the proposed effort would operate, as Jessi did, under the pan-European Eureka program. It would run for four years, immediately following Jessi's end, from January 1997. The proposals also seek annual funding similar to Jessi's--about $650 million.

While discussions have gone on around Europe this year, the proposal has had the working title of Medea--standing for Microelectronics Development for European Applications.

Nasko has outlined six core competencies to be covered, which makes room for EDA techniques and libraries as one of three horizontal enabling-technology areas. CMOS-process technology and general-manufacturing technology are the other two. Multimedia, communications and other applications are the three vertical-applications areas that should be supported, according to the prop osals.

Stanford Telecom provides help for CATV head ends

By Loring Wirbel

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Developers of cable TV head-end equipment finally will be able to take advantage of the same standard-product price advantages as their set-top brethren, thanks to a new QPSK receiver architecture from Stanford Telecom Inc.'s wireless and cable products group.

Stanford will come to next week's Western Cable show in Anaheim, Calif., with a standard board for hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) head ends, demodulating downstream signals based on quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation.

At first, QPSK boards for cable head ends did not seem to make a lot of sense, said Robert Corrigan, vice president of marketing, since many vendors wanted to offer proprietary features in silicon. But the IEEE's moves toward a QPSK base for the 802.14 cable-data standard "will bring a lot of standardizati on to those using QPSK modulation," said Corrigan. Stanford already has moved to standard QPSK upstream services through its single-chip STEL-1103 device for set-top boxes.

General Magic frees Telescript

By Junko Yoshida

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- In a major shift in strategy, General Magic Inc. is going public with its Telescript communication software technology that uses mobile agents. The Sunnyvale company is releasing for non-commercial applications free Telescript language reference and Telescript development environment.

The move follows General Magic's recent decision to decouple development and promotion of Telescript technology from that of the Magic Cap operating system by creating two separate divisions within the organization.

The shift in strategy reflects the startup's recognition that it has to ride the fast-rising Internet wave. The company is now committed to pen etrating a diverse worldwide public network with its agent-based Telescript technology, rather than depending on the private network environment of Magic Cap-based clients and Telescripted servers.

"Five years ago, when we founded the company, we had no idea that the Internet would grow like gangbusters as we see today," said James White, General Magic's vice president of Telescript technology. "An emerging electronic marketplace--for which our Telescript technology is designed--is represented by the Internet today, and is driven by the Internet."

Congress delays digital-TV auction

WASHINGTON -- Broadcasters and other digital-TV proponents opposed to spectrum auctions won a temporary reprieve after Congress approved a budget blueprint that directs regulators to study the issue before final action is taken.

The provision, contained in the massive spending bill completed on Nov. 17 , softens an earlier Senate proposal--opposed by broadcasters--that would have delayed the award of digital-TV licenses until January 1998. The new language pushes that date up to November 1996.

The advanced-TV spectrum has become a prime target of lawmakers seeking additional revenue to balance the federal budget. The budget bill approved by House and Senate negotiators seeks to raise $19.3 billion over seven years, with the auctioning of spectrum licenses accounting for more than $15 billion.

C-Cube acquires Media Computer

MILPITAS, Calif. -- C-Cube Microsystems Inc. bought Media Computer Technologies Inc. for $6.3 million. The transaction will be accounted for as a purchase, C-Cube said.

The company said it purchased Media Computer (Santa Clara, Calif.), which supplies digital video-processing and video-windowing technology for the PC market, to expand into that market. Media Computer will develop ASICs, reference de-

signs and application software, according to C-Cube.

Siemens invests heavily in China

BEIJING -- Siemens will dump $1 billion into China in the next five years to exploit emerging markets and manufacturing infrastructures there.

Gunter Wilhelm, a member of the corporate executive committee with special responsibility for the Asia-Pacific region, said recently that Siemens already has invested $250 million in China. The continuing investments will be in telecommunications, power generation and transportation systems.

The company's total sales from all its activities in China, including non-consolidated joint ventures, rose almost 30 percent, to $1 billion, for the fiscal year ended in September. Siemens expected annual sales in China to soar to $10 billion by 2000, Wilhelm added.

PowerPC trio launches common platform

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

LAS VEGAS -- Shaving a few months off their plan, Apple, IBM and Motorola unveiled a promised common hardware reference platform for PowerPC-based computers at Comdex/Fall. Though the specification was not due until the spring, it is nevertheless likely to be a year from now before systems and silicon using the new architecture are widely available and the success or failure of the platform becomes clear.

The new platform provides an architecture that acts as a bridge between the world of the Macintosh in which the operating system typically resides on ROM and the world of the PC in which the OS is usually on the hard-disk drive. The platform specifies a boot ROM using open firmware to launch a computer based on a variety of operating systems, including IBM's AIX, the Mac OS, Novell's Netware, OS/2 Warp, Windows NT and Sun's Solaris. The platform also specifies either a Super I/O chip that links to a world of PC peripherals or a Mac I/O controller that connects to legacy peripherals based on the Apple Desktop Bus or AppleTalk network.

Currently, 13 vendors are shipping systems that use the PowerPC. They have either developed their own system specifications or, in the case of a select group using the Mac OS, have worked with Apple on its core logic and ROM-based design. The new platform holds the promise of a range of compatible systems and opens the door for Apple to open licensing of the Mac OS, since cloners would no longer need to work directly with Apple's hardware engineers.

Upstart card spec zooms in

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

LAS VEGAS -- In the race to bring multimedia to the notebook computer via souped-up PC cards, the upstart Zoomed Video Port proposal sped passed the finalized Cardbus standard at Comdex/Fall. Some nine chip makers and six PC-card maker s showed products supporting the pending ZV Port standard. By contrast, only a sprinkling of Cardbus silicon arrived at Comdex, and cards or systems supporting the PCI-like bus were not publicly shown.

The state of affairs was somewhat surprising since Cardbus, with a theoretical bandwidth of 132 Mbytes/second, has been defined since last spring, while ZV Port, which offers no more than 27 Mbytes/s, will not officially go to ballot at the PCMCIA committee until early next year. However, because ZV--a method for going around the host processor and system bus and blasting video or audio directly to a suitably tuned controller and thence to an output device--is cheaper and easier to implement, the enthusiasm was not unexpected.

Cardbus controllers, once expected to ship as early as June, are just now reaching OEMs. "I think everybody slipped dates to ship Cardbus controllers because they underestimated the difficulty of supporting burst mode," said Anthony Wutka of the PCI bus group at Texas Instruments , one of the few vendors shipping Cardbus controllers. "The Cardbus card and systems products will probably not appear until January."

CCT becomes source of autorouting for 14 customers

By Richard Goering

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Cooper & Chyan Technology Inc. (CCT) will become the exclusive source of autorouting technology for 14 PC-based pc-board CAD companies, representing nearly half of the installed base of some 100,000 PC-based layout systems worldwide, the company announced this week. CCT's new "CCT Installed" program also aims to raise public awareness of the company, which provides the "shape-based" Specctra AutoRoute product.

The 14 companies include U.S. vendors Cadint USA, Ivex, MicroSim and PADS Software, along with 10 European vendors. According to Bill Portelli, vice president of sales and marketing at CCT, the program goes far beyond the OEM relationships that CCT has had with some of these vendors in the past.

"An OEM partner sells your stuff if he feels like it," Portelli said. "These partners have basically agreed to shelve their routing technology, and to put one of our routers in every package they sell. It's almost an Intel or Microsoft type of approach."

Nat'l Instruments turns PC into fast VME controller

By Stan Runyon

AUSTIN, Texas -- Following on the heels of its upgradable VXI embedded controllers, National Instruments is releasing capabilities that will turn any PCI- or ISA-based computer into a high-performance external VME controller.

Both types of controller rely on custom ASICs to deliver high-speed control and high reliability--an essential with VMEbus products.

The controllers--the VME-PCI8010 and VME-AT4010--are based on National's MXI-2 architecture, rolled out in August. MXI-2 is a software-transparent fast link, whic h lets external computers act like embedded controllers directly plugged into a VME slot. MXI-2 also lets users daisychain as many as eight VME mainframes.

"There are other VME controllers," said marketing manager James Kimery. "But what sets these products apart is that they include our NI-VXI and NI-VTL software drivers and are completely compatible with LabView and LabWindows/CVI application software."

Minc ports tools to Windows NT

By Richard Goering

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Minc Inc. has announced the availability of its PLD design tools for Windows 95 and Windows NT environments. The company has also declared temporary price reductions of 50 percent or more on its Windows-based tools.

Minc's PLDesigner-XL tool, previously available under Unix DOS or Windows 3.1 only, takes standard inputs including VHDL, Verilog and schematics. It provides support for nearly 6,000 devices from such vendors as Advanced Micro Devices, Actel, Altera, Atmel, Cypress Semiconductor, Lattice Semiconductor, Philips and Xilinx.

Multiple devices

PLDesigner-XL automatically partitions designs across multiple devices and architectures. Minc claims to be the only third-party company currently designing fitters for complex PLDs.

Kevin Bush, vice president of sales and marketing for Minc, said the move to Windows 95 and NT was driven by OEM and end-user demand. Since PLDesigner-XL was already a 32-bit Windows product, little extra work was required, he noted.

From Comdex: Sony-Intel deal foreshadows Japanese push into PCs

By Junko Yoshida

LAS VEGAS -- The multimedia explosion in personal computers is proving irresistible to Japan's electronics giants, which have begun a rush into the market.

With only one company--Toshiba--listed among the world's top 10 PC makers, Japan ese companies appear to be determined to catch the current consumer wave. They have begun gearing up for a major thrust into a booming multimedia PC market, which isn't expected to crest until Christmas 1996.

Though they have packed a mighty punch in areas such as PC peripherals, memories, components and handheld devices, the likes of Sony, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC have been bantamweights in the PC market.

Last week, Sony made an aggressive moves designed to change that. At Comdex here Sony disclosed a strategic agreement with Intel Corp. under which the two will design a line of consumer-oriented PCs that Sony will begin marketing next fall. Sony hopes to parlay its name and consumer electronic savvy into PC market share.

"The [Intel-Sony] relationship right now is simply a memorandum of understanding that says we are going to develop exciting new products using our technologies and their technologies for products to be sold and marketed by Sony. Anything more specific than that we have yet to work out," said Carl Yankowski, president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics Inc. (Park Ridge, N.J.).

From Comdex & Mobicom: Can the PDA make a comeback? Stay tuned

By Alexander Wolfe

LAS VEGAS -- The PDA was back with a vengeance at two industry conferences last week. At Comdex/Fall here, Apple Computer Inc. revealed an aggressive strategy to boost the processing power of its Newton--and equip it with Web-browsing and Internet capabilities--in a bid to propel the PDA from an industry curiosity to a market-driver for mobile computing.

Meanwhile, a design that industry experts said could have a significant influence on future PDA architectures came to light at Mobicom 95 in Berkeley, Calif. There, a team of computer scientists and EEs from the University of Calif. at Berkeley demonstrated a prototype of their Infopad system. The PDA--equipped with video-compress ion and cellular-communication features--is essentially a dumb, multimedia terminal squeezed into a handheld form-factor. Equally important is the fact that the Infopad incorporates a host of innovations in low-power, highly integrated communications ASICs; indeed, the design techniques used to construct those chips could be snapped up by silicon developers to catch the cresting wireless-communications wave.

Both efforts are gaining momentum at a time when many in the industry still question the staying power of the PDA. Although electronics executives no longer dismiss PDAs outright, which they did after high-profile disappointments like Apple's first Newton and the AT&T/EO Corp. product, neither are they ready to climb aboard the handheld bandwagon. Many vendors reached at Comdex last week voiced opinions similar to that of Richard Pierce, director of marketing at Intel Corp.'s handheld and mobile products group. "We're in a watch and wait mode," he said. "If there's a specific need for a [PDA] sil icon solution, we'll respond."

Fire at Sony battery plant causes industry shuffle

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- The Nov. 4 fire that hit Sony Energytec Corp.'s lithium ion battery factory has caused some competitors to speed up their expansion plans, and Sony itself is hustling to quickly transfer production to another facility.

However, since the Sony factory produced the type of batteries used in portable computers, its loss will be felt by computer customers in the United States and elsewhere for some time.

Sony is moving undamaged equipment from Koriyama to its Tochigi factory, which is being converted from cassette tape to lithium ion battery production. Originally, Tochigi was to have been Sony's second lithium ion factory.

"We are going to start production at Tochigi as early as possible, probably by the end of this month. We set a target of producing 2 million units a month there by early next year," said a spokeswoman.

Sony's estimate is that the fire destroyed about 20 percent of the second floor of the Koriyama factory, where the batteries underwent final testing.

Sony was doubling capacity at Koriyama, with an interim target of 4 million units a month by the end of the year. Prior to the fire, the fab produced about 3 million units a month, most of them the cylindrical batteries used in portable computers.

From Comdex: 1394 serial bus standard leaps to the head of the class

By Loring Wirbel

LAS VEGAS -- The struggle for desktop port space in next-generation serial channels took center stage at last week's Comdex/Fall, and several factors combined to move the IEEE's 1394 serial bus to a lead position against the nascent Microsoft/Intel Universal Serial Bus (USB) design. In particular, Sony Electronics Inc. (Park Ridge, N.J.) used its debut of a f amily of 1394-enabled digital cameras to pledge a no-holds-barred effort to have 1394 accepted in both consumer electronics and desktop computer realms.

Sony announced a development and OEM agreement with Intel Corp. to use Intel processors and motherboards in future multimedia desktop systems to be sold under the Sony label. Carl Yankowski, president of Sony Electronics, said that as part of this deal, "We'll indicate to Intel what we see as the limits to USB, and we'll really stress 1394 for high-speed video data."

The Sony posturing was only the beginning of a spate of good news for the 1394 Trade Association last week. Sun Microsystems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) joined the industry group, and offered to provide details of its internal gigabit-link technology to a 1394.1 working group, which will examine 800-Mbit/second and 1.6-Gbit/s extensions to the current approved speed grades of 100, 200, and 400 Mbits/s. Another new supporter of the trade association was Yamaha Corp. (Buena Park, Calif.), which pledged to combine 1394 efforts with its promotion of the XG video-game interface standard.

The standard began life as an Apple Computer Inc. project called FireWire, and picked up steam as semiconductor vendors such as Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) offered physical-layer chips to support the serial bus. In addition to its speed, it offers better support for isochronous services than many traditional serial channel architectures.

From Comdex: Philips, Ricoh demo erasable CD-ROM

By Mark Carroll

LAS VEGAS -- Philips Electronics and Ricoh Co. Ltd. last week demonstrated their erasable CD-ROM medium and drive at Comdex/Fall. The prototype successfully performed a direct-overwrite and sector-erase cycle.

Meanwhile, the Optical Storage Technical Association is weighing several proposals for a new logical file structure that CD-E will use. Among the issues still under discussion is the copy-protection scheme. Specifications for the erasable-CD format were proposed in January and released for review last month.

Philips Components CD-recordable business-line manager Cornelis Klik said that manufacturers should be able to make the changes to media and drives to permit CD write-and-erase. "We hope that by September of 1996, five or 10 companies will ship CD-E drives with media," he added.

Meanwhile, Ricoh has formally released the CD media for sampling, and it disclosed last week that it is seeking "a second source" for the erasable disk, which conforms to the Orange Book Part III standards.

The CD-E standard is supported by 10 major manufacturers: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Matsushita, Sony, 3M, Olympus, Philips and Ricoh. The new medium is said to have an archival life of more than 10 years, or roughly 10,000 access cycles.

Data-storage world mulls 3M's pull-out

By Terry Costlow

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- The removable-storage industry was stunned last week when 3M Co. decided to spin out its Data Storage Products operation as an independent company. The move both changes the landscape in media and casts a cloud over the group that developed many of the basic technologies for tape and optical media.

The core products of the new company--which had generated $2 billion a year in revenue as a 3M unit--will be data cartridges, floppy disks and optical media.

"The decision by 3M to depart from the data-storage market sent shock waves through the tape and optical-media industries," said Ray Freeman, president of Freeman Consulting (Santa Barbara, Calif.). "Where will the enormous capital investment for future technology development come from if even 3M's pockets are not deep enough?"

Over the past year or so, 3M has been aggressive in the storage markets, working on several joint-development projects. The company developed much of the hardware and media technology for the Travan system that is emerging as the next generation in data-cartridge technology. As holder of the basic data-cartridge patents, 3M has the clout to get drive makers to focus on one technology and to get component suppliers to support that thrust.

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