Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times . Previous editions are available from the 1994 , 1995 , 1996 , 1997 , and 1998 News Archives.

01/26/96

Intel discloses list of Pentium Pro bugs

Minicard promoters release details of spec

Startup hopes its 3-inch drive has the right form

TI swats bug in 320C32 floating-point DSP

U.K. firm acquires Premier Industrial Corp for $2.8B
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

01/25/96

VDOnet launches video servers for the Internet

SGI positions itself as a visualization leader

Atmel, Xilinx boost capacity of FPGAs

PacBell builds hardware vendor team in bid for PCS lead

NCD founders launch Net-multimedia firm

U.S. prepares for multimedia growth in Japan

01/24/96

MIT gate array offers unprecedented versatility

FET-SEED planted in ATM video switch

Tool benchmarks neural OCR

Netsys adds performance tools

Tatung fires up its first Ultrasparc systems

HP's NetMetrix offers mix of monitoring tools

01/23/96

Via's logic chip set for P6 is first alternative to Intel's

Powerfault EDA tool automatically generates Iddq vectors

Epic tool optimizes custom IC designs for power

Virtual Machine Works offers emulation for the masses

01/22/96

Hughes plans Internet connections via satellite

PC makers scrambling to incorporate DVD-ROM and AC-3 sound

Code for Intel native signal processing library hits the streets

Has Taiwan's flat-panel industry missed the boat?

Two companies unveil Cycle-based Verilog simulators

Lotus offers 64-bit equivalent encryption concept to NSA

OEM Magazine to offer live video conference over Internet

Avant! files countersuit against Cadence

3DO, VLSI Tech forge licensing deal

Intel discloses list of Pentium Pro bugs

By Alexander Wolfe

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. has mailed to OEMs its first Pentium Pro bug list. The document, called the "Specification Update for 150-, 166-, 180- and 200-MHz Pentium Pro Processors," details 45 errata, including 13 for which no fix is planned.

Two of the glitches could raise eyebrow s among developers who are eager to exploit some of the newest architectural features in the Pentium Pro--2-Mbyte paging and performance-monitoring registers.

"It seems strange to me that Intel has decided to let [13] errata stay in the 'No Fix' category," said Terje Mathisen, a software expert based in Norway. "On the other hand, as long as they can't lead to wrong end-user results, these errata are much less serious than the Pentium floating-point-divide [FDIV] problem."

According to Nathan Schultz, technical marketing manager at Intel, "These are a collection of particularly minor problems. They won't affect customers or end users in any significant way."

Most of the just-disclosed Pentium Pro bugs appear minor in nature, and many have already been repaired. Indeed, 12 glitches present in the B0-stepping of the chip are corrected in newer C0- and sA0-stepping production versions of the microprocessor. Another 19 bugs that occur in all current parts will be fixed in future steppings, Intel said.

Minicard promoters release details of spec

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- The four promoters of the Miniature Card (Minicard), a thumbnail-sized flash-based card format proposed as a standard for portable consumer products, have released details of the draft spec and say they expect to finalize it at next month's Miniature Card Implementers Forum. While the cards aren't expected to be available in volume anytime soon, the standard's backers--Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Intel Corp. and Sharp Electronics Corp.--say they have already lined up support from a number of OEMs.

The four drafters of the Minicard spec together accounted for about 80 percent of the flash-memory ICs made last year (search our archive for story on Jan. 8, page 78 ). The cards, which will be about a quarter of the size of the PC card form factor, are expected to be used in such products as digital still ca meras, handheld computers and digital audio recorders.

Companies said to have lined up behind the format include Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., General Magic, Konica Corp., Micron Technology Inc., Microsoft Corp., Nokia Mobile Phones, Olympus Optical Co. and Philips Electronics.

The basic specification calls for a card measuring 38 mm x 33 mm x 3.5 mm. Those dimensions make the card more suitable for portable consumer products than the PCMCIA format adopted by notebook-PC vendors. When used with a PCMCIA adapter, the Minicard will be compatible with personal computers.

Startup hopes its 3-inch drive has the right form

By Terry Costlow

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Preparing to do what's never been done in the disk-drive industry, JTS Corp. plans to create a new form factor that's larger than existing drives. The company believes that it can prompt notebook computer makers to swi tch from 2.5-inch to 3-inch disk drives.

JTS is preparing to unveil a 640- Mbyte drive called the Nordic.

"We will start shipping to Compaq at the end of February," said Tom Mitchell, CEO at JTS. "Compaq has already qualified the drive. As we go through this half, our shipments will be fairly sizable. We also expect to ship to Zenith and Olivetti in May."

JTS has a formidable lineup backing its attempt to convince system designers that they can save money because a 3-inch drive's comparatively larger platters make it possible to use older, cheaper technology.

TI swats bug in 320C32 floating-point DSP

By Martin Gold

HOUSTON -- Texas Instruments Inc. has begun to correct a bug in the latest member of its TMS320C3X 32-bit, floating-point DSP family. The bug affects C32 users who wish to simultaneously run the two direct-memory-accessing channels of the device's DMA coprocessor b lock. The C32 has been in volume production since October.

"We recognized that there is a problem, and it is being fixed," said Daniel Chen, the DSP floating-point program manager at TI's semiconductor operation. Characterizing the bug as "minor," he said the correction is being made first in a software workaround and then in a silicon revision that will reach the market in May.

Specifically, the problem involves the back-to-back DMA transfers between two DMA channels to and from external memory. When two DMA channels access external memory in consecutive cycles, the second channel will transfer corrupted data. The problem always occurs when the DMA channels have rotating priority. When the channels have fixed priority, the problem occurs only when both channels have back-to-back transfers.

U.K. firm acquires Premier Industrial Corp for $2.8B

WETHERBY, England -- Farnell Electronics p lc, a major European distributor of electronic components, will take over U.S. distributor Premier Industrial Corp. (Cleveland) under a $2.8 billion deal.

The new company, Premier Farnell, will have combined annual sales of more than $1.6 billion and will be the world's third largest electronic-component distributor.

Its headquarters will be in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, England, with North American activities will be headquartered in Cleveland. The merger is expected to be completed in the second quarter.

Farnell had revenues for its fiscal year ending Jan. 29, 1995, of about $817 million and pretax profits of approximately $94 million. Premier, which had revenues of $818 million and pretax earnings of $172 million for its fiscal year ending May 31, 1995, is a distributor of electronic components and industrial maintenance and repair products.

VDOnet launches video servers for the I nternet

By Junko Yoshida

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Startup VDOnet Corp. has launched a line of server software products that will allow content providers to publish video over any TCP/IP-compliant network, delivering more than 100 simultaneous video streams.

Frame rates vary with the speed of the user's connection. Video at 10 to 15 frames/second is possible with a 28.8-kbit/s modem. Frame rates scale up to full-motion video as bandwidth increases.

The company also revealed that several big-name commercial users, including CBS News and Paramount Digital Entertainment, have adopted its VDOLive low-bit-rate compression algorithms for publishing video content over the Internet. CBS News Up-to-the Minute has committed to putting VDOLive content into full production, according to VDOnet.

VDOLive compression algorithms, based on wavelet and proprietary technologies for which patent applications have been filed, deliver video at 10 to 15 frames/s and high-quali ty audio in a 176 x 144 Quarter Common Interchange Format (QCIF) window on a PC when using a 28.8-kbit/s modem over regular phone lines. Files encoded once by VDOLive can be viewed by multiple clients as a unified object at scalable levels of audio and video quality, according to each client's modem speed and prevailing network conditions.

The files can be decoded completely in software on a PC equipped with a 486 or higher performance CPU.

SGI positions itself as a visualization leader

By Junko Yoshida

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) this week rolled out a spate of products--from desktop workstations and servers to supercomputers--that deliver new levels of visualization. Key to the performance improvement is the MIPS R10000 and R5000 microprocessors from SGI subsidiary MIPS Technologies Inc.

Most significantly, SGI claimed that its new Onyx InfiniteRealit y is "the world's fastest visualization supercomputer." It demonstrated such capabilities as 60-Hz real-time photo rendering, geospecific texturing that allows smooth morphing between two levels of textured map, illumination and full translucency at 60 frames/second.

"Those who develop virtual set technology for broadcasting, create entertainment effects for Hollywood movies, or build architectural walk-through and scientific visualization technology all have an insatiable appetite to process real- time graphics, imaging and video data," said SGI president Thomas Jermoluk.

SGI launched, among other products, the Onyx InfiniteReality visualization supercomputer; the Power Challenge 10000 supercomputer; the Indigo2 Impact 10000 workstation family; the Indy R5000 and Indy Studio desktop systems; the Challenge 10000 server family; and the Iris FailSafe high-availability solution.

Atmel, Xilinx bo ost capacity of FPGAs

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- FPGA vendors Atmel Corp. and Xilinx Inc. have announced high-density extensions to their product lines. In Atmel's case, the AT6010 will take the company's innovative Cache Logic architecture--purchased from Concurrent Logic--into the nominal 20,000-gate range. Xilinx has announced not only a process change but major architectural tweaks to move the flagship XC4000 family into the territory between 28,000 and 62,000 nominal gates. In addition, Xilinx outlined a road map that would, with the arrival of a planned 0.35-micron process, move the new family to a claimed 125,000 gates.

A member of Atmel's AT6000 family, the AT6010 is a uniform array of logic cells, each including both combinatorial logic and a D-type flip-flop. The cells rely primarily on next-neighbor connection in the array, but also have access to longer interconnect lines. With 6,400 cells and the speed of the next-neighbor interconnect, this structure has an advantage o ver most architectures in implementing data-path circuitry, according to Atmel.

The AT6010 boasts partial or full on-the-fly reprogrammability. Buffers permit portions of the chip to be reconfigured while the remainder is operating. In coprocessing applications, for instance, the chip serves as a reconfigurable accelerator, able to create custom data paths on demand or even to configure one end of a pipeline while data is moving through the other end.

Xilinx's announcement, in contrast, involves a new 0.5-micron process and significant architectural changes. The new XC4000EX represents the largest member of the XC4000 family.

PacBell builds hardware vendor team in bid for PCS lead

By Junko Yoshida

PLEASANTON, Calif. -- Angling for an early lead in the Personal Communications Services (PCS) market, Pacific Bell Mobile Services has formed an alliance to develop data-service appli cation-programming interfaces (API) for handhelds built to Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standards. Working with the Pacific Bell subsidiary on the APIs are Ericsson, Nokia, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Bell South.

Terrence Valeski, vice president of marketing and business development at Pacific Bell Mobile Services, said at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the partnership's "goal is to build platform-independent, open APIs so that software developers feel comfortable writing creative applications for data services on GSM networks."

The APIs will reside between GSM data-network applications and software running on various GSM handsets, said Glenn Gottlieb, product director at Pacific Bell Mobile Services.

By using the GSM short-messaging feature, which essentially integrates paging with alphanumeric two-way messaging, GSM-based PCS providers can offer such interactive data applications as off-track betting and broadcast-advertising messages.

NCD founders launch Net-multimedia firm

By Loring Wirbel

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- This week's official launch of Precept Software Inc., founded by the husband and wife team of Bill Carrico and Judy Estrin, might spark the observation that "third time's a charm"--except that the team's two previous efforts, Bridge Communications Inc. and Network Computing Devices Inc. (NCD), were charmed in their own right.

NCD still must redefine itself as an Internet-access company in an area where X terminals have proven less popular than anticipated, but Carrico and Estrin won significant stripes by selling Bridge, their first company, to 3Com Corp. Their Precept venture focuses on providing isochronous, multicast services over TCP/IP to the Windows environment. Given NCD's presence in the IP protocol world, it might seem as though Carrico and Estrin took a natural leap from NCD to Precept, but Estrin said things weren't that simple.

"When we left Bridge, it was clear we wanted to take a break and start another company. When we left NCD, our first priority was taking a real break. It wasn't at all clear where or when we'd be doing a startup," Estrin, chief executive of Precept, said. "But we realized in early 1995 that we weren't ready for retirement, and that was when we started looking at multimedia over IP."

Off the ground

U.S. prepares for multimedia growth in Japan

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Japan's appetite for semiconductors grew a healthy 33 percent in 1995, to $41.2 billion, according to Dataquest Japan, and U.S.-based IC companies are readying themselves for another round of growth here in multimedia systems. To that end, a series of information-sharing seminars will focus on multimedia technology, and a full-scale trade mission to Japan is being planned in Washington.

The Commer cial Service of the U.S. Embassy recently sponsored the Multimedia Semiconductor Exhibit and Seminar, at which 34 U.S.-based companies demonstrated technologies, said Julie Snyder, commercial officer at the embassy.

In the spring, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ) will cosponsor a two-day event designed to showcase U.S. semiconductor technologies before a more limited audience of Japanese system-design engineers. On April 23, U.S. engineers will present their ideas on how U.S. technologies can be applied to the DVD systems now in development in Japan. The following day, the set-top-box market will be addressed. About a dozen U.S. companies are scheduled to deliver full-scale presentations, and many others have expressed an interest in participating, said Roger Mathus, executive director of the Japan office of the SIA.

Later this year, the Department of Commerce is likely to organize a trade mission to Japan that will also focus on mu ltimedia technologies. For some small companies, these missions are door-opening opportunities that otherwise would be financially out of reach.

MIT gate array offers unprecedented versatility

By Gail Robinson

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Researchers at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are exploring the capacity benefits promised by dynamically programmable gate arrays (DPGA), a new type of field-programmable gate array invented here. Recent work, which has generated a "temporal" circuit-design method, will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's Fourth International Symposium on FPGAs the week after next in Monterey, Calif.

The ability to reconfigure a circuit completely on every clock cycle allows DPGA designers to stack spatial circuit layouts along a time axis, producing what the developers say is unprecedented utilization of silicon real estate.

DPGAs di ffer in design from FPGAs by providing on-chip memory for multiple array configurations. While traditional FPGAs offer unparalleled hardware-configuration flexibility, the comparatively long reload time has limited them to the role of specialized coprocessors for general-purpose CPUs.

"It can take 30 or 40 ms to reload FPGAs," observed MIT researcher Andre DeHon. "This is partly due to the fact that there is a lot of data that has to be loaded into the device. Some people have made a better interface, getting down into the hundreds-of-microseconds range, but it still takes a long time to reload the functionality of the device."

DeHon's answer is to provide some context memory on chip to change the personality of the array very quickly--essentially making it reconfigurable in one clock cycle. The concept leverages the low cost of chip memory and the fact that a parallel read of on-chip memory can be done across the entire array, basically allowing one very large instruction word (VLIW) to be read in a single cycle.

FET-SEED planted in ATM video switch

By Gail Robinson

NAPERVILLE, Ill. -- Researchers at AT&T Bell Laboratories, here, have successfully integrated FET-SEED (field-effect transistor self-electro-optic-effect device) technology into an optoelectronic switching network that transports ATM-encoded digital video. A 2 x 2 section of the array, running at 155 Mbits/second, was reported to operate error-free. In addition, the section can operate as a time-multiplexed switch running at 208 Mbits/s, reconfiguring every 2.76 ms.

The experimental results, part of an ongoing project funded by Arpa, is targeted as a distribution network for 155-Mbit/s video.

The system comprises three segments: a GaAs/Al GaAs switching chip, an optical system and an optomechanical system. Based on FET-SEED technology, the chip is built with multiple quantum-well modulators and detectors bonded to a VLSI circuit. "Basically, we have created an optical switch that is implemented on the surface of an integrated circuit," said Steve Hinterlong, technical manager of AT&T's photonics switching technologies group.

Tool benchmarks neural OCR

By R. Colin Johnson

PALERMO, Italy -- A tool to evaluate neural-network-based optical-character recognition (OCR) has emerged, from CRES (Centro per la Ricerca Elettronica in Sicily). The demo software was created by the HandCare Project at CRES, a research effort dedicated to creating VLSI solutions to the handwriting-recognition problem.

"We hope we have provided a tool to evaluate the capability of neural networks to deal with the handwritten-character-recognition task," said its programmer at CRES, Giuseppe Gioiello.

The neural-based optical-character recognizer achieved its measure of intelligence by learning the large data set provided by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gioiello said. A multilayered perceptron was trained on the whole NIST set of 44,951 training characters and 11,941 testing-stage characters. The learning method was a variation of back-propagation-of-errors called conjugate-gradient descent.

The free OCR recognizer implements novel techniques for the preprocessing and classification steps, resulting in fast classification combined with an easy route to VLSI, Gioiello explained.

Netsys adds performance tools

By Loring Wirbel

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Netsys Technologies Inc., which introduced some of the first software planning tools for router-based networks a year ago, is adding a suite of performance-analysis tools to its repertoire of network design and planning software. Netsys president Herb Madan said the debut of Performance Baseliner and Pe rformance Solver will allow his company to broaden its reach to network managers involved in daily performance monitoring of large LANs and WANs.

Since the tools are based on Cisco Systems Inc.'s Internetwork Operating System, they remain based on Cisco router models only. However, Madan said that new tools under development for LAN and ATM switching will use several vendors' switching models, allowing Netsys to broaden its scope outside the Cisco umbrella.

Tatung fires up its first Ultrasparc systems

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

MILPITAS, Calif. -- Longtime Sparc cloner Tatung Science & Technology Inc. has rolled out its first systems to use Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Ultrasparc chip. True to Tatung's careful and loyal course, the first systems mirror Sun's own initial Ultrasparc workstations, though Tatung has tried to leave its users some extra elbow room for configuration options.

"Initially we are just trying to develop a good general-purpose workstation," said Kam Chan, president of the workstation maker, which is a subsidiary of Taiwan's Tatung Co. "These initial systems are nearly the same as Sun's in many respects, but we are working on more-differentiated models that will begin to appear in the second quarter."

Tatung's Compstation U series comes in two models. The U140 uses the 143-MHz version of the Ultrasparc processor, which Tatung claims delivers performance of 215 SPECint92 and 303 SPECfp92. The model U170 uses the 167-MHz version of the chip, which Tatung said offers 252 SPECint92 and 351 SPECfp92.

HP's NetMetrix offers mix of monitoring tools

By Loring Wirbel

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. --Hewlett-Packard Co.'s NetMetrix operation will offer a mix of system-monitoring and performance-analysis tools for OpenView, allowing users to compare parame ters such as LAN and WAN network performance with information on server performance and CPU utilization. The tools will be demonstrated at this week's ComNet show in Washington, alongside offerings that put NetMetrix on World Wide Web sites for the first time.

Andy Belcher, operations manager for NetMetrix, pointed out that no other network-management environment can achieve the breadth of the new HP tool set, since the PerfView tools now offered under OpenView enter the realm of system-management rather than network-management statistics gathering. HP's aim in uniting these statistics, Belcher said, was to give a single view of any aspects that could affect the performance of client/server networks. Even the performance of server- and client-based application software can be monitored through the NetMetrix suite.

Via's logic chip set for P6 is first alternative to Intel's

By Ron Wilson

FREMONT, Calif. -- When Intel officially rolled out the P6 microprocessor, renamed the PentiumPro, part of the scenario looked disturbingly familiar to systems vendors. The only core logic available would be the Intel Orion, a seven-chip set laden with features for multiprocessing servers. That was, after all, Intel's intended first market for the new chip.

But that was not the end of the ominous news. The P6 system bus proved vastly more complex than the Pentium bus. It was essentially a split-transaction bus--rather than a conventional, burst-synchronous bus--requiring much more logic, buffering and raw speed than its Pentium antecedent. And it used a proprietary low-voltage-swing signaling scheme--GTL+--that required a license from Intel.

But the news has been getting brighter. First, rumors have circulated that Intel has decided to keep a lower profile in the motherboard market, and now, an alternative chip set for the P6 has appeared. Via Technologies has been quietly working with Intel, lice nsing the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) and GTL+ technologies, and preparing a P6 chip set.

The set is built on Via's successful Apollo Pentium chip set, which packs all the core logic for a Pentium motherboard into three chips. The Apollo P6 follows that form factor, with system controller, data buffer and PCI-to-ISA bridge chips. That will come as a relief to vendors that faced designing in the seven Orion chips.

Powerfault EDA tool automatically generates Iddq vectors

By Stan Runyon

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Like many things in life, dense chips have their trade-offs. Shrinking feature sizes bring unprecedented design opportunities but new kinds of faults as well. Increasingly, designers must deal with those faults, while maintaining quality, functionality and performance.

In the last few years, quiescent current in CMOS circuits, Iddq, has gained influence as a way of uncovering new classes of faults, including gate-oxide shorts, bridges, leaky junctions and multiple faults.

The idea behind Iddq is that digital CMOS circuits draw current only during state changes. At other times, current draw--the quiescent current--is less than, say, 100 ýA, a measurable number that increases with the appearance of certain manufacturing defects.

Though Iddq as a fault-finding methodology has its detractors, it appears to work well when applied properly. LSI Logic and other foundries are sold on it, making it a requirement for big ASICs.

So far, there have not been many tools to help designers with Iddq testing, so PowerFault-Iddq, from Systems Science, should be a welcome addition to the design-automation tool kit. It should not only improve quality levels but also speed up the design cycle.

As an Iddq test generator, PowerFault-Iddq performs two main functions: It generates a complete test-vector suite that can be applied on a suitable tester as soon as first sil icon is available and it provides a set of correct tester strobe points for that application. The only stipulation: The circuits must be simulated with Verilog (Cadence's Verilog-XL or Chronologic's VCS).

Epic tool optimizes custom IC designs for power

By Richard Goering

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Bringing a new capability to the commercial EDA market, Epic Design Technology has announced AMPS (Automatic Minimization of Power through Sizing), a tool that optimizes custom IC designs for power, timing and area. AMPS works by resizing transistors to meet user-defined goals.

While internal tools are available for performance optimization, AMPS is the first commercial tool that can handle the combination of power, timing and area, said Simon Napper, Epic vice president of marketing. However, AMPS will apparently be competing with Tilos, a power and performance optimizer that AT&T Design Aut omation has licensed to Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.). That company has not announced its plans for Tilos.

IC designers have long known that performance can be optimized if transistor sizes are increased. Unfortunately, this has the side effect of increasing both power consumption and area. Likewise, if transistor sizes are reduced to minimize power consumption or area, performance might suffer.

Virtual Machine Works offers emulation for the masses

By Richard Goering

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Virtual Machine Works (VMW), a startup that grew out of a research group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hopes to bring logic emulation to a new group of ASIC designers by promising lower costs and improved ease of use. VMW's VirtuaLogic emulator works to attain those goals through advanced compilation technology and simplified FPGA-based hardware.

VMW becomes the lates t entry into a fast-growing marketplace dominated by Quickturn Design Systems (Mountain View, Calif.). Aptix and Zycad are also active in the market, and Synopsys and Mentor Graphics plan to enter this year, via respective acquisitions of small emulation companies.

While emulation is in demand because of the insatiable need for faster verification technology, cost has prevented many ASIC designers from taking advantage of it. "With the ease of use of our system, and the low cost of acquisition, we believe we will see significantly lower barriers to entry," said MIT professor Anant Agrawal, chairman and chief technical officer of VMW.

Hughes plans Internet connections via satellite

By Junko Yoshida

BOSTON -- On Tuesday, Hughes Network Systems, together with Hewlett-Packard and Starlight Networks, will detail its DirecPC satellite service strategies.

Designed to broadcast data via sa tellite to a PC, DirecPC can offer not only data but also Web-based MPEG video images, other mixed media content, and applications directly onto customers' desktop PCs.

HP's server division, which produces both Unix and Net server-based systems, will team up with Hughes Network Systems and Starlight Networks, a company which provides server software that handles streaming video, to develop the underlying technology. The team plans to initially tap the enterprise computing market, which is looking for ways to take advantage of DirecPC services for Internet and intranet services.

PC makers scrambling to incorporate DVD-ROM and AC-3 sound

By Junko Yoshida

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- When DVD-ROM drives hit the multimedia PC market this year, the personal computer industry may be forced to rethink its entire approach to PC design, striving to meet the standards of Hollywood studios and the strin gent hi-fi audio/video quality expectations of the consumer electronics industry.

Almost everyone in the PC industry agrees that DVD-ROM is the most important storage device for multimedia PCs since the invention of CD-ROM. Yet every PC vendor's New Year's nightmare was how to implement a DVD-ROM drive and its decoding capabilities--MPEG-2 video and AC-3 audio--at a reasonable cost for a home PC for Christmas 1996.

"Everyone in the PC industry was caught by surprise when Dolby AC-3 was chosen as part of the final DVD specifications last December," said David Anisman, director of marketing for MPEG products at Zoran Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif.

"It's a madhouse now at Dolby," agreed Roger Dressler, technical director of Dolby Laboratories Inc. in San Francisco. "Practically everyone in the PC world has contacted us, on one level or another, asking us what it means for them to implement AC-3 audio on a PC."

For example, IBM, hoping to keep its multimedia PC leadership, claims that if not the ma jority of its products, at least the high-end models of Aptiva brand multimedia PCs for Christmas will integrate both a DVD-ROM drive and DVD decoding functionality inside. The company may have to add a dedicated AC-3 IC to the current MWave-based audio subsystem for its PC.

Toshiba Corp. plans to launch on its own at least 1 million units of DVD-ROM drive bundled with DVD decoding board in the first year.

And Sony Corp., which will introduce a DVD movie player for late 1996, will not market its own brand DVD-ROM drives until 1997. And it has yet to decide whether to incorporate a DVD-ROM drive in its first PC model, scheduled for the U.S. market this year.

Code for Intel native signal processing library hits the streets

By Alexander Wolfe

HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Intel Corp. has finally taken the wraps off its hobbled native signal processing (NSP) initiative, unveiling a comprehensive software library containing more than 200 functions and algorithms and 350 pages of on-line documentation.

Meanwhile, competitors Spectron Microsystems and Microsoft Corp. are preparing their own respective DSP-aware software technologies. Spectron--the DSP-software house that was intimately involved in NSP until Intel changed its strategy last summer (search our archive for Aug. 7, 1995, page 1)--is poised to release its IA-Spox software development kit for Windows 95, which is targeted at Pentium applications. Microsoft, for its part, is moving full-speed ahead with low-latency audio (search our archive for Jan. 8, page 1)--a technology that's expected to fill a vacuum left by a now-abandoned component of Intel's NSP project.

The trio of efforts--all intended for use with the Windows 95 operating system and the Pentium microprocessor--comes as engineers are scrambling to find tools to enable them to construct applications that exploit advanced sound and graphics cards. Moreover, this newfound range of choices is leaving many developers confused about how best to cover their software bets. A big concern: Most tools are adept at handling simple audio and graphics, but it's harder to find products wide-ranging enough to take on heavy-duty embedded applications involving modems and other PC peripherals.

In releasing its NSP software libraries, Intel has taken a quiet approach, making little public mention of the fact that it's begun shipping the code. An alpha version is available only on a software developer's CD-ROM put out by Intel Architecture Laboratories, and the libraries aren't posted on the Intel Web site where virtually all of the CD's contents are mirrored.

Despite the low-key release, Intel said that it is actively encouraging developers to use the libraries.

Has Taiwan's flat-panel industry missed the boat?

By Mark Carroll

HSIN CHU, Taiwan -- Taiwan's flat-panel-dis play industry has arrived at the party, but most of the delicacies may already have been gobbled up by its competitors in Japan and South Korea.

Only one Taiwan-based company now produces active-matrix color panels, with at least one other planning on doing so by yearend. Several other firms plan to begin producing TFT screens next year, but the recent sharp declines in 10.4-inch TFT prices, to about $400, makes commercial production look increasingly unlikely.

As Japanese companies brought on more efficient LCD factories using larger substrates and newer generations of equipment, yields shot above 90 percent, as they also increased overall capacity. Now, the market is oversupplied. In 1995, demand for TFT notebooks was about 2.3 million units, and for 1996 Prime View International Co.--which is to begin producing 4-, 5- and 6-inch TFT screens in the third quarter--expects that demand will increase to about 4.5 million TFT equipped notebooks. But capacity will be for 7 million screens, said Gary Pan, a Prime View marketing engineer.

The final blow to LCD pricing came when Samsung Electronics of Korea began shipping 10.4-inch TFT screens in the Taiwan market last summer, linking flat panel and DRAM sales, Pan said.

Two companies unveil Cycle-based Verilog simulators

By Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The fast-emerging marketplace for commercial cycle-based simulation will receive a boost this week, as Frontline Design Automation and Pendulum Design (Waltham, Mass.) independently unveil cycle-based Verilog simulators. Both companies claim to make cycle simulation much more practical by automatically partitioning designs between cycle-based and event-driven portions.

Though event-driven simulators have almost totally dominated the commercial market, cycle-based simulators have received intense interest within the past two years. Because they only evaluate events on clock-cycle boundaries, cycle-based simulators can provide blazingly fast functional validation for synchronous logic, although they're potentially less accurate than their event-driven cousins.

However, most of the early cycle simulators, require users to change their design methodology and rewrite models and test benches. Frontline's CycleDrive and Pendulum's vls claim to remove these obstacles, therefore allowing designers to use cycle simulation without changing their designs.

Lotus offers 64-bit equivalent encryption concept to NSA

By Loring Wirbel

SAN FRANCISCO -- IBM subsidiary Lotus Development Corp. offered an olive branch of sorts to the National Security Agency last week at the opening of the RSA Data Security Conference. The Iris Associates subsidiary of Lotus that developed Lotus Notes will be able to ship an international version of Notes with the equivalent of 64-bit encryption, us ing a new concept Lotus calls Differential Workfactor Cryptography.

In the past, the NSA has blocked the State Department from issuing broad licenses for encryption packages with encryption stronger than 40 bits. The Business Software Alliance argues that this has jeopardized sales of U.S. software overseas. NSA has unsuccessfully tried to get U.S. manufacturers to use either the Clipper chip or its software equivalent, based on a classified encryption algorithm, or use an unclassified "key escrow" algorithm in which decryption keys must be held by third parties. OEMs have rejected all key escrow concepts, and have demanded international export rights for public-key cryptography methods promoted by vendors such as RSA.

Lotus' compromise with the NSA concedes the agency's right to conduct signals intelligence on foreign targets. The encryption in Notes Release 4 is based on a 64-bit random number. But for the exported version of Release 4, the NSA generates a public-key algorithm, and encrypts 24 bits of the key using the public RSA key. The result of this operation, the Workfactor Reduction Field, is bound to the encrypted data. Foreign hackers will find the encrypted messages as difficult to decrypt as a message with a 64-bit RSA key, but the NSA will find it as easy to crack as a message with a 40-bit key.

OEM Magazine to offer live video conference over Internet

OEM Magazine, the sister publication of EE Times, will present a live video conference over the Internet on Thursday, Jan. 25, at 4 p.m. EST. The event will use the enabling technology CU-SeeMe, and features an interview with its creator, Tim Dorcey of the Cornell University Technology Development Team. OEM Magazine is also planning an exclusive interview with Dorcey for inclusion in its March issue.

Readers can participate in this interactive event by accessing the on-line address 132.236.91.204 and using the conference cod e 1996, in the CU-SeeMe user menu.

To obtain a free copy of CU-SeeMe on the Internet's World Wide Web, go to http://www.wpine.com or ftp://cu-seeme.cornell.edu/pub/cu-seeme . The software is available for all platforms, but system requirements include at least a 28.8 modem, and accessibility over an Internet firewall. To actually transmit video and sound, you will also need an applicable video camera and microphone, though they are not required to view only.

The event will be captured as an Apple Quicktime movie by Cornell, and made available on OEM's Web site shortly thereafter. OEM's site is located at http://techweb.cmp.com/oem/current .

Avant! files countersuit against Cadence

By Craig Matsumoto

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The cloak-and-dagger atmosphere surrounding Cadenc e Design Systems Inc.'s suit against Avant! Corp. thickened last week as Avant! countersued, claiming the EDA giant has embarked on "a carefully orchestrated, illicit scheme to drive Avant! out of business."

The suit, filed Jan. 16 in U.S. District Court here, said Cadence couldn't compete with Avant!'s place-and-route software and instead resorted to accusing Avant! (Sunnyvale, Calif.) of stealing code. The complaint alleges that Cadence and its president, Joseph Costello, violated federal antitrust laws, committed securities fraud and engaged in "racketeering and false advertising."

Beyond that, Avant! charges, Cadence employees profited by shorting Avant! stock.

"We feel the countersuit is an obvious and predictable part of Avant!'s campaign to divert attention from the truth--and the overwhelming amount of evidence against it that is part of both the DA's case as well as Cadence's lawsuit," a Cadence spokesman said.

Industry analyst and attorney Ron Collett, president of Collett Internati onal (Santa Clara, Calif.), said that the countersuit was expected. "Very rarely does one company file a suit and not have a countersuit," he said. "That's irrespective of whether there is any merit to the first suit or the countersuit." However, the bitter rivalry between the two companies is "bad for the end user and bad for the EDA industry," Collett said.

If Cadence's charges are true, he said, its only "serious" competitor in IC place and route could be derailed; if Cadence's charges are false, Collett said, then "Cadence will have a lot of explaining to do."

3DO, VLSI Tech forge licensing deal

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- VLSI Technology will join a crowded digital-signal-to-NTSC/PAL conversion-IC market by licensing the digital-video-encoding technology from 3DO Co.

The digital-video-encoding technology is "a piece of puzzle necessary to build emerging products like inexpensive Web brows ers or multimedia computers for TVs," said Umesh Padval, VLSI vice president and general manager for computing. The particular technology licensed to VLSI last week is 3DO's "fifth-generation technology, equipped with higher-level video and graphics capability and designed with portability," 3DO said. VLSI plans to design a series of products, said Padval, but not standalone digital-encoder ICs.

3DO has licensed the company's basic digital-video-encoding technology to several other silicon vendors in recent years, including GEC Plessey, Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) and C-Cube Microsystems. The names of other licensees have not been released.

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