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

02/16/96

Commerce Department scrambles to save R&D program

Consortia merge to help fill R&D gaps

Taiwan enters silicon wafer business

TI speeds up 16-bit DSP

Japan sets 12-inch wafer, 16-Mbit DRAM research projects
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

02/15/96

3-D imager measures complex objects with lightning speed

From ISSCC: Gbit SDRAMs boast high bandwidth

Vixel defines fabric for optical switching

ISSI fired up for fast flash

Is e-cash coming? Bank on it

Contract manufacturers Sherwood, Precis merge

02/14/96

Engineers Week: employment up, but layoffs cloud picture

HLD debuts floor planning tool that works from RTL

Motorola upgrades routers

Philips' chip called to aid speakerphone

Chronology tool generates HDL test benches

02/13/96

Intel unveils its '96 core-logic strategy

From Display Works: FEDs on the fast track

Strong growth in EDA software

Exponential gets PowerPC license; Siemens considers one

Oki, Matsushita target multimedia

02/12/96

Intel on mobile expedition to assault portables market

Dial D for deregulation, danger: fears surround Telecom Act

DRAM-price turmoil has Asians nervous

From ISSCC: Watch for the single-chip multimedia machine

Europe expects IC market growth to slow

Entertainment and computer groups feud over copyright law

Commerce Department scrambles to save R&D program

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Commerce Department officials trying to rescue the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) from the budget ax cited a packaging effort and advanced manufacturing technology as examples of how the embattled program is yielding results.

Currently, ATP is operating with 75 percent of its 1995 funding, or $256 million. But the prorated funding will expire March 15, unless Congress passes another continuing resolution to fund the government. Republicans have vowed to kill ATP.

In an attempt to salvage the program, Commerce released a survey last week of 125 companies that found that 70 percent would not have pursued technology now under development without an ATP award. The survey also showed that ATP had shortened by two years the R&D cycle for so me technologies.

Along with the survey results, officials touted a handful of ATP efforts they say are developing technology with commercial applications. A three-year, $2.4 million packaging consortium headed by MicroFab Technologies Inc. (Plano, Texas) focuses on "solder jet" technology used to write solder patterns on circuit boards with the high-temperature equivalent of an ink-jet printer.

Consortia merge to help fill R&D gaps

WASHINGTON -- Declining federal and industry support for research and development is highlighting concerns about future product development that depends heavily on research dollars spent today. An electronics industry consortia formed in the 1980s to stretch R&D investments has joined forces with counterparts from other sectors to address the growing U.S. R&D shortfall.

The recently formed Council of Consortia is an outgrowth of a group founded by the heads of research consortia in 1990. Members of the new super consortium include Bellcore, Sematech, Semiconductor Research Corp., Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp., and the Software Productivity Consortium. The aerospace, utility and manufacturing industries are also represented. Together, the group's 13 members include nearly 1,500 high-tech companies and organizations.

Their goal is to fill the funding gap by promoting greater research cooperation. Both government and industry are slashing budgets across the board, including funding for research and development, consortia members indicated when they announced the effort. Cooperative research and development through consortia, they said, is the answer to the challenge of declining R&D budgets and increasing demand for new technologies.

Taiwan enters silicon wafer business

By Mark Carroll

HSIN CHU, Taiwan -- Wi th a nod toward both burgeoning national demand and the worldwide silicon shortage, Taiwan has entered the silicon-wafer business.

Taisil Electronic Materials Corp. has produced a 200-mm silicon crystal, emerging as the country's first virgin silicon-wafer facility. The company will begin pilot wafer production in April. Taisil president Dennis Wingrove said initial pilot-production volume will be about 2,000 8-inch wafers/month.

Taisil is a joint venture among Monsanto Electronic Materials Corp. (MEMC) of the United States; China Steel Corp. of Taiwan; the Taiwanese state-run Chiao Tung Bank; and the China Development Corp., Taiwan's largest investment bank. Valued at $147 million, the venture began construction of the wafer-production facility in January 1995 in the Hsin Chu Science Based Industrial Park (SBIP).

According to one industry participant, if the IC fabs hit their projections for this year, there will most assuredly be an acute shortage of silicon wafers this year.

TI speeds up 16-bit DSP

By Ashok Bindra

HOUSTON -- Texas Instruments Inc. will offer 100-Mips performance from a 16-bit fixed-point programmable DSP when it samples its 320LC548 late this year. Based on TI's 0.25-micron quad metal CMOS process, the 3.3-V device combines the company's 320LC54X DSP core with a large amount of static RAM.

The processing power of the LC548 has been combined with 32 kwords of on-chip static RAM to allow a single DSP to handle multiple signals concurrently, and enable reconfigurable systems to run a wide variety of software algorithms. At 100 Mips, it becomes possible for systems to perform a variety of processing functions on a single chip that today require multiple DSPs, said Ron Wages, TI's marketing manager for DSP products. This new class of very-high-Mips DSPs will be supported with optimized C compilers and integrated design environments.

A single 100-Mips part w ill be able to handle three full-duplex channels for a GSM basestation, Wages said. Another possibility is the integration of multiple telephony and multimedia tasks, such as V.34 modem, fax-modem, DSVD, full-duplex speakerphone, FM synthesis, wavetable synthesis and 3-D sound.

Japan sets 12-inch wafer, 16-Mbit DRAM research projects

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- A pair of well-funded research projects launched here this week will fuel technology innovation into the next century. The first, a Sematech-like consortium, aims at 12-inch IC production equipment and advanced processes; the second is a MITI-sponsored national project that will investigate the basic technologies needed for 16-Gbit memories and beyond.

While pinning 12-inch wafers at the top of its agenda, Advanced Semiconductor Technologies Inc. (ASTI)--a joint venture among 10 leading Japanese IC manufacturers--will embark on o ther research projects, such as sub-quarter-micron process technology over its 10-year charter, said Hajime Sasaki, senior executive vice president of NEC who is the president of the group.

The second consortium launched last week, the 21-member Association of Super Electronics Technologies (ASET), will undertake a five-year project planned by the Ministry of and International Trade and Industry. MITI has secured a $100-million first-year budget for the "super-advanced electronics technology development" project, which will focus on next-century technologies, such as electron-beam, X-ray and argon-fluoride-excimer lithography.

3-D imager measures complex objects with lightning speed

By Gail Robinson

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Intelligent Automation Systems Inc. has developed a real-time 3-D imaging system that uses a novel surface-area-measurement approach for quick measuring of fast-mov ing objects. The system's creators claim it can capture a complete scene of 50,000 coordinates in 1/10,000th of a second with measurement accuracy of better than 1/1,000th of the field view.

Called the Miniaturized Four Dimensional Imager (4DI), the compact device uses stereo vision and structured light to capture data from stationary or moving objects in a wide range of sizes, from a few feet to fractions of an inch. The system, which has has no moving parts, was designed for industrial-inspection applications that require highly accurate inspection of small parts at very high speeds.

While conventional surface-area and volumetric measurement systems can be accurate, they frequently require human involvement and can be slow and inappropriate for on-line industrial inspections. Using structured laser-light illumination, video-image capture and high-speed computation, engineers at Intelligent Automation Systems based the miniaturized system on technology developed several years ago by company founder S teven Gordon while he was a graduate student at MIT.

From ISSCC: Gbit SDRAMs boast high bandwidth

By David Lammers and Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- The 1-Gbit synchronous DRAMs described at the recent International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) are not the first at that density--Hitachi Ltd. and NEC Corp. grabbed that ring a year ago--but they do reflect some advances. Samsung Electronics and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. touted very high data-transfer rates for their 1-Gbit SDRAMs and Mitsubishi described use of synchrotron-generated X-ray lithography to build a reasonably small die.

Mitsubishi built its prototype in a 0.14-micron, three-layer-metal CMOS process that its researchers claimed yields the highest data-transfer rate (1.6 Gbytes/second) and smallest die size (581.8 mm2) for the 1-Gbit density to date. Shinji Komori, design manager at Mitsubishi's Advanced Technology R &D Center, said one goal was to minimize the length of the connecting wires from the peripheral circuits to each of the 32-Mbit memory blocks.

The 32-bank design described by Samsung (Seoul, South Korea) provides a 1-Gbyte/s data-transfer rate. Jong Woo Park, a senior research manager at Samsung's Kiheung development center, said the 652-mm2 device was built with 0.16-micron minimum features, with four layers of metal, using a Micrascan krypton fluoride excimer-laser lithographic tool. By the turn of the century, when Gbit devices move from the research center into manufacturing, a 0.15-micron process will likely be used.

Vixel defines fabric for optical switching

By Loring Wirbel

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- Vixel Corp.'s introduction of a parallel optical link based on vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) is the first step in its effort to define a scalable parallel and seria l optical switching fabric based on low-cost optical interconnects by year's end. Vixel has an ambitious program to get its optical architecture used in both telecommunication and data-communication applications.

But while the small company has reached an important milestone in being one of the first to move into production with VCSEL architectures, Vixel will face some tough competition in architectural concepts for buses and switches.

This month's debut of the P-VixeLink, for parallel use in telephone-company switching centers and cross-connects, will be followed by a midyear release of S-VixeLink, which will target serial applications in high-speed LANs, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks and Fiber Channel in-building networks.

ISSI fired up for fast flash

By Craig Matsumoto

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- After eight years of slugging it out in the cache-memory business, Integr ated Silicon Solutions Inc. (ISSI) is trying to expand into other markets, starting with a line of flash-memory parts aimed at providing fast access times.

Because the flash market is already occupied by bigger companies--Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in particular--the emphasis on speed is critical. Rather than wage a hopeless head-to-head battle with those two, ISSI is trying to create its own niche with fast flash parts, which were unveiled late last month.

"We think there's a market for lower-density, high-speed flash," said Robert Cushman, ISSI's vice president of marketing. Markets would include modems, cellular phones and disk drives.

ISSI has no concrete plans to match Intel's 16-Mbit flash density, nor does it claim to battle AMD or Atmel Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) in the 3-V-and-below arena.

Instead, ISSI's flash design concentrates on quick access times, as low as 45 ns. In contrast, AMD's 2.7-V flash has access times of 100 ns or more.

Is e-cash coming? Bank on it

By Larry Lange

NEW YORK -- When GE Information Services said at the recent Electronic Commerce conference here that it would field the "most advanced system on the market" for secure Internet transactions, the Internauts in attendance wondered just how the company planned to pull it off. Would GE offer a new method for conducting small transactions over the World Wide Web? Had it come up with a way to implement "e-cash" in a meaningful manner across the Internet? Or would it take an entirely new approach to Internet security?

The answer is none of the above--at least not yet. The initial GE InterBusiness suite addresses GE's immediate concern of expanding its business-to-business electronic-data-interchange (EDI) network, by adding Internet access, and puts off the rest of the equation until later this year.

Anne Biehl, manager of market development for GE Information Services, insi sts that the company is "serious about the Internet." Yet, the set of hardware and software products introduced here earlier this month is too little, too late, according to a number of experts on Internet commerce.

Contract manufacturers Sherwood, Precis merge

By Terry Costlow

LONGMONT, Colo. -- Contract manufacturers Sherwood Enterprises Inc. and Precis Metals Inc. have merged to form what they claim is the largest electromechanical assembler in the country. The new company will be called Electronic Manufacturing Systems (EMS).

Sherwood (Longmont), which specializes in cable assemblies, acquired Precis (Westbrook, Maine), a maker of enclosures. Both focus on computers, telecom, networking and medical industries.

"I think we'll be the largest contract manufacturer of our kind in the U.S.," said Mark Stevenson, chief executive officer at EMS. "We'll have $125 million in revenu e and 550,000 square feet of manufacturing space. People can rely on us for three things: the design of enclosures, design of cables going into them and the complete mechanical assembly and system integration."

Compared with board-level contract manufacturers, "The big difference is that we do low-volume, high-mix products that have a lot of engineering changes," Stevenson said. "We build the box, and all the engineering changes to increase speed and capacity occur inside the box. "

Engineers Week: employment up, but layoffs cloud picture

By Robert Bellinger

National Engineers Week opens next week with the usual flurry of honoraria, symposia, special events and classroom visits.

Engineers in 1996 have a lot to celebrate: strong hiring in many disciplines; a robust electronics industry; a 2.2 percent unemployment rate (vs. 5.8 percent for the rest of the population); and risin g wages in the West.

Still, some blips pop up on the screen: downsizing, for instance, spurted to nearly 100,000 in January. And there's some unsettling news over an eight-year decline in engineering degrees, especially BSEEs. In 1987, 30,000 BSEEs were granted; in 1995, 19,000. Companies are reaching into the college ranks deeper and earlier than ever in an effort to "grow their own." Waiting for the seniors to graduate is risking missing the better half of the class.

The supply squeeze led engineering executives to publicly speculate on whether they can fill the 160 to 200 new fabs they estimate will be needed by 2000.

HLD debuts floor planning tool that works from RTL

By Richard Goering

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Moving ASIC floor planning to a higher level, High Level Design (HLD) Systems next week will announce Top-Down DP, a tool that works directly from register-transfer l evel (RTL) source code. The new offering promises to bring size, timing and power estimates to designers before they go through logic synthesis.

While most floor-planning tools work at the gate level on synthesized net-lists, vendors and users are recognizing the need for RTL floor planning. Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.) and Compass Design Automation (San Jose) both plan to offer RTL floor planning this year, but representatives of both companies questioned whether direct code analysis with no synthesis can produce sufficiently accurate estimates.

Top-Down DP, however, directly reads RTL Verilog net-lists and requires no synthesis. It can be used as a timing- or power-analysis tool, and can also use its automatic and interactive floor-planning capabilities to partition designs before synthesis.

"The whole timing structure of the circuit is set at the register-transfer level," said George Janic, president of HLD Systems. "What we can do at that level is introduce timing so people can lo ok at interconnect delays, and then specify budgets for synthesis."

Motorola upgrades routers

MANSFIELD, Mass. -- Motorola Inc.'s Information Systems Group has upgraded routers offered by its Massachusetts and Huntsville, Ala., groups. The Vanguard line of remote-office WAN systems has been upgraded with the 310 series for Ethernet/ISDN connectivity. Meanwhile, the Huntsville transmission products group has offered add-in cards for the 925 router featuring remote-access technology licensed last fall from Shiva Corp.

At the Massachusetts network systems division, the Vanguard 311, 311Plus, 312 and 312Plus combine an Ethernet port with an NT-1 basic-rate ISDN interface. By bundling data compression and point-to-point protocol (PPP)/multilink-PPP, file transfer rates of up to 512 kbits/second can be supported. Rod Wilson, director of marketing for access products, said that a key featur e upgrade was support for X.25 and frame-relay protocols, important for emerging frame-relay switched virtual circuits.

"This is not a FRAD [frame relay access device], there are no serial ports for frame relay but this Vanguard frames data for service over ISDN," Wilson said. "It makes a nice complement to our FRAD line."

Philips' chip called to aid speakerphone

By Ron Wilson

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- The speakerphone is quickly becoming one of the truly reviled appliances of modern business. The signal from the other end comes out through your speaker, goes back into your microphone, and gets back to the other end of the line just in time to set up a wonderful oscillation.

Philips Semiconductors, with its TEA1095 hands-free telephone chip, is attempting to help. Basically, the chip is a half-duplex channel switch but with a number of important features.

The part has a linea r potentiometer for logarithmic volume control, on-chip dial-tone detection and separate mute controls for transmit and receive channels.

But its real strength is in voice-activated switching. To make sure that the chip switches in response to voice, rather than noise, the 1095 has separate speech-envelope and noise-envelope detectors on each channel. The chip compares the energy in each envelope to estimate who is talking and who is listening.

It then decides how to set the gain on the transmit and receive channels. But rather than just turning one on and the other off, the chip maintains the sum of the transmit and receive gains as a constant. This can then be set just below the threshold of oscillation, keeping those poles a bit off the axis.

Chronology tool generates HDL test benches

REDMOND, Wash. -- Chronology Corp. next week will introduce a tool that generates "self-check ing" VHDL and Verilog test benches from timing diagrams. Called QuickBench, the product incorporates Timing Designer, an interactive timing-diagram tool from Chronology.

Producing HDL test benches, which contain the code necessary to simulate a design, typically consumes 35 percent of the entire front-end ASIC design cycle, according to a recent survey by Chronology.

Today, users either write test benches by hand or buy models. QuickBench provides another alternative that claims both efficiency and accuracy. "We'll save you time and help you catch errors you're not catching," said Mike McClure, vice president for marketing at Chronology.

To use Quickbench, users enter a timing diagram, either by hand or by importing a diagram from Chronology's Synchrony program, which provides free interactive data books through Chronology's Web site at http://www.chronology.com.

Users input parameters for tests and indicate which components and cycles are needed. QuickBench then automatically generates a VHDL or Verilog test bench. It's a complete bus-functional model, McClure said, and the only thing users need to add is the test sequence.

Intel unveils its '96 core-logic strategy

By Ron Wilson

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. on Monday unveiled the core of its 1996 desktop-motherboard strategy. Armed with a pair of core-logic chip sets that alter the way the PCI bus is implemented, and a driving focus on the Universal Serial Bus (USB), the company plans to erect a strong technology barrier between itself and other Pentium-class motherboard vendors.

Intel has split its Pentium chip-set family into two branches: one for the multimedia and small-office/home-office market, and one for conventional business computing.

"Our OEM customers told us they wanted better cost/performance tuning of the motherboard to the intended application," explained Intel product manager Calvin Smith. "Man y of these customers already have separated their home and business computers into two product lines. Now, we have separated our core-logic family to address those diverging needs."

The two chip sets are the 430HX for business PCs and the 430VX for home and multimedia systems. Both are built around the 430FX Triton core and share significant enhancements, but the two differ in memory strategy and level of integration.

"In the corporate world, you can't challenge the existing infrastructure," Smith said. Hence, the HX core works with either fast page mode or extended-data-out (EDO) DRAMs. Intel has cut the chip count of the 430FX by integrating the data-path controllers into the system controller chip.

From Display Works: FEDs on the fast track

By David Lieberman

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Two companies drove prototype vehicles into the Display Works conference here last week, showing th at field-emission displays are on the fast track to commercialization. FED Corp. (Hopewell Junction, N.Y.) publicly demonstrated a monochrome, 2.54-inch-diagonal FED, while Silicon Video Corp. (SVC; San Jose) privately showed a multicolor 2.3-inch-diagonal FED, both exhibiting high brightness on a stingy power diet.

The one company with FEDs already on the market, PixTech (Mountain View, Calif.), has demonstrated the technology's advantages over today's dominant flat-panel display technology: the LCD. The first PixTech offering--a 5-inch-diagonal, 1/4-VGA-resolution, monochrome display that became available in December--cranks out 240 cd/meter2 of brightness for about 3.5 W, using a 50 percent contrast-enhancement filter, without the viewing-angle limitation of LCDs.

The FED and SVC prototypes showed even more impressive results. While PixTech and partners Texas Instruments, Motorola, Futaba and Raytheon use relatively high-voltage drivers combined with low-anode voltages on their phosphor screens, bo th FED and SVC are taking the low-voltage-driver, high-anode-voltage tack. That allows them to use modified CRT phosphors, which are very bright and highly efficient.

Strong growth in EDA software

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The EDA-software business grew a hefty 17.2 percent in 1995, according to preliminary figures just released by Dataquest Inc. The research organization estimated this market, excluding platforms, service and maintenance, at $1.58 billion last year, compared with $1.35 billion in 1994.

Dataquest reported that "total distribution revenue" for the EDA market, which includes services and platforms, was up 15.4 percent in 1995, from $3.95 billion to $4.56 billion.

The leading EDA-software vendor in Dataquest's report is Cadence, at $280.9 million. While its annual revenue was $548 million, much of it was attributable to services and maintenance, said Gary Smith, an analyst. S imilarly, Mentor Graphics software revenue was estimated at $183 million, compared with $384 million in total revenue.

Synopsys, with lower overall revenue than Mentor, was second in the listing with $193.5 million in software revenue. Viewlogic was fourth with $76.8 million, but showed an alarming 12-percent drop in software revenue.

Sun Microsystems dominated total distribution EDA revenues at just over $1.1 billion. Hewlett-Packard came in second at $613.5 million.

Dataquest's report also showed healthy growth in the IC-CAD market, at 34.8 percent, and much slower growth in pc-board CAD, at 4.3 percent. At $284 million, the IC-CAD market sailed past the pc-board CAD market in 1995, estimated at $266.7 million. Cadence overwhelmingly led in IC CAD, with Zuken-Redac at the top of the deeply fragmented pc-board CAD arena.

Exponential gets PowerPC license; Siemens considers one

SA N JOSE, Calif. -- Exponential Technology Inc., which is building a BiCMOS high-end PowerPC microprocessor for Apple Computer and others, yesterday announced it has received a PowerPC license from IBM and a process license from Motorola. The IBM license allows Exponential to design and build microprocessors using the PowerPC architecture, while the Motorola license covers process technology patents.

Exponential has already taped out the first version of its new CPU.

The agreements, for which no detailed terms were disclosed, clears the way for Exponential to complete its design and enter production of the processor in early 1997. The company claims the chip will be about three times faster than the fastest Pentium CPUs.

Meanwhile, such is the enthusiasm for commodity chips at Siemens Corp.'s semiconductor division, spurred by success in DRAMs, that the company is considering re-entering the mainstream microprocessor market with the PowerPC.

Looking at forecasts that DRAM and MPUs will take incr easing market share toward the decade's end, Ulrich Schumacher, head of the standard ICs group in the semiconductor division, said, "We would like to see other people successful with PowerPC before we attempt it."

Oki, Matsushita target multimedia

HACKENSACK, N.J. -- Oki America Inc. and Matsushita are both creating divisions to develop multimedia chips.

Oki America Inc. recently founded Silicon Dynamics (Sunnyvale, Calif.), an R&D arm dedicated to silicon and system development for multimedia and telecommunications markets.

Silicon Dynamics plans to work on networking, ATM/Fast Ethernet/wireless LANs, MPEG-2, graphics controllers, DSPs and RISC, a company spokesman said.

Meanwhile, Matsushita Electronics Corp. (Osaka, Japan) last week announced the establishment of Panasonic Semiconductor Development Co. for development of multimedia ICs.

The mission of the Cupertino, Ca lif., company is to accelerate development of multimedia ICs for PCs and communications equipment, a Matsushita spokesman said. "That will include a variety of video-signal-processing devices, including MPEG chips and 3-D graphics ICs."

Intel on mobile expedition to assault portables market

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Intel Corp.'s secretive PC motherboard and systems group is quietly launching a foray into the portable-systems market with a set of modular board designs that could be the first step in an attempt to redefine the notebook computer. Given signs of a major shift in thinking here at Intel's OEM Products and Services Division (OPSD), suppliers and potential customers say it's an open question as to how far and how fast Intel will extend its considerable clout into the mobile arena.

"Can Intel suck the margins out of notebooks the same way they have sucked them ou t of desktops? It will probably be a year before the impact of this becomes clear," said one source familiar with the company's plans.

Late this year, the source said, Intel plans volume delivery of CPU and I/O modules that would plug together with a standard interface to form the basis of a notebook motherboard. The modules would include a low-voltage Mobile Pentium in a tape-array bonding (TAB) package, an Intel Mobile Triton chip set, a Super I/O chip and an Intel peripheral chip that includes a Universal Serial Bus controller.

OPSD's road map, according to those who have seen it, is more focused on delivering boards for next-generation Intel processors and chip sets than on the Mobile Pentium and Mobile Triton chips available today. The plan leaves open the possibility of a future module that could provide graphics, audio, MPEG or other multimedia functions.

Dial D for deregulation, danger: f ears surround Telecom Act

By George Leopold and Loring Wirbel

The free-for-all unleashed by telecommunications deregulation promises to launch a spectrum of new technologies and services.

Questions remained about how the overhaul will be implemented by an already-strained Federal Communications Commission (FCC), how fierce competition will affect technological innovation and when consumers are likely to see any benefits.

The FCC must begin about 80 rule-making proceedings required by Congress to make telecom deregulation a reality. A rule-making timetable is expected out today.

One outcome of the Act, analysts said, could be the gradual erosion of network reliability and declining standardization as service providers are forced to deploy proprietary technologies to differentiate their offerings. All this could make the touted end-to-end network difficult to achieve.

Concerns also have centered on the resiliency and reliability of wide-area-network switching systems run by multi ple carriers using multiple vendors' switches and digital cross-connects. In theory, common use of Signaling System 7 software and Sonet ring topologies should ease interoperability, but some incompatibility already prevalent between regional and interexchange carriers could be magnified with multiple competitors at each level in the network.

One area that should flourish is technology innovation, as phone and cable companies leverage their software skills with new manufacturing rights to develop network products.

DRAM-price turmoil has Asians nervous

By David Lammers

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A case of nerves has gripped the Asian electronics industry, as DRAM prices totter toward a threatened collapse. Already battered by sharp price erosion in SRAMs, companies are pulling out of the 4-Mbit DRAM business, revising 1996 production schedules for higher-density DRAMs and diversifying into other memory markets.

As for 256-kbit SRAMs, prices plummeted from the $14 range in mid-1995 to $1.50 by January. Tags now have dropped to cost. The story hasn't been much better in the 1-Mbit market, where prices on cache SRAMs optimized for Intel Corp.'s Pentium have slid from $25 to $30 a few months ago to $7 or $8 now. One Taiwanese source quoted $6.50.

"There is an oversupply of 4-Mbit and 16-Mbit DRAMs around the world now. Demand is not weak, but the production rate is increasing at 30 percent to 35 percent, while demand increases by 20 percent to 25 percent," said Yuichi Haneta, senior vice president in charge of semiconductor production at NEC Corp.

From ISSCC: Watch for the single-chip multimedia machine

By Martin Gold

SAN FRANCISCO -- Last week's International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) put the IC-design community on notice: Tomorrow belongs to the multimedia mac hine, and most of that platform will fit on one chip. From the keynote address through many of the sessions, attendees heard the call to merge today's general-purpose and digital signal processors into a multiprocessor--with hundreds of millions of transistors, a 1-GHz internal frequency, and performance of 1 trillion operations per second--that will constitute what keynote speaker Hajime Sasaki called a "one-chip multimedia complex."

"In the deep-submicron era, the multimedia-complex-on-a-chip will be a primary motivation for the progress of solid-state circuit technology," said Sasaki, the NEC Corp. executive vice president in charge of the company's semiconductor and electronics businesses, setting the tone for much of the conference. "Various kinds of functions--including an advanced human interface--will be consolidated on a single chip, facilitating multimedia use worldwide.

"Architecture optimization, power-dissipation reduction and design-methodology improvement are among the major design chal lenges. We are now at the beginning of the multimedia era."

Europe expects IC market growth to slow

By Peter Clarke

DRESDEN, Germany -- Delegates at a semiconductor equipment and materials forum last week received mixed signals on chip-market growth and heard warnings of possible delays in the move to 12-inch wafers.

But several presenters from Europe's chip industry told the Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) that they did not believe the semiconductor market could continue to grow at the rate of the last few years. The symposium was organized by the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI).

Jurgen Knorr, vice president of Siemens AG (Munich, Germany) and head of the company's semiconductor division, was the first to sound the slowdown alarm. Pointing to predictions of $350 billion to $370 billion for the semiconductor market in 2000 he said, "The big three [chip makers, Philips, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics and Siemens] don't believe in such a large upswing; $200 billion to $250 billion is more realistic. We need to avoid overheated market expectations followed by a collapse."

Increasing demand may be offset by financial and personnel shortages over the next few years. "We need an adjustment in growth rate," Dauvin said. Nevertheless, he predicted a healthy 22-percent growth in 1996 and 10- to 15-percent growth in 1997.

Entertainment and computer groups feud over copyright law

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Last week's hearing on proposed digital copyright legislation pitted the movie and music industries against consumer-electronics, computer and Internet groups. While the former favor quick adoption, the latter seek major modifications to the bill to limit liability for copyright infringement and scale back anticopying provisions they view as too broad.

The NII Copyright Protection Act of 1995, based largely on a Clinton administration white paper, attempts to bring existing copyright laws into the digital arena. The proposal has drawn heavy fire from high-tech manufacturers and on-line providers that maintain it will stifle technological innovation and strangle the Internet. Backers, however, argue that the information highway will be a bust without compelling content, and copyright law must be extended before Hollywood and new-media developers will offer their wares over the Net.

Content providers want to put the bill on the fast track after criminal penalties for copyright infringement are added. They cautioned lawmakers not to amend the bill further, since it is unclear where digital technology is headed. "What we want to avoid at all cost is delay," said Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America and chief proponent of criminal penalties for on-line providers who infringe copyrights.

High-tech companies wa nt lawmakers to raise the standard for liability to "actual knowledge" or "direct participation" in copyright infringement before on-line services could be found directly liable, said Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., chief proponent of pro-Internet amendments.

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