EET-i Top of the News

Week of 11/27/95

12/01/95

IDT ships integrated 25-Mbit ATM transceiver

Embedded ARM in works

Three vendors redefine workgroup architectures

DEC primes video for Pentium

Team Corp. bridges tools
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

11/30/95

Silicon neurons tackle temporal processing

Carbon nanotubes exhibit field-emitter qualities

Mentor's Antares eyes tool vendor

Plessey eyes partnerships

Falling price of color LCDs causes concern

11/29/95

Cisco taps software partners for home-market move

Two ai m to bring ISDN into the home

Anagram releases timing, power simulator

VCD option permits recycling of tests

Bull market for new engineering grads

Tek scopes double bandwidth, sample rate

11/28/95

Motorola adds to its 16-Mbit MCU family

Fujitsu bets big on synchronous DRAMs

Single-chip video filters unveiled

Plessey rolls AMPS chip set

From ISHM: Composite substrates meet power needs

11/27/95

Group eyes 'free' VHDL sim models

Western Cable Report: U.S. scales back its ITV programs

Copyright bill comes under fire

Analysis: Why AMD dropped the 29000 to focus on X86 chips

Peritus buys Vista to gain ESDA technology

IDT ships integrated 25-Mbit ATM transceiver

By Loring Wirbel

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Culminating a year of discussion by the Desktop25 ATM Alliance about 25.6-Mbit/second Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks, Integrated Device Technology Inc. (IDT) next week will ship a fully integrated 25-Mbit transceiver.

The move kicks off a busy year for IDT in ATM. The company has created a dedicated ATM division to unite segmentation-logic, physical-layer transceiver and specialty-FIFO work for ATM. It also will launch "SwitchStar," an adjunct to its current "NICStar" program, to show that IDT is as serious about designing products for ATM switches as it is for the higher-volume network-interface-card (NIC) market.

"We will use our expertise in memory structures to offer some unique designs in switching-fabric ICs," said ATM marketing manager Michael Olsen. "You will also see multi-channel PHY (physical-layer) devices, Sonet framers and 'NIC-on-a-chip' designs for both 25 and 155 Mbits."

Embedded ARM in works

By Peter Clarke

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) has leveraged its implementation of the Peripheral Interconnect Bus (PI-Bus) on-chip to develop a microcontroller version of its ARM710 32-bit RISC microprocessor. And, as part of the company's strategy to develop more-complex devices, it is discussing incorporating multiple ARM CPUs on a single piece of silicon to address embedded applications with general-purpose silicon and software.

The ARM7100 microcontroller, slated for availability next year, is aimed at the next generation of personal digital assistants. It sweeps up many of the peripherals that sit alongside its ARM610 microprocessor, as in designs like the Apple Newton. The 7100 includes an 8-Mbyte cache, a half-VGA LCD controller, direct DRAM interface, phase-locked-loop (PLL) clock mul tiplier, IrDA (Infra Red Data Association) data interface, codec interface, serial ports, timers and a real-time clock.

ARM said the 7100 could be used in office-automation products, such as photocopiers, facsimile machines and private automatic branch exchanges, and applications that need a fast user interface, such as an automotive console for controlling in-car entertainment, mobile phone and navigation systems.

Three vendors redefine workgroup architectures

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cisco Systems Inc., Newbridge Networks Inc. and Alantec Inc. all made significant changes in their workgroup switching architectures this week, reflecting the rapidly shifting mix of Asynchronous Transfer Mode and switched-LAN services entering the lower levels of the networking hierarchy. Cisco made perhaps the most radical move, phasing out a low-end ATM switch sold on an OEM basis from NEC Corp., in favor of a new architecture that combines an ATM switching-fabric chip set from MMC Networks Inc. with a MIPS R4600 processor for signaling and routing.

Meanwhile, Newbridge added token-ring support as a feeder system called Blue Ridge to its Vivid ATM switch. And Alantec has added multiple ports of switched Fast Ethernet support to its workgroup-level PowerHub 4xxx family.

The workgroup, a level in the network hierarchy uniting a hub or switch with several servers and workstations belonging to one engineering or project group, is becoming the realm in which most architectural innovations are taking place for uniting legacy LANs and ATM. Two years ago, developers of switching LAN hubs and ATM switches concentrated their efforts on enterprise platforms managing LANs on a corporate level and departmental hubs and switches that served several workgroups. Now, even companies whose business plans were based on enterprise and departmental systems are moving to workgroup-level systems.

DEC primes video for Pentium

By Ron Wilson

MAYNARD, Mass. -- With a sophisticated chip and a highly unusual partitioning scheme, Digital Equipment Corp. hopes to bootstrap a new market for low-cost MPEG-1 and H.261 encoders and decoders. Digital's hardware/software combination promises to add real-time video compression and decompression to Pentium PCs for a retail price under $500.

The key to Digital's approach is a unique division of labor between the host CPU and a newly developed video-codec chip. The two processors cooperate to perform real-time MPEG-1 compression or decompression at 30 frames/second, or bidirectional H.261 video compression and decompression at 15 frames/s in each direction.

Unlike previously announced single-chip MPEG-1 compression engines, the 21230 contains a motion-estimation unit. This permits it to produce compressed files with not just Intra-frame encoding (I-fra mes) but also the highly compressed bidirectional and predictive (B and P) frame types.

Digital hopes that this capability will lead to a generation of low-cost codec boards for applications such as videoconferencing and multimedia authoring. Today, the company claims, the same real-time capability would cost at least $1,000 at the retail level.

Team Corp. bridges tools

By Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Proclaiming a new era in Windows-based EDA, Team Corp. next week will announce EDA Bridge 5.0, an integration and component-information-management tool that will link Viewlogic's Workview Office tools with Cadence's Allegro for Windows. With the introduction, integration capabilities previously available for Unix-based EDA tools are now offered on PCs.

Both a value-added reseller and software developer, Team has recently become the distributor for Workview Office and Allegro fo r Windows. The company has sold about 2,700 copies of previous versions of EDA Bridge, many of them in conjunction with the Pads Software products that Team resold until recently.

In addition to supporting Workview Office and Allegro for Windows, EDA Bridge 5.0 is claimed to offer faster database queries, more-advanced component-information management and bill-of-materials capabilities, and improved AutoCad integration compared with earlier releases of the product. But Ward Thomas, Team Corp. president, said that EDA Bridge 5.0 is more a strategy announcement than a product announcement.

Silicon neurons tackle temporal processing

By Chappell Brown

AUSTIN, Texas -- Analog processor arrays modeled on neurons form the basis for a new image-recognition system being devised here by startup Intelligent Reasoning Systems Inc. (IRSI). The design strategy involves a hybrid analog/discrete r epresentation of signals that faithfully mimics the temporal behavior of neurons.

The approach benefits from the combination of analog processing speed with error control rivaling that of digital representations. The resulting circuit design methodology can directly tackle such time-dependent tasks as speech recognition or motion detection without the complications of digital encoding.

"One of the really difficult problems in speech recognition is how to break up a stream of sounds into individual words--the segmentation problem," observed IRSI president Mark Deyong. "But if you view speech recognition in terms of temporal processing, the segmentation problem simply goes away."

Work at IRSI with processing elements that are driven asynchronously by their inputs and that encode information temporally has shown that segmentation naturally occurs at a certain stage in the chain of signal processing. "The brain is so good at these tasks precisely because it does not attempt to digitize the problem in the first place," Deyong said.

Carbon nanotubes exhibit field-emitter qualities

By Gail Robinson

HOUSTON -- In examining the characteristics of open-tipped carbon nanotubes, researchers here at the Rice University Quantum Institute's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology have discovered that the structures can yield significantly higher electronic-field emissions than had been imagined. The researchers found that chains of carbon atoms--numbering from 10 to 100--are pulled out of the open endwall layers of the nanotubes by the force of the electric field, thus forming an atomic "wire."

The resultant emission currents--0.1 to 1.0 ýA at room temperature--may help push nanotube technology out of the lab and closer to commercialization.

"We figured that nanotubes were a natural for investigating field-emission properties, since they are intrinsically so long and thin ," said Andrew Rinzler, a researcher at Rice. "But we discovered that they were a much better field emitter than we ever anticipated."

With a tensile strength 100 times greater than that of steel at about a quarter of the weight, the structures exhibit unique properties that could have a far-reaching impact on industry. "We would like to spool this stuff up," said Rinzler. "Imagine suspension bridges 10 times longer than they are now, using less material."

Mentor's Antares eyes tool vendor

By Peter Clarke

STARNBERG, Germany -- Antares, the subsidiary of Mentor Graphics (Wilsonville, Ore.) set up to sell PC-based EDA software, is said to be interested in acquiring Spea Software AG, a German PC-based EDA-tool vendor.

Though Spea is better known for its line of graphics add-in cards for PCs, a recent management buyout from Spea led to the creation of Seto Software GmbH, to sell Top-CAD p c-board design and layout tools. The most recent version of Top-CAD is a 32-bit software package that includes schematic capture, layout, and rip-up-and-retry autorouting, designed to run under Windows NT or Windows 95.

Joe Krolla, sales and marketing manager at Seto, said he could not confirm, deny or comment on any talks being held between Mentor and Antares.

Seto is 75 percent-owned by Uli Seng, with other managers owning the remaining 25 percent. The company's name comes from that of its chief executive officer, Setrak Topkinar.

Plessey eyes partnerships

By Peter Clarke

ROBOROUGH, England -- GEC Plessey Semiconductors will need one or more partners to share in its next major wafer-fab investment and to help move its processing capability to 0.25-micron design rules. The process partnership will be in addition to the company's R&D collaborations, the latter practice hav ing become standard operating procedure in Europe.

GEC Plessey managing director Tom Urwin said he has already had discussions with some companies that would like to have a European foundry presence and are seeking an appropriate partner. Urwin expects to sign a deal next year that will enable the company to bring its process and manufacturing volume up in step with demand in the 1998 time frame.

"We will definitely be in an alliance [sometime in 1996] for the development of the 0.25-micron process and the facility," Urwin said.

He said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, Taipei), which has supplied foundry services to GPS and is contemplating either a wholly owned or joint-venture foundry in Europe, is among the candidates.

Falling price of color LCDs causes concern

By David Lammers

Tokyo -- For much of the past decade, the goal of Japan's display industry has be en to create an active-matrix (AM) color display costing $500. Well, they've finally done it, and it turns out to be a case of "be careful what you wish for; you just might get it."

In the fourth quarter of 1994, a 10.4-inch AM-TFT (thin-film transistor) LCD commanded $1,000 or more from a hungry market. By the first quarter of 1996, a 10.4-inch display probably will cost $400 to $450, said Masanobu Ohyama, executive vice president of Toshiba Corp., who is in charge of the company's semiconductor and display operations.

That "very severe" price decline in active-matrix screens is one problem facing the LCD industry. But the trick with steep price declines is to turn them in your favor by expanding into new markets. With color flat panels, that means breaking out of the notebook stronghold and into wall-hanging televisions and cathode-ray-tube (CRT) replacements, said Ohyama.

Cisco taps softw are partners for home-market move

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Directly targeting the growing market of telecommuters, Cisco Systems Inc. has forged partnerships with an array of software vendors to develop low-end remote-access platforms. Cisco has disclosed its strategy of pushing dial-up corporate and Internet access from the home, a move that calls for repackaging a low-end hardware line from Combinet Inc. (San Jose), which Cisco acquired last summer.

What's more, the initiative entails creation of a CiscoRemote end-user software package that includes utilities from Netscape Communications, AirSoft Inc., Farallon Computing Inc., Qualcomm Inc. and Network Telesystems Inc.

"The new 750 line will be sold through our CiscoPro reseller program to home users, as well as to enterprises to provide to telecommuters," said senior product line manager Dale Jantzen. "There were some home-office opportunities in the 1000 and 2500 lines, but the 750 is the first to directly target the ho me user. As homes add multiple computers, you end up with a LAN in the home and the need for routed connectivity to the WAN."

Two aim to bring ISDN into the home

By Loring Wirbel

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Two significant players in remote-access router/server markets are betting on basic-rate ISDN as the key vehicle for bringing digital services to small-office/home-office (Soho) markets.

Newbridge Networks affiliate Advanced Computer Communications Inc. (ACC), here, has introduced its Congo platform for Soho ISDN connectivity. Meanwhile, ISDN pioneer Network Express Inc. (Ann Arbor, Mich.) is launching a unified software architecture for its ISDN remote-access servers, to offer basic-rate ISDN BRI), frame-relay and analog services over ISDN links.

"Momentum among the RBOCs [regional Bell operating companies] for ISDN deployment is finally building nationwide, and the custome r demand is definitely there, thanks to the desire for wideband Internet access," said Steve Fields, who heads up ACC's Soho marketing efforts.

ACC has produced the Yukon bridge router for remote offices and the Nile and Danube for branch offices, but Congo sets a new price point by offering multiprotocol routing features in a sub-$1,000 system. The standard model offers 802.1D link bridging and static IP addressing, and expansion options allow Congo to handle IPX/SPX spoofing for NetWare protocol stacks, as well as Demand IPX RIP/SAP protocols. PAP and CHAP security protocols are also supported.

Anagram releases timing, power simulator

By Richard Goering

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- In its first major public product release, Anagram Inc. has announced ADM 2.0, a transistor-level timing and power simulator for deep-submicron ICs. The product claims to run orders of magnitude faster than Spice and to offer a considerable speed improvement over ADM 1.0, which was quietly released to early customers in late 1994.

As a product that provides both dynamic timing simulation and power analysis, ADM 2.0 competes against TimeMill and PowerMill from Epic Design Technology Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). Founded in 1993, Anagram employs 20 people and has been profitable since the release of ADM 1.0.

Anagram's core technology is its analytical digital macromodeling (ADM) technique, developed by Andrew Yang, chief technical officer and assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Based on analytic closed-form solutions, the ADM tool claims to offer Spice-like accuracy while running as much as 1,000 times faster.

VCD option permits recycling of tests

WESTFORD, Mass. -- A new utility for the cycle-based SpeedSim/3 simulator from SpeedSim Inc., cal led VCD TestBench, allows users to extract stimulus and response data from one simulation run and compare it with results from a different simulation run. The utility reads the Verilog Value Change Dump (VCD) format interface as specified by Open Verilog International.

Because most Verilog simulators output VCD files, the VCD TestBench utility can be used to compare the results of event-driven Verilog simulators with those of the cycle-based SpeedSim/3. That would be of value in evaluating the accuracy of cycle-based simulation.

Users should be aware, however, that SpeedSim/3 supports only two states: 0 and 1. "Normally, we would expect that customers using SpeedSim would have used event-driven simulation to eliminate the X [unknown] and Z [high-impedance] states," said Don McInnis, SpeedSim's chief executive officer.

Bull market for new engineering grads

BETHLEHEM, Pa. -- The jo b market looks bullish for 1995-96 graduates, especially in computers and engineering.

More employers intend to visit campuses this year, and they plan to step up hiring, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). All told, 259 employers told NACE that they will hire 23.5 percent more graduates in 1995-96 than they recruited in 1994-95.

The news is especially good for EE and computer-science graduates. "New technology has increased demand for current technical expertise," NACE said, "which has spurred hiring in the computer-related and engineering fields." Average starting salaries are expected to rise as well, up 3.2 percent for BSEEs, to $36,454. Computer scientists are likely to average $34,222, about 4 percent higher, while computer engineering (BSCEs) will pick up more, at $35,855. Software and data-processing companies are anticipated to be among the most active recruiters next year, NACE said.

Among master's graduates, EEs will fare well, with aver age starting offers of $42,070, compared with $41,982 for MSCS grads. A PhD in electrical engineering will start at $60,848, while a CS doctorate brings in about $58,625.

Tek scopes double bandwidth, sample rate

By Stan Runyon

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- In the highly competitive world of oscilloscopes, the clear and persistent winner continues to be the end user. Three new scopes from Tektronix aptly demonstrate why that is so.

The three--the TDS 340, TDS 360 and TDS 380--replace three earlier members of the TDS family but bear twice the bandwidth and twice the sample rate. All three also set new price points and all carry some new features as standard equipment.

The respective bandwidths and sample rates of the new trio are 100, 200 and 400 MHz, and 500 Msamples/second, 1 Gsample/s and 2 Gsamples/s. Each holds the same record length of 1,000 points behind each of two channels.

I n addition, all three units offer standard fast-Fourier-transform (FFT) capabilities. The 360 and 380 add built-in floppy-disk drives to their standard-feature repertoires.

Motorola adds to its 16-Mbit MCU family

By Brian Fuller

AUSTIN, Texas -- Motorola's Microcontroller Division this week is rolling out new members of its old standby 16-bit MCU family, one optimized for speed, the other for cost. Introduced were the 68HC16V1 and 20-MHz and 25-MHz versions of its 68HC16Z1 microcontrollers.

Bill Pfaff, manager of modular microcontroller operations for the Advanced Microcontroller Division, said the V1 was designed to serve as a low-cost entry MCU for embedded control applications that need 16-bit performance and low pin count, while the Z1 is simply moving up the performance curve with customer needs.

The 68HC16V1 contains a CPU based on a 16-bit implementation of Motorola's 68HC 11 microcontroller family. It incorporates a queued serial module (QSM) and general-purpose timer (GPT). It's also the first Motorola MCU to use the new streamlined integration module (Slim), which allows for a lower pin-count and positions the device for cost-sensitive applications that require small packages.

Fujitsu bets big on synchronous DRAMs

By David Lammers

KAWASAKI, Japan -- Bolstered by increasing chip-set support for synchronous-DRAM architectures, Japan's major memory vendors are picking up the pace of SDRAM-development work.

Fujitsu Ltd. (Kawasaki) is betting particularly heavily on SDRAM technology. The company is playing a key role in the development of interface standards and is concentrating its design activity on synchronous technology, rather than on the Rambus architecture.

Fujitsu's prime goal for the next year is to build SDRAM volumes from its second-gener ation SDRAM design, rather than proliferate designs aimed specifically at the PC market.

Yoshihiro Takemae, manager of the SDRAM design department at Fujitsu's engineering center here, said the company is preparing a second-generation 16-Mbit SDRAM that will be ready for sampling early in 1996. A 0.35-micron line at Fujitsu's Iwate fab will make it possible to shrink the die size to 60 mm2, compared with the 138 mm2 of silicon consumed by Fujitsu's first-generation SDRAM (made with a 0.55-micron process).

The double-bank design will run at 100 MHz or higher and will be configured in by-4 and by-8 versions. A by-16 design, aimed at the personal-computer market and able to provide 800 Mbit/second to a 64-bit graphics bus, is being readied for later sampling.

Single-chip video filters unveiled

By Brian Fuller

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Tackling the messy job of cleaning up crowded video bo ards, Micro Linear Corp. has unveiled single-chip video filters.

"The chips eliminate the need for designers to do their own filters and it gives them a low-cost, off-the-shelf solution," said Michael Paiva, product marketing manager.

To date, video systems have employed filters to clean up noise before and after the analog signal goes through digital conversion. The conventional approach has been to design filters using discretes such as inductors and capacitors, which then requires the manufacturer to slap them down on the board and hand-tune them, Paiva argued. Hybrid filters are an alternative, but a generally expensive one, he added.

Micro Linear is addressing the problem with the ML6420 and the ML 6421 filters. The 6420, employing three independent video filters in a single chip, is used to reduce out-of-band noise and alias components in the video signal before it's digitized in the A/D converter.

The 6421--also using three filters--cleans up reconstructed video from the D/A converters.

Plessey rolls AMPS chip set

By Ron Wilson

SWINDON, England -- Though the official word is that new digital services, from DAMPS to PCS, are rapidly replacing analog cellular telephones, there is continuing interest in new designs for AMPS chip sets. At present, most cellular handsets are built from eight to 10 ICs and a large number of passive components.

Hence, a number of chip vendors have recently announced silicon to cut the cost of the AMPS handset. Most recent in the race is a newcomer to the entire market--GEC Plessey Semiconductors. That company, as part of its continuing strategy to get more revenue out of excellent bipolar RF and low-power CMOS processes, has jumped in with a five-chip set.

As with just about any AMPS chip set, there are caveats. The Plessey chips do not include an IF (which, according to the company, is a readily available commodity part), a power amp lifier, SAW filters or a number of passive components. This partitioning reflects the economic realities of mixed-signal silicon, and the preferences of the phone manufacturer with whom the chip set was designed. That vendor had its own tastes in IF and power- amp chips.

The chip set is partitioned into two bipolar and three CMOS devices, encompassing just about everything else in the handset. The two bipolar chips are the ACE9010 RF front end, including low-noise amplifier and UHF voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), and the ACE9020 transmit interface chip that contains the transmitter VCO, mixer and prescaler.

From ISHM: Composite substrates meet power needs

By Ashok Bindra

LOS ANGELES -- As the power density of electronic components and assemblies rises, so does the need for thermally conductive materials for packages and substrates. Several papers on composite materials that boas t excellent thermal and mechanical properties for such applications were highlighted at the recent International Symposium on Microelectronics, organized by the International Society for Hybrid Microelectronics (ISHM).

A joint paper by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, Calif.) and Sun Microsystems (Mountain View, Calif.) described Dymalloy, a composite substrate for high-power-density packaging. A copper-diamond composite, Dymalloy offers a thermal conductivity of 420 W/mK and a nominal coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of 5.5 ppm/ýC at 25ýC. Because its CTE matches closely with that of gallium arsenide (GaAs) and silicon components, Dymalloy permits the use of hard-die bond materials with high thermal conductivity, said the researchers.

Likewise, aluminum-silicon carbide (Al-SiC) composites are also evolving as materials for packaging applications that have stringent thermal and reliability requirements. At Alcoa Technical Center (Pittsburgh), the company has developed a pres sure-assisted manufacturing process to produce in volume Al-SiC cermet materials with low CTE (7.0 to 7.3 ppm/K), high thermal conductivity (200 W/mK), high stiffness and low density (3.02 gm/cc).

Group eyes 'free' VHDL sim models

By Richard Goering

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. -- Taking their cue from the renegade Free Software Foundation, a group of EDA users has launched the Free Model Foundation (FMF), a not-for-profit corporation that hopes to provide free, unencrypted, source-code simulation models over the Internet. If successful, this fledgling organization could change the way component-simulation models are created and distributed.

Though the founders of FMF still work at a large aerospace corporation (which they declined to identify because of company policy), they've already set up a World Wide Web site with the help of VHDL International (VI) at http://www.vhdl.org/vi/fmf. The site offers two small libraries of components modeled after the Vital VHDL-simulation standard.

"I've been a design-automation manager for a number of years, and one thing that's always frustrated me, since I tend to be involved in board design, is a lack of simulation models," said Richard Munden, FMF president. While companies such as Synopsys's Logic Modeling Group (Beaverton, Ore.) provide encrypted simulation models, Munden said that he and other users really want source-code models.

Western Cable Report: U.S. scales back its ITV programs

By Junko Yoshida

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- The Western Cable Show opens its doors this week to a U.S. cable industry scaling back its once-lofty interactive-TV (ITV) concepts--and costs. This is the beginning of a broad effort to make ITV more palatable to U.S. consumers. In the view of most cable companies today, the ideal digital set-top architecture is one that offers minimal interactivity, or perhaps none at all.

At least, that's the preferred approach here at home. In contrast to the U.S. market's tepid appetite for full-service ITV, Asian and European markets apparently can't get enough of the stuff. And as domestic cable, phone and satellite providers linger over the daunting menu of options for networks and services, system-level vendors of digital set-top silicon say they're finding far more stable volume markets for their fare overseas.

In an announcement indicative of the domestic trend, Microware Systems Corp. (Des Moines, Iowa) today is announcing DavidLite, a streamlined version of its flagship David 2.0 ITV-system software that offers a much smaller footprint and lower memory requirement "to deliver digital one-way or minimal two-way set-top boxes," said Arthur Orduna, strategic marketing manager for the company's New Media System Division.

Copyright bill comes under fire

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- A coalition of computer, education and privacy groups is railing against House and Senate legislation designed to adapt U.S. copyright protections to the digital age.saying it is too broad. While both sides in the debate acknowledge that a delicate balance must be struck between broad access to new digital media and intellectual property protections, the industry groups assert that the proposed legislation will stifle innovation and unduly restrict public access to copyrighted material sent over global networks

Moreover, critics and some lawmakers worry that the Clinton administration is in too big a hurry to cut an international deal on digital copyrights that could pre-empt congressional review.

At issue is the scope of the NII Copyright Protection Act of 1995.

Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman, who headed the government study, argued during the first in a series of planned hearings on the legislation tha t "technology has altered the copyright balance" and it is time to "clarify existing law and adapt it where the balance has shifted" too far in favor of either copyright owners or users.

Leading the charge against the copyright legislation is the Digital Future Coalition, a Washington-based organization made up of 27 computer, education and privacy groups.

Analysis: Why AMD dropped the 29000 to focus on X86 chips

By Terry Costlow and Loring Wirbel

AUSTIN, Texas -- AMD's decision to stop development on its venerable 29000 line earlier this month pointed up once again the balancing act between pushing technology forward and not spending a fortune. AMD decided that even in the embedded-processor market, where there is no dominant processor family, it was more profitable to leverage the infrastructure for X86 chips than to compete with the many RISC processors on the market.

By most c ounts, spending on the proprietary RISC architecture that was marketed by AMD's Embedded Processor Division had been scaled back in recent years, making it difficult to compete now that the 32-bit segment of the embedded market is heating up. Rather than beefing up those expenditures, AMD has decided to focus both its desktop and embedded efforts on Intel-compatible parts.

"We started looking at the resources needed to support the embedded-processor market," said Dave Chavoustie, vice president of the Embedded Processor Division. "The 16- and 32-bit market is $1.4 to $1.5 billion. Of that, about 30 percent or a little more is X86-based. When you look at the number of RISC competitors in the rest of the market, the number is growing every day."

Support infrastructure

Peritus buys Vista to gain ESDA technology

By Richard Goering

BILLERICA, Mass. -- An unusual mix of technologies cou ld result from the acquisition of electronic-system-design-automation (ESDA) vendor Vista Technologies Inc. (Schaumburg, Ill.) by Peritus Software Services, a software-maintenance company. Peritus has developed formal-proof technology--to which Vista has already contributed-- that could prove useful in design automation.

Vista employs 15 people and markets three ESDA products--StateVision, DesignVision and Vista Model Creator --as well as two computer-aided software engineering (CASE) products. Terms of the acquisition were not revealed.

The two companies have had a consulting relationship for several years. Ted Swoyer, director of marketing for Peritus, noted that Vista helped his company develop formal-proof technology for automatically updating commercial software to work after the year 2000. That's a particularly big concern for financial institutions, whose software is currently set up to work with dates up to 1999.

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