EET-i Top of the News

Week of 12/04/95

12/08/95

Sun, SGI, Netscape team in ambitious Internet effort

IDS, Wink trade ITV software

IBM shows multipoint video via the Net

Toshiba sets $1.3B for 0.25-micron fab

Mondale backs follow-on to chip pact with Japan

Synopsys pulls PCI cores
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

12/07/95

Justice probes Windows 95 over 'Net connection

Mitsubishi licenses Sun's Java tool

Self-aligned process builds vertical gate

IBM creates optical microscope that can images atoms

Neuro-fuzzy meets finite-state automata

Vivid to take on Japanese vendors in LCD driver market

12/06/95

Campaign targets high-tech theft

Intel taps into over-55 crowd with SeniorNet

Cadence simulates RF to analyze nonlinear circuits

Synopsys melds scan insertion, reoptimization

Socket makers gear up for Rambus modules

Cray taps 3-D packaging

12/05/95

Digital expands its OpenVMS environment

Siemens, Zoran team for video glue chip

ADI chipsets combine DSP, motion controller

Avatar plug-in diskette gains

Mitsubishi plays ISDN card

Accton rolls trio of Fast Ethernet hubs

12/04/95

Cable industry pushes interactive aside in favor of modems

Immigration cutback passes first Senate hurdle

NexCom emerges with new designs for nonvolatile memory

Chip makers excited about potential for network-based PCs

Japanese rev up for DVD, but laser diode shortage could slow plans

EDAC shelves Interoperability Lab effort

Sun, SGI, Netscape team in ambitious Internet effort

By Junko Yoshida

SAN FRANCISCO -- The gauntlet was officially thrown down for Internet domination here, as three of the Net's major players announced an alliance of their World Wide Web technologies. Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications Corp. plan to move Web sites, now confined to text and still pictures, into a more commercially viable, 3-D graphics, multimedia-enabled interactive Web platform.

This is seen as an effort to offset Microsoft Corp.'s growing Web presence, which is based on such applications as the Microsoft Explorer Web browser, its 3-D active virtual-reality modeling language (ActiveVRML) and the soon-to-be-released Blackbird--a Web programming and authoring language.

The three-way agreement joins Netscape's browser and server technology, SGI's Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) tools, and Sun's Java, a Web programming language.

Sun and Netscape have also combined forces to produce JavaScript--a cross-platform object-scripting language--that will become building blocks for cross-platform applications and multimedia content.

In separate but related announcements, IBM announced it would license Java, and SGI, Sun and Macromedia unveiled plans to co-define new open, multimedia formats and application programming interfaces (API).

IDS, Wink trade ITV software

By Loring Wirbel

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Interactive Digital Solutions Inc. (IDS), the joint venture of Silicon Graphics Inc., AT&T and Time Warner, announced at the recent Western Cable show that it would work with Wink Communications Inc. on client- and server-based software tools for interactive TV (ITV).

Wink, a spin-off of GeoWorks Inc., has developed an Interactive Communicating Applications Protocol (ICAP), to bring affordable interactivity to consumer-electronics devices, such as TVs, VCRs, set-tops and personal digital assistants. IDS will incorporate ICAP in its InterActive Community broadband interactive system software.

One of the most compelling aspects of the Wink suite is that "we don't have to await deployment of interactive digital services," said Patrick McEntee, director of marketing at IDS. "The software scales from a simpler analog environment to next-generatio n digital."

IBM shows multipoint video via the Net

By Nicolas Mokhoff

SAN DIEGO -- IBM used the Supercomputing Conference (SC '95) venue here to launch a next-generation Internet technology that enables multipoint interactivity using two-way video and audio streams.

Through an elaborate, supercomputer-based infrastructure assembled on site, the company and its technology partners introduced the approach via an on-line news conference from San Diego to New York and provided direct feeds of conference-session proceedings over the Internet to some 20 supercomputer centers nationwide. IBM and its partners also set up two URL addresses to enable remote users with the requisite equipment to view conference sessions either in real-time or as recorded material.

IBM worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to set up an elaborate infrastructure, comprising the company's SP2 supercomputer an d RS/6000 workstations, at the conference site to transmit video and audio streams over Fore Systems' Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switches. Internet interoperability was maintained using common Internet protocols.

Toshiba sets $1.3B for 0.25-micron fab

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Toshiba Corp. will invest $1.3 billion in a 0.25-micron logic IC fab line at its Iwate site in northern Japan, where production is expected to begin in the spring of 1998. The fab will provide system-design engineers with integrated "system-ASIC" components using core logic from both Toshiba and outside logic-design houses, said Susumu Kohyama, in charge of Toshiba's logic-IC operations.

The addition to the Toshiba Iwate facility will be the proving ground for a "concurrent engineering" type of computer-integrated-manufacturing (CIM) system. The CIM software, still under development, will allow engineers in IC design and manufacturing to work more closely and to bridge their efforts to technical marketing, sales, shipping, accounting and other parts of the product flow.

Switching from one process "recipe" to another, for dozens of different production lots, is a manufacturing challenge that requires sophisticated flow control, a skill that Taiwan's TSMC, for example, has mastered.

Mondale backs follow-on to chip pact with Japan

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Ratcheting up the pressure on Tokyo to extend the U.S.-Japan semiconductor agreement or reach a new accord, U.S. Ambassador Walter Mondale told reporters there this week that the Clinton administration wants "some sort of follow-on agreement that will sustain [the success of the chip pact], so that we don't backslide."

Mondale's comments echo previous statements by U.S. trade officials (see the CMP archive, Oct. 30, page 4). "He 's just following the lead [based on] what we've been saying," said a U.S. trade-representative spokeswoman.

Government and industry officials in Japan have resisted U.S. efforts to continue the chip agreement, which expires in July, arguing that its goal of a steady 20-percent foreign market share has been achieved and that the Japanese IC market is open.

Nevertheless, Mondale's comments indicate that Washington may be planning a new trade offensive against Japan, focusing on semiconductors and an unresolved dispute over Kodak's access to the Japanese film market. Asked recently whether the United States was going to let up on Japan, U.S. trade representative Mickey Kantor replied, "I'm focused like a laser beam on our Japanese friends."

Synopsys pulls PCI cores

By Richard Goering

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The nascent marketplace for synthesizable cores has hit a snag, as Synopsys Inc. has temporarily pulled back from the PCI macrosets. Synopsys's technical difficulties reflect an already-rocky start for this new marketplace, which is expected to become more important as chip complexity grows.

Synopsys has also confirmed a quiet reshuffling in which its Logic Modeling Group, which provided simulation and synthesis models, no longer exists as a separate business unit. The same people and products are now part of two new divisions--Design Reuse and Verification Systems--and the Logic Modeling label continues as a product identifier.

Meanwhile, Ravicad Inc. (San Jose, Calif.)--a leading Synopsys rival in the PCI-core area--will officially change its name this week to Virtual Chips Inc., in an attempt to redefine itself as a provider of off-the-shelf products. Ravicad started life as a consulting firm.

Synthesizable, register-transfer level (RTL) cores have attracted much attention and designer interest because of the growing need for design reuse. A number of companies have st arted selling cores in such areas as PCI, ATM and MPEG. But early products have required a high degree of customization (see the CMP archive, Nov. 6, page 77).

Justice probes Windows 95 over 'Net connection

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department is going after Microsoft Corp. again, this time looking into concerns that the company's Windows 95 operating system stacks the deck against rival Internet services.

The department's antitrust division has served civil subpoenas to the Netscape Communications Corp. and CompuServe Inc. on-line service, a CompuServe spokesman confirmed. Justice investigators are looking at whether Windows 95 and its related Internet software disable or raise the costs of rival programs that let users access the Internet. A CompuServe spokesman said its browser software for the World Wide Web portion of the Internet now works with Windows 95 but only after additiona l cost.

Microsoft acknowledged this week that problems arose during testing earlier this year but were resolved with the newer versions of most competitors' products.

Mitsubishi licenses Sun's Java tool

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- The Electronic Device Group of Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc. said it licensed Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java programming language and HotJava World Wide Web browser.

Mitsubishi officials said they will use Java to build high-volume, digital-networked products for industrial and commercial applications.

Mitsubishi will embed Java/HotJava in silicon, enabling a wide range of low-cost distributed-computing applications, such as interactive TV/set-top boxes and building control systems.

Self-aligned process builds vertical gate

By Chappel l Brown

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- By using the top metal electrode as a shadow mask, researchers at Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering have developed a self-aligned process for depositing vertical gates in resonant tunneling transistors (RTT). The gates offer performance advantages by forming a closer contact to the quantum-well region of the transistor, but another advantage is the potential for real-estate saving. The gates can take up appreciable area vertically without adding much to the lateral dimension of the device, offering the possibility of scaling the devices down to 0.1-micron lateral dimensions.

Not only are the resulting transistors small, but they also have a higher level of functionality, because of the resonant-tunneling effect. By creating a folded I-V curve, the RTTs have more than one stable operating point, an effect that can be exploited to build full logic gates with only one transistor. Previous attempts to build RTTs have used planar Schottky gate s or vertical gates deposited in etched recessed areas. Those techniques are difficult to scale down to the small dimensions at which the resonant-tunneling effect becomes a strong factor in transistor action.

IBM creates optical microscope that can images atoms

By Gail Robinson

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. -- Researchers here at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center have designed an optical microscope that can see objects 500 times smaller than can be detected by conventional optical microscopes. Recent results show that the microscope provides 1-nm resolution--about five times larger than an individual atom--and potentially could image single atoms in visible light.

Based on scanning interferometric apertureless microscope (Siam) technology, the approach could hold implications for a wide range of applications. "At this point, we can view single molecules and easily identify them," sa id Kumar Wickramasinghe, leader of the research team and manager of physical measurements at IBM. "Biologists will be able to read DNA components 100 times faster, shortening the mapping of genetic profiles from years to a few days."

The microscope may also prove a powerful tool for the electronics industry. For example, the microscope technology could achieve storage densities of 100 times that of current optical disks. IBM's scientists can read 50-nm bits at a data rate comparable to those of high-end data-storage systems.

Neuro-fuzzy meets finite-state automata

By R. Colin Johnson

TORINO, Italy -- To be successful in real-world control environments, neuro-fuzzy approaches must be combined with conventional finite-state automata, according to researcher Marcello Chiaberge at the Politecnico di Torino here. To prove the concept, Chiaberge has constructed a real-time controller bo ard housing both a conventional microcontroller and a custom neural chip based on pulse-width modulation.

Neural networks and fuzzy logic offer the means to build non-linear controllers that can adapt to changing circumstances in a more robust manner than conventional proportional-integral-differential (PID) controllers. Their advantage is that they process continuous analog values, intelligently filling gaps between discrete digital states.

According to Chiaberge, however, there are many situations in the real world to which such purely analog approaches are ill-adapted. "There are several cases where an analog controller alone is not sufficient as, for instance, the control of electric engines running at different speeds in different phases or in calculating the optimal trajectory of a manipulator with two largely different load conditions," Chiaberge said.

Vivid to take on Japanese vendors in LCD driver market

By Brian Fuller

CHANDLER, Ariz. -- In an era when many silicon vendors are grappling with low-voltage issues, Vivid Semiconductor Inc. is looking in the other direction. The two-year-old startup, which revealed its business model last week, is leveraging a portfolio of patented extended-voltage-range technologies in a bid to address a major problem in flat-panel-display design.

Vivid's column drivers modulate higher voltages at the individual pixel level in an approach that is said to cut power consumption and eliminate the additional circuitry used in contemporary designs to handle extended-voltage needs. The company has taken on no small task in breaking into a growing business dominated by Japanese companies, many with captive IC operations.

The 19-person company is building on a foundation of technology patents that emerged partly from process-technology work conducted at Medtronics and Motorola by Vivid founder Alex Erhart. Vivid is approaching the market fro m the perspective of end-user issues as well as those of notebook-system design. As images driven to the notebook screen become more complicated, pressure increases on the display electronics. Contemporary designs must drive 10 to 12 V to display good color images, but high-voltage column drivers are usually built in a custom process, adding unpalatable expense to cost-conscious-system development.

Campaign targets high-tech theft

By Robert Bellinger

AUSTIN, Texas -- Engineers in fabs and R&D centers alike soon will see posters on their walls offering tips on "how employees of electronics firms can help prevent or respond to a holdup."

The Technology Theft Prevention Foundation, made up of electronics and insurance companies and law-enforcement agencies, is sponsoring the employee-awareness drive. It has mailed out a series of 12 posters with messages ranging from "Who's walk ing in behind you?" to "You never know who's listening."

"High-tech burglaries and robberies, and the violence associated with these crimes, are on the rise throughout the United States, as well as Europe and the Pacific Rim," said FBI special agent Richard Bernes. "Warehouse and plant employees, as well as security guards, have been maced, knifed, pistol-whipped, shot."

While the foundation doesn't want to alarm workers, it finds that too many electronics companies take a lackadaisical attitude toward security. "Any company that makes, distributes, assembles, transports, sells or simply has high-valued components and workstations on premises is at risk," said the foundation's executive director, MaryLu Korkuch.

For copies of the posters, call Korkuch at (908) 903-2561.

Intel taps into over-55 crowd with SeniorNet

By Larry Lange

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Just in time for th e holidays, Intel Corp. is getting into the spirit of giving--and maybe getting back a little, too. In donating 30 Pentium-based personal computers to the non-profit organization SeniorNet, the company hopes to make inroads to the growing market of America's aging population.

"Computers keep the world's horizons open to older adults; they allow seniors to form new friendships and stay connected," said Stephen P. Nachtsheim, Intel vice president and general manager. "Intel is committed to taking a leadership role in providing older adults with access to the latest, most powerful personal-computer technologies."

Its SeniorNet program is in the mode of a longstanding Apple Computer Inc. strategy of providing library and educational systems on Apple platforms at little or no cost to various groups, with an eye toward future revenue-generating business. "This is a win-win for all of us," Nachtsheim said of Intel's SeniorNet connection.

But tapping the potential of the seniors market hasn't been easy. "Many of the elderly seniors don't want to know from computers," said a SeniorNet spokesman at the Forest Hills, N.Y., Learning Center. "They've never had to come in contact with them," or may not have realized that when they used an automated teller machine, for example, they were using a computer.

Cadence simulates RF to analyze nonlinear circuits

By Peter Clarke

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Moving into RF simulation, Cadence Design Systems Inc. has rolled out SpectreRF, a simulator aimed at both the linear and non-linear circuits found in digital wireless RF modules. Cadence said SpectreRF solves design problems not addressed by existing simulators, especially in non-linear circuits such as mixers, oscillators, switches and sampling and switched- capacitor filters.

The simulator is based on new mathematical algorithms developed by Ken Kundert, the chief architect of SpectreHDL, Cadence 's Spice-based simulator. The software is orders of magnitude faster than Spice for multi- frequency circuits, said company officials, and can be used for non-linear circuits not addressed by existing harmonic balance simulators.

SpectreRF is intended for the design of products ranging from cellular telephones, paging systems and mobile computers to wireless LANs and global positioning satellite systems.

Like harmonic balance simulators, SpectreRF can analyze circuits with multiple or widely-spaced frequencies, which cannot be handled by Spice. But unlike harmonic balance simulators, which are typically limited to tens of transistors up to 100, SpectreRF can simulate large circuits of up to 1,000 transistors, the company said.

Synopsys melds scan insertion, reoptimization

By Stan Runyon

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Transparency is an attribute that all design-for-test software wo uld like to have. So far, it has been but an elusive goal. In taking that goal literally one step closer to reality, Synopsys offers Test Compiler 3.4a, which combines two steps, fusing scan insertion and reoptimization into a single process.

Eliminating steps in the design-for-testability flow is a way to make testability insertion easier; perhaps more important, it can significantly speed up the testability process. In the case of the new version of Test Compiler, Synopsys said beta-site results show the time to a testable design can be accelerated up to a factor of 10.

The reason: reoptimizing a design after test insertion can consume as much as 90 percent of the overall test synthesis time. As an example, Synopsys said that inserting scan into a 100,000-gate ASIC can take one to two hours using present technology and a Sparc-10 workstation.

After that, reoptimization often is necessary because replacing a design's flip-flops with scannable flops can disrupt the original design, violate critic al timing or exceed a driving signal's maximum transition time. That means another 10 to 20 hours is piled on for global optimization, which must account for all the timing paths and other critical constraints.

Socket makers gear up for Rambus modules

By Terry Costlow

LISLE, Ill. -- Socket manufacturers are gearing up to meet the growing demand for Rambus memory modules. Molex Inc. has paired with Rambus Inc. to develop sockets for high-bandwidth memory chips, and Augat Inc. has added a second model to a socket line that was also created with assistance from Rambus.

Memories from Rambus (Mountain View, Calif.) are designed specifically for applications such as graphics accelerators that need more bandwidth than conventional RAM. The Rambus Memory Channel moves data at up to 533 Mbytes/second without the effect of pulling data from several chips in parallel.

The sockets suppor t those bandwidth needs while meeting the industry's requirements for low profiles. Sockets from both Molex and Augat (Attleboro Falls, Mass.) can be used on motherboards or on add-in cards. Particular attention was paid to the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) add-in market, which has more stringent height requirements than the older ISA architecture.

Among companies using Rambus memory are Cirrus Logic, which puts Rambus chips into its VisualMedia accelerators. Chromatic Research Inc. uses the chips in its Mpact media engine.

Cray taps 3-D packaging

By Terry Costlow

EAGAN, Minn. -- Cray Research Inc., known for its packaging prowess, has gone outside to get one of the key packaging technologies in its new scalable supercomputer. Cray is utilizing stacked memories to keep size down while improving access to memory banks.

Later next week, Staktek Corp. (Austin, Texas) will announce that it is supplying the 3-D modules to Cray, which unveiled its system late last month. Staktek has developed techniques that make it possible to stack four or more devices without creating thermal problems.

The use of stacking technology from Staktek is something of a coming-out party for 3-D packages, which have been used previously mainly in military products.

"This is a very major contract for us," said William Askins, director of marketing at Staktek. "It's not the only one you'll see in the next 12 months. We are dealing with most of the major OEMs in the industry."

Digital expands its OpenVMS environment

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

SAN FRANCISCO--Digital Equipment Corp. this week rolls out a new version of its OpenVMS operating environment. OpenVMS version 7.0 stretches the Maynard, Mass.-based company's legacy OS both upstream into new ranges of performance an d downstream into tighter integration with the increasingly mainstream Microsoft Windows NT server environment.

"This is the biggest revision of the operating environment in a decade---since we launched clustering," said Mary Ellen Fortier, a director of product marketing at Digital. The rollout came at a regular meeting here of the Digital Equipment Corp. Users Society.

In terms of high-end performance, OpenVMS in its current release catches up with some of the advances the company's Digital Unix environment made some time ago. OpenVMS 7.0 offers full 64-bit data addressing tuned for the Alpha AXP processor. The OS has also been reworked to support so-called Very Large Memory capabilities, with oversight of internal storage areas as large as 8 terabytes.

In addition, the new version of OpenVMS uses a new, 64-bit, log-structured file system, called Spiralog 1.0, that was designed with databases of 10 Tbytes in mind. Operations handled in the new file system run twice as fast as those handled in th e previous, 32-bit File-11 file system, Digital claims.

Siemens, Zoran team for video glue chip

By Ron Wilson

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Siemens Semiconductors and Zoran Corp., following closely in the footsteps of Philips Semiconductors, have cooperated to produce a video glue chip for PCI-bus personal computers.

The problem they are addressing has to do with Intel Corp.'s vision of the PCI bus as the single conduit for video information coming into, being processed by and leaving the PC.

On paper, there is enough bandwidth in the bus to carry all these signal streams. but turning a possibility on paper into a reality on the motherboard has been a challenge.

Hence, the interest in glue chips. Basically, the job of the SZB6120 (from Siemens) or ZR36120 (Zoran) is to sit on the PCI bus and act as a traffic cop for video data. For this purpose, the chip bridges PCI to two other b uses. The first is an I2C bus. This allows the CPU to work directly with the variety of video chips that take commands over this serial bus. The second is what the vendors call a guest bus. "The guest bus is a generic 8-bit bus with three address lines and four chip selects," said Zoran business manager David Anisman. "It has programmable timing on all the signals, so it can attach just about anything. The new chip also bridges the PCI bus to the guest bus, in effect adapting non-PCI controllers to the PCI pipe."

ADI chipsets combine DSP, motion controller

By Loring Wirbel

NORWOOD, Mass. -- Analog Devices Inc. has launched a line of motion-control chip sets, coupling an ADSP-21xx DSP processor with an associated ADMC20x motion-control coprocessor. The ADMC21x series provides full digital control for ac-induction and permanent-magnet synchronous motors. The DSP device implements the contr ol algorithms, while the motion-control processor handles signal interface, signal conditioning and conversion.

All 21xx members are 16-bit fixed-point processors, differing in amounts of on-chip memory and in serial and host interfaces. The processors integrate on-chip ALU, MAC, barrel shifter, dual data-address generators, program sequencer, programmable timer, data/program RAM and dual serial ports. The 21xx DSP device determines position, torque, velocity and flux loops, and it passes information on to the ADMC20x device. The latter processor performs motor-current data acquisition, vector transforms and pulsewidth-modulation (PWM) drive-signal processing. All members of the ADMC20x coprocessor family feature four-channel simultaneous-sampling 11-bit A/D converters (with added four-channel analog mux in the ADMC-201), voltage reference, vector-transformation algorithms and 12-bit PWM timers.

Ava tar plug-in diskette gains

MILPITAS, Calif. -- With a growing number of OEMs opting for an open approach to modular peripherals, Avatar Systems Corp. has won design-ins from four notebook makers and two desktop OEMs for

its 170-Mbyte Hardiskette.

The victories may indicate that although top-tier notebook makers, such as Compaq Computer and Toshiba, are offering notebooks with interchangeable batteries, CD-ROM and floppy drives based on proprietary modules, second-tier vendors are moving toward a more open module definition.

The 2.5-inch Avatar drive can plug into the same modular slot in a desktop or notebook as a 5.25-inch CD-ROM drive or a 3.5-inch floppy drive or extra battery. Because of this flexibility, companies such as Acer America, Chaplet, Dolch Computer Systems and Revered Technology are offering the Hardiskette as an option for their notebooks. Integraph Computer Systems and Olivetti Computer are offering the drive as an option on some of their desktop systems.

Mitsubishi plays ISDN card

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Like many U.S.-based subsidiaries of major Japanese chip companies, the Electronic Device Group of Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc. is taking a step into higher integration products as a strategic move closer to North American systems markets. In Mitsubishi's case, the lead product is an ISDN card--a Basic Rate Interface (BRI) board called NetViper.

Aimed at Internet access as its driving application, NetViper is billed as the first of a family of planned ISDN products. The group is also at work on ATM boards, reportedly co-developed with software company Trancell, and on 3-D graphics boards developed with partner Rendition.

"This business model of partnering with small software developers and design houses is a good one for us," said Steven Sandy, a strategic marketing manager for Mitsubishi. "They are looking for ac cess to deep-submicron silicon that they can tie their firmware and designs to, and we are looking for new markets and integrated-silicon solutions."

Accton rolls trio of Fast Ethernet hubs

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Accton Technology Corp. is rolling out Fast Ethernet shared hubs, switches and adapters, to make 100 Mbits/second standard in the workgroup. The suite of products ranges in price from $1,400 to $3,400, putting Fast Ethernet hub support within reach for many smaller corporations.

Yimin Doo, president of Accton, said that permitting easy integration of existing 10 Base T users into 100-Mbit networks was a key factor in the new Fast Switch family's design.

Fast SwitcHub-8 is an eight-port hub that combines five 10-Mbit RJ-45 ports, a self-sensing 10-Mbit port--configurable as RJ-45, BNC and AUI--and two 100-Mbit Fast Ethernet ports. All 10 Base T ports support both half- and full-duplex transmission. Packets can be carried between 10-Mbit ports using a 100-Mbit backbone, or transferred from a 10 Base T to an Ethernet network, connecting up to six workgroups with an aggregate bandwidth of 60 Mbits/s for the 10 Base T ports. The hub can be configured with one or two Fast Ethernet connections, for a total throughput of up to 260 Mbits/s.

Fast EtherHub-8 is the shared-hub equivalent of the switching device. It offers eight 100 Base TX Fast Ethernet hubs, and is designed for an all-100-Mbit environment. Two hubs can be cascaded to support 16 nodes. Node-to-node distances can extend to 230 meters, while cascading connections between hubs can extend to 30 meters.

Cable industry pushes interactive aside in favor of modems

By George Leopold and Junko Yoshida

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- The cable industry completed its flight from interactive TV last week by agreeing to forge interface specifications for cable modems needed to provide high-speed Internet access.

Industry leaders along with their key equipment suppliers announced the standards agreement at the Western Cable Show here last Thursday. The group said the industry research arm, CableLabs, in Louisville, Colo., will coordinate the specification effort that it hopes will yield preliminary results by April. The effort must also incorporate a parallel cable modem interoperability initiative also announced here by four manufacturers.

"Our focus has been shifted from interactive TV to PC interconnect," said Tele-Communications Inc. Chairman John Malone in announcing the effort. Instead of expensive terminals required for ITV set-tops, near-term deployment of cable modems is spawning an Internet access industry expected to emerge within the next year, he explained.

Along with all of the top North American cable firms, the effort includes cable modem makers General Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, Mo torola, Scientific-Atlanta and Zenith along with Intel and others.

The partners said they are within weeks of specifying several interfaces. The initial focus will be the link between cable modems and PCs using the 10 Base T protocol. Also, the link between cable networks and the next level of wider area networks is close to being identified, CableLabs said.

Immigration cutback passes first Senate hurdle

By Robert Bellinger

WASHINGTON -- In a hearing notable for a bipartisan, albeit off-key, duet by Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, a beefed-up immigration reform bill that trims back employment-based visas passed its first hurdle last week.

The bill, S. 1394, "The Immigration Reform Act of 1995" reduces employment-based visas from 140,000 to 90,000; stiffens requirements for employers that want to import workers, and discourages employers from displa cing American workers with temporary foreign people. It was amended and ported out by the Senate subcommittee on immigration on Wednesday. The bill, combined with another measure that seeks to stem illegal immigration, now goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Another immigration bill, HR 2202, is awaiting a vote in the House.

The Simpson bill, named for the Wyoming senator and subcommittee chairman, is receiving strong support from several engineering groups, and opposition from American employers and Asian-American organizations.

"[The] legislation will establish a reasonable balance between employers' need for access to high-tech professionals and the public need to safeguard job opportunities, wages and working conditions in the United States," said Joel B. Snyder, vice president of professional activities for IEEE-USA. Joining him in supporting the bill were the American Engineering Association, the Software Professionals Political Action Committee and the Network of Emerging Scientists.

"This is a misguided attempt to deal with a complicated and contentious issue," insisted Paul Huard, senior vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers. "Sen. Simpson's bill would slowly strangle access to highly skilled and trained foreign workers, leaving U.S. companies unable to operate at their full potential."

NexCom emerges with new designs for nonvolatile memory

By Brian Fuller

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- An obscure design house that has spent four years developing flash memory technology is entering the crowded nonvolatile memory market with a new architecture deployed in flash ICs, memory cards and memory modules.

NexCom Technology Inc., founded by two expatriates from Catalyst Semiconductor, has devised an architecture that borrows from NOR- and NAND-based flash architectures to yield a single transistor cell design. The approach brings the high-density aspects of traditional NOR/hot-channel electron architectures of EPROMs and EPROM-flash devices with low-voltage, high-speed erase and the write capabilities of E-squared-based flash architectures to what NexCom calls EE-NOR.

The closely held company has also kicked off a marketing effort that attempts to place its architecture in what it calls an emerging area for non-volatile storage: portable and mobile media storage. To this end, the company is leveraging an alliance with Oki Electric Co. of Tokyo to bring to market its new flash ICs, as well as application-specific modules for OEM use (building on the company's design-house legacy) and flash cards for ATA storage.

Chip makers excited about potential for network-based PCs

By Loring Wirbel and Ron Wilson

MILPITAS, Calif. -- Semiconductor vendors are jumping at the potential market for low-cost, net-based personal computers, seeing a perfect ap plication for their growing ability to integrate CPU cores with complex peripherals. Nevertheless, there is some question as to whether consumers would buy such a "dumb" computer.

Here's the scorecard:

1. LSI Logic described its ability to produce a MIPS-based single-chip Internet client.

2. Similar investigations are already under way at Sun Microsystems, which hopes to leverage its ownership of the Java language into a leadership position in the Internet client market.

3. VLSI Technology is working through its relationship with British set-top box designer Online Media--a subsidiary of Acorn Computers Ltd.--to move the ARM7500 integrated media processor into the market.

4. Mitsubishi Electronic Device Group appears to be closing in on the same objective, albeit from a different direction.

All the excitement is over the potential for an Internet terminal, selling for well under $500, that could not only support a net browser but could function as a full PC.

Using Sun's Java lan guage or some similar protocol, the net client could browse web sites. But it could also download portions of interactive applications, called aplets, and execute them locally. Thus, a web site could act as a mass storage device and could provide aplets for, typically, word processing, spreadsheets and 3-D graphics, giving the diskless net client the same capabilities as a full PC.

Japanese rev up for DVD, but laser diode shortage could slow plans

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- Japan's electronics industry is putting a spotlight on the potential of the digital video disk. Toshiba Corp., leader of the Super Density group, has predicted that by 1998 DVD-ROM drives will take about half of the 100-million-unit worldwide market for ROM drives. But the availability of the laser diode, a key component, is an area where several executives from laser manufacturers say they need to make great efforts in o rder to meet the anticipated demand.

"How many laser diodes can be supplied will be an important factor in deciding the rate of shipments during the first year of the DVD players and DVD-ROM drives," said Toshikazu Yosumi, director of the optical disk systems division of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.

In June, when Matsushita announced its low-noise red laser for use in DVD drives, engineering managers predicted that volume production would begin next spring. But Yosumi said last week, "We are in the pilot production stage, and I cannot tell you at present when we will begin volume production. If the production volume is limited, internal supply will have a higher priority than sales outside the Matsushita group."

Hiroshi Motohashi, storage analyst at Dataquest Japan, said he expects that the DVD unified format will become final this month at negotiations between the SD and Sony-Philips groups. It will take about six months to complete the chip set, but getting an adequate supply of lasers may take longer.

EDAC shelves Interoperability Lab effort

By Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- One of the more ambitious efforts of the Electronic Design Automation Companies (EDAC), a proposed "Interoperability Lab" that would have allowed vendors to test interfaces to EDA software, has been quietly shelved following a recent EDAC executive meeting. While small EDA vendors provided the initial impetus for the lab, larger vendors apparently decided the concept was unnecessary, unwieldy and potentially risky.

Under the original plan, the lab was to be located at the Center for Software Development here and would've been a repository for EDA software. Under controlled conditions, vendors could have tested interoperability with other vendors' software.

But after months of study, EDAC executives decided to suspend further activity on the interoperability lab while allowing the Emerging Companies Committee (ECC), if it wants, to come up with a new proposal. "We felt that all the major companies had interoperability programs going, so the interoperability lab was really extraneous or duplicative," said Alain Hanover, EDAC chairman and president and CEO of Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.).

Hanover maintained that third-party programs such as Cadence's Connections program, Mentor Graphics' Open Door, Synopsys's in-Sync and Viewlogic's Power Partners program fulfill all the functions the interoperability lab would have provided. Viewlogic, for example, makes its software available to 30 other companies for free, Hanover said.

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