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

03/08/96

Microsoft launches counterassault against Netscape

From Intermedia: Intel lifts curtain on its MMX technology

DSP-based telecom eased

Newport Wafer-Fab Ltd. to build 0.5ý chip plant in Wales

Olivetti finds U.S. investors in Acorn
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

03/07/96

Scots to try Internet TV; all of UK to follow

New HDTV format proposed

SMC buys core-logic firm

Facing a loss, ISD scrambles to solve reliability problem

Scaling China's other wall: the barriers to trade

03/06/96

Study shows different reflections in glass ceiling

Sandia's synthetic carbon charges lithium batteries

Software genetically sorts neural nets

FET rids scale-induced effects

03/05/96

ADI said licensing DSP core to AMD

Psycho-acoustics comes to the sound chip

Compaq to debut computers with 3.5-inch 120MB floppies

New plating technique portends smaller hybrid circuits

Optical I/O enables reconfigurable backplanes

E DA industry begins to adopt code coverage techniques

Synopsys tool offers "behavioral retiming"

03/04/96

MicroUnity, Terayon focus on broadband link for Internet access

Cyrix going into PC business to push its processor

Apple and Microsoft face off on 3-D APIs

Judge favors Viewlogic over former Chronologic employee group

Microsoft starts drive to turn PC telecom platform

HDL wars subside, but trouble persists

Tele-TV to buy new set-top boxes

Microsoft launches counterassault against Netscape

By Alexander Wolfe

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft Corp. will launch its Internet counterassault next week, unleashing a software strategy aimed at blunting the momentum of archrival Netscape Communications Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.).

Microsoft's plan revolves around a treasure trove of object-linking-and-embedding (OLE) technologies tuned for Web-aware applications. These include new programming constructs to handle MPEG-encoded video, JPEG images, Quicktime animations and Real-Audio sound files.

The OLE features will be supported in Microsoft's new "Sweeper" Internet client architecture, which will also be unve iled next week. Sweeper implements Microsoft's new Internet server application programming interface--known as ISAPI--that's essentially the Windows spec for writing Internet server applications.

"OLE is the foundation for all of Microsoft's ongoing work," said Dwight Davis, editor of Windows Watcher (Redmond, Wash.), a newsletter that covers Microsoft. "Sweeper is designed to keep developers in the OLE fold and not bolt for Netscape's greener pastures."

From Intermedia: Intel lifts curtain on its MMX technology

By Ron Wilson

SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel Corp. officially described the technology behind its widely discussed MMX instruction group at Intermedia here this week. By greatly expanding the CPU's ability to deal with vectorizable arithmetic inner loops, the new instructions speed software image processing, graphics and video operations by as much as a factor of two. They will be impl emented in the P55C, in a new version of the P6 and in all later major-market Intel microprocessors.

MMX comprises 57 new op codes for the Intel X86 architecture. These instructions execute on the integer pipelines of the P55C CPU, but work with the floating-point register file rather than the integer register file. They include add and subtract, multiply and multiply-accumulate, comparison, format-conversion, logical, shift, data-movement and control operations. Most of the arithmetic op codes can use either normal arithmetic or signed or unsigned saturating arithmetic.

The power of the multimedia instruction-set extension comes from a free sort of single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) approach. Instead of an instruction taking an 80-bit floating-point register as a single number, MMX assumes the first 64 bits contain a group of separate numbers, all packed together. An add, for example, can treat the register as eight 8-bit quantities, four 16-bit numbers or two 32-bit numbers. When the instruct ion adds, it calculates each quantity separately, suppressing the carries between them.

DSP-based telecom eased

By Martin Gold

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- HotHaus Technologies Inc. has developed what it claims is a comprehensive software suite that dramatically cuts the time required to build DSP-based system and subsystem solutions for computer telephony, PBX and feature phone markets. Consisting of a DSP server, software drivers and core signal-processing services, the suite is slated for debut at the DSPx show, which opens here on Monday.

The HausWare software solution enables telecommunications product designers to implement complex, multiline DSP systems in a fraction of the time required to integrate separate DSP software components. HausWare leverages the common high-level architecture of telecommunications products to eliminate the overhead typically required in traditional DSP opera ting systems, said Ross Mitchell, president of HotHaus (Delta, British Columbia).

The software suite will be marketed to telecom OEMs and suppliers of DSP-based subsystems using Texas Instruments' TMS320C5X and C54X digital-signal-processing ICs.

Newport Wafer-Fab Ltd. to build 0.5ý chip plant in Wales

By Peter Clarke

Newport, Wales -- To expand its presence as a foundry, Newport Wafer-Fab Ltd. (NWL) will build an 8-inch, 0.5-micron fab here. While the plant, when fully operational, could produce a relatively modest 10,000 wafers a month, it is projected to cost only about $350 million to build and equip.

But to get to its 0.5-micron goal, with a view to moving later to 0.35-micron, NWL may need to license the process technology or strike a partnership with another semiconductor manufacturer. Steve Byars, chief executive of Newport Wafer Fab, ruled out allowing a customer or par tner to take a stake in the company.

Construction is due to begin in three weeks and take about 18 months. Equipment installation is set for the fourth quarter of 1997 and processing of commercial silicon should start around the end of the first quarter of 1998. NWL will receive financial help from local and national governments, aid estimated to be worth about $90 million.

Olivetti finds U.S. investors in Acorn

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Despite a poor showing last year by Acorn Group, its parent, Olivetti Telemedia, has found investors on both sides of the Atlantic.

For calendar year 1995, Acorn sales fell 24 percent, tripling losses to about $18.9 million on sales of about $58.9 million. The loss compared with one of about $6.4 million for the previous year.

While Acorn's mainly U.K.-based computer sales are in trouble, the company recently reorganized its divisions and is working wi th Oracle, a U.S. database vendor, to develop reference designs for low-cost network computers. Acorn also owns 43 percent of profitable Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., which designs and licenses ARM processors.

An unidentified U.S. group, sources said, persuaded Olivetti to sell the group's members a 10.5-percent stake in Acorn, reducing Olivetti ownership from 58.9 percent to a minority stake. The U.S. firm Chancellor Capital Management organized the purchase.

Olivetti Telemedia plans to sell another 2.4 percent, and Acorn founder Herman Hauser intends to sell about a third of his 5.3-percent stake in the company to U.K. institutional investors. Olivetti Telemedia then will own 45.9 percent and Herman Hauser 3.6 percent of Acorn.

A spokesman for Acorn confirmed that shares had been to sold to Chancellor Capital Management. He said he expected no changes in the board at Acorn as a result of Olivetti Telemedia's moving to a minority holding.

Scots to try Internet TV; all of UK to follow

By Peter Clarke

GLASGOW, Scotland -- ViewCall Europe plc next month will start a 1,000-home field trial here of its Internet TV service and a multifunction box that it calls a consumer-oriented networking computer. ViewCall plans to leverage the trial to launch full commercial service across the United Kingdom in September.

Whether the box is best defined as a network computer or an interactive-TV set-top is hard to say; ViewCall Europe will ask the field-trial families to connect the unit to a television for display and to a telephone-jack socket to access special services and the Internet. The box, powered by an ARM7500 32-bit RISC microprocessor and the Acorn RiscOS operating system, has no hard-disk drive, but it does have 4 Mbytes of memory, a 14.4-kbit/ second modem, a keyboard and a remote control. It will work with Java applets--small programs for such tasks as Web-page animation.

The box will come in under the $500 mark that almost overnight has become the universally recognized price point for the network computer (NC). But that may be irrelevant to customers, since in the first phase of commercial deployment, ViewCall will provide the box free to subscribers of its Internet service.

New HDTV format proposed

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- The dispute between computer makers and regulators over a digital-TV standard flared up with the emergence of a new layered format that proponents say would deliver better pictures and eliminate the conversion of signals required by the HDTV Grand Alliance system.

The single-layered format was developed by Gary Demos, president of DemoGrafx (Santa Monica Calif.). Demos said his layered-compression approach would allow digital TVs to receive many formats from a common signal. The Grand Alliance standard backed by a Feder al Communications Commission (FCC) advisory panel includes high- and standard-definition formats that require conversion of the signal when the transmitted format doesn't match individual sets.

"That conversion could be costly, and it would degrade picture quality," said Demos, adding that his system would provide a "gateway" for the convergence of TV sets and multimedia PCs.

The new approach would provide cost savings over the Grand Alliance system by allowing designers to use a less-expensive decoder that is "essentially equivalent to an NTSC decoder," Demos said.

SMC buys core-logic firm

By Ron Wilson

HAUPPAUGE, N.Y. -- In one stroke, Standard Microsystems Corp. (SMC), notable in the personal-computer industry primarily for its Super I/O chips, acquired a core-logic business, the most innovative integrated L2 cache architecture in the industry, a joint development with embed ded DRAM vendor MoSys Inc., and a relationship with emerging Taiwanese CMOS giant TSMC.

All of this came about when SMC acquired the assets of Efar Microsystems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). SMC vice president of marketing Douglas Finke said "when we looked into the future of that business, we saw a problem. All of the chips on the motherboard except the CPU and main memory are collapsing into one big, integrated chip."

But that integrated chip, Finke said, will have a lot more than I/O functions in it. It will contain the system core logic, graphics and L2 cache as well.

"A small chip- set shop in Silicon Valley came to us," Finke said. "They were building a reference board using their new single-chip 486 core logic and needed Super I/O chips. The talk eventually turned to mutual interests, and last week we announced the acquisition of the assets of Efar Microsystems."

Facing a loss, ISD sc rambles to solve reliability problem

By Brian Fuller

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Information Storage Devices Inc. (ISD) scrambled last week to find the source of a process problem at its foundry, Samsung, that could ignite financial losses for at least a quarter.

Reliability problems on early production runs on a 0.8-micron CMOS E2PROM process in Korea could delay ISD's conversion from the older 1.2-micron process at Samsung for up to six months. That, coupled with having to write down an unspecified amount for excess inventory in other, less-than-optimal wafers from Samsung, could yield a financial loss for half the company's fiscal year, chief executive officer Dave Angel said.

ISD expects possible operating losses for the first quarter, ending March 31, and potentially the second quarter, ending June 30.

"We have a tremendous amount of momentum, and this is a damn shame," said Angel, whose company, best known for its voice-recording chips, has enjoyed a stair-stepping rise in revenues s ince its first products hit the market in 1992.

Scaling China's other wall: the barriers to trade

By Mark Carroll

SHENZHEN, China -- China's Great Wall kept invaders out for generations, but a more formidable barrier has been erected along the coastline separating this reclusive country from the rest of the industrialized world.

Trade tariffs, currency differences, graft and corruption are conspiring to slow what many have predicted would be the swift rise of the world's greatest market for virtually everything from telephones and TVs to PCs and personal organizers.

Unlike the Great Wall, however, this barrier is being pulled down stone by stone, often in very crafty ways.

The hope of a gold strike in China has led investors from as close as Taiwan and as far away as Europe to find ways to sell into or subcontract services to the People's Republic.

In doing so, they're finding that the minuses of doing business in China often threaten to outweigh the benefits.

The main problem is that despite actions to the contrary, China is still very much a managed economy. For example, China's average import tariff is about 36 percent. For IT products the tariffs vary; mainboards are about 7 percent, monitors 30 percent. In November, President Jiang Zemin announced that overall tariffs would be reduced by 30 percent to help China obtain entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Even with a 30 percent reduction, however, China's average tariff would still be 25 percent, far higher than most countries' 15 percent. High tariffs have two immediate consequences. They make legally imported goods much more expensive and thus less attractive and, second, they spawn a vibrant gray market.

Study shows different reflections in glass ceiling

By Robert Bellinger

Women and CEOs have distinctly different points of view on what's holding women back at the executive ranks. In a survey, more than half of the women executives blamed "male stereotyping and preconceptions of women" as the top factor holding them back. By contrast, only a quarter of their (primarily) male bosses think women encounter stereotyping.

The survey was conducted by Catalyst (New York City), a non-profit organization that works with businesses and professional firms on women's issues.

A common complaint among the 461 women executives responding is that they're "excluded from informal networks." Just under half (49 percent) believe they're left out of the grapevine loop vs. 15 percent of the CEOs. Not being in the informal networks can be damaging, past studies have shown.

One study of women and minorities found they often failed to hear about internal promotions and changes in policy until after the positions had been filled or the policies implemented. Competing successfully for top exe cutive positions requires an early knowledge of changes ahead.

The CEOs see the chief obstacle to women as being "lack of general management or line experience." But women don't see it that way at all. Fewer than half of them (about 47 percent) think they don't have the requisite backgrounds vs. 82 percent of the CEOs who view women that way.

Sandia's synthetic carbon charges lithium batteries

By Gail Robinson

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a process to modify a popular textile material, found in sock and carpet fibers, into a synthetic carbon to make rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The process, developed under a three-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (Crada), has been licensed to Bethlehem Advanced Materials Corp. and is expected to find application in areas ranging from electric vehicles and satellite com munications to cellular phones and laptop computers.

While lithium-ion battery technology is not new--several Japanese companies have had products on the market for years--the Sandia technology is distinguished by its use of a low-cost carbon for the negative electrode in the battery. "This is significantly cheaper than what is typically used and provides much higher power," said Robert Crocker, a senior member of Sandia's technical staff in California.

Lithium-ion rechargeables offer several advantages over nickel-cadmium and lead-acid batteries, including higher energy per unit weight and unit volume.

"We expect lithium-ion batteries to replace most rechargeable technologies because they offer four times the energy density of lead-acid batteries and two to three times the energy density of nickel-cadmium batteries," said Crocker.

Software genetically sorts neural nets

By R . Colin Johnson

REDMOND, Wash. -- Software that uses Darwinian principles to search through hundreds of neural networks for the best candidate for a particular application has just come to market.

Based on genetic algorithms, the technology, called NeuroGenesis, comes from BioComp, a contract consulting company here. It suits a number of application areas, such as modeling, classification, diagnostics or time-series predictions, says the company, which is also designing a high-end server that will allow users to easily manage hundreds of NeuroGenesis networks.

"As a consulting company, we just got tired of having to adjust all the parameters on these commercial neural-network packages," said Carl Cook, president of BioComp. "For a 20-input neural network the number of possible combinations of neurons, connections, layers and transfer functions is more than 100 billion. So we decided to get a genetic algorithm to try out different combinations for us."

The heart of the resulting software, the NeuroGenetic Optimizer (NGO), tries out hundreds of alternative neural architectures and configurations using the principles of natural selection. NGO creates and evaluates a population of possible networks and goes through them, generation after generation, until it finds an optimal one.

FET rids scale-induced effects

By Chappell Brown

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- A novel "heterodimensional" field-effect transistor design has been scaled below 0.5 micron, revealing superior performance over more conventional architectures. The approach, devised by device researchers at the University of Virginia here, offers extremely low-power operation while reducing noise and other problems associated with small device dimensions.

By fabricating a pair of side gates that pinch a two-dimensional electron region, the "two-dimensional metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor," or 2D-MESFET, opera tes with fewer than 500 electrons in its channel at peak current. That puts it close to single-electron transistor devices. By comparison, conventional FETs at 0.5 micron switch more than 10,000 electrons. In addition, the transistor operates easily at room temperature, making it practical for real-world use.

While the design requires special epitaxial systems grown with molecular-beam-epitaxy (MBE) equipment, further scaling could eventually allow the same effect to occur in silicon devices, researchers said.

ADI said licensing DSP core to AMD

By Martin Gold

NORWOOD, Mass. -- Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) has reportedly licensed its ADSP-21xx digital-signal-processing core to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Acer Laboratories, and is working with Mentor Graphics Corp. and Aspec Technology Inc. in a major push into the DSP-based ASIC business. The unbundling of ADI's DSP technology was viewed by analysts as a strategic response to competitors' moves.

ADI declined to comment. However, a press invitation referring to a "new direction" and ADI's "newest technology partners" confirmed that an announcement is planned prior to the DSPx conference next Monday in San Jose, Calif.

DSP-core licensing agreements by Texas Instruments, Motorola and a number of companies that have obtained rights to use DSP Group's signal-processing cores have put pressure on ADI to license its 16-bit 21xx core and to develop application-specific and customer-specific solutions.

According to sources familiar with ADI's plans, AMD's Communications Products Group (Austin, Texas) and Acer Labs, based in Taiwan, will use ADI's DSP architecture in their upcoming application-specific standard products. AMD will embed the core in communications-related ICs but is not expected to compete in general-purpose DSPs. Acer will use the core in future versions of its PC telephony and telephone-answering devices. The Ac er Group, parent of Acer Labs, has been aggressively pursuing markets for MPEG-1 chips, graphics accelerators and core-logic chip sets. Acer's PC operation could become a large user of chips based on ADI's DSP architecture.

Psycho-acoustics comes to the sound chip

By Ron Wilson

AUSTIN, Texas -- Research in psycho-acoustics began with the noble purpose of finding out how the human ear works as a transducer. Such knowledge would have obvious value in helping people whose ears weren't performing to specs. But, of late, the science has been subverted into an altogether different pursuit: figuring out how to deceive the innocent ear.

Two examples of the using clever tricks for back-end processing of an existing mono or stereo source to create the illusion of a wide stereo field. have found their way into personal-computer audio chips. One, from Cirrus Logic Inc. subsidiary Crystal Semicon ductor, uses SRS Labs Inc.'s Sound Retrieval System (SRS). The other, from ICT Inc., employs a proprietary approach.

Crystal's product is an integration of the SRS digital-signal-processing technique into Crystal's existing CS4236 single-chip sound system. The latter chip comprises a sound processor, delta-sigma converters, a plug-and-play ISA-bus interface, joystick controller, enhanced IDE CD-ROM interface, MIDI UART, and an interface for an external wavetable chip.

ICT has taken a more modest approach to the problem, though an A/B comparison might be necessary to tell whether the results are different from Crystal's. In the PC1802--the first of a projected family of PC audio-processing products--ICT offers a stereo-spreading processor as a standalone chip.

Compaq to debut computers with 3.5-inch 120MB floppies

By Terry Costlow

HOUSTON -- Compaq Computer Corp. next Monday will unveil systems that offer a 120-Mbyte 3.5-inch floppy instead of a 1.44-Mbyte drive. Compaq and its development partners, 3M Co. and MKE Industries Ltd., hope the drive will become the next standard for removable media.

The LS-120 drive uses laser servo encoding techniques to increase capacity, yet it maintains the magnetic recording used with existing floppy drives, making the system compatible with drives and diskettes that are used universally for removable storage.

That compatibility attracted Compaq to the technology. Re-writable optical drives provide higher capacity, but they can't read the billions of diskettes used by personal computers and workstations.

The computer maker has high hopes for the drives, which are being unveiled on two of the many Deskpro models being shown today. Those machines are aimed at business applications.

"We're pretty confident that this has the makings of being the next standard for diskettes," said Paul Gottsegen, product marketing director at Compaq's Co mputer Desktop Division. "We feel over time that there's a good chance all 1.44 Mbyte drives will be replaced by this drive."

New plating technique portends smaller hybrid circuits

By Terry Costlow

DETROIT -- Zecal Inc. has come up with a technique for plating copper directly to ceramic, making it easier to create high-power hybrid circuits. The Z-Strate technology is being targeted at automotive applications, making it possible to put an alternator on a two-square-inch substrate.

Zecal, a division of Varity Corp., plans to leverage the auto industry's demand to put more capabilities in increasingly smaller areas. A module demonstrated at the Society of Automotive Engineers conference here late last month shrinks the size of an alternator by a factor of four.

"We have an alternator that supplies a total of 68 A at two different voltage levels and dissipates 1,200 W of power," sa id Jack Walnes, president of Zecal (Churchville, N.Y.). "Most of the package is the heat sink."

Optical I/O enables reconfigurable backplanes

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.-- Multiprocessor architectures are growing larger as they incorporate a higher number of processing nodes, or PNs. While such architectures are being designed with more and more PNs per card, their electrical interconnection via the backplane is becoming a limitation. To overcome the wiring congestion at the backplane of such multiprocessing systems, designers are adopting optoelectronic devices as inputs and/or outputs to eliminate electrical wires.

Optical I/Os are being combined with electronics processing circuitry on-chip to generate what is called a smart pixel. These smart pixels can be integrated in two-dimensional array to obtain a smart pixel array (SPA). Using SPAs on printed-circuit boards, researchers at McGill Un iversity in Montreal have interconnected pc boards to alleviate backplane bottlenecks imposed by electrical wiring. McGill University's work was presented at the recent International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).

The optoconnector developed by McGill University scientists is based on CMOS-SEED (self-electro-optic-effect device) smart pixels. It is constructed in a hyperplane architecture in which each SPA on a given pc board is point-to-point connected with a corresponding SPA on both physically adjacent pc boards. Since these smart pixels can dynamically change the connectivity between pc boards, a reconfigurable backplane can be created, according to the paper.

EDA industry begins to adopt code coverage techniques

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- A light bulb went off at the recent International Verilog Conference here. Both Veda Design Automation (Santa Clara) and Simulation Technol ogies (Minneapolis) announced "code coverage," an idea that's been used in the software-development world for many years. These Verilog-based tools determine how thoroughly simulation test vectors have exercised a design.

Both Veda's VeriCover and Simulation Technologies' VeriCov run alongside Verilog simulators, and keep track of the execution of statements in the Verilog code. "The idea here is to qualify your test vectors before you do synthesis," said Rich Davenport, president of Simulation Technologies. "Prior to this tool, there was no way to answer the question of whether or not you've simulated enough."

David Allenbaugh, director of North American sales for the U.K.-based Veda, noted, "You can simulate for 14 years, but if you don't simulate all the logical paths in the part, you'll never know if it's correct." His company has had prior experience in this area; late last year, Veda announced a VHDL code-coverage tool.

Synopsys tool offers "behavioral retiming"

By Richard Goering

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Providing a new way to use its Behavioral Compiler synthesis tool, Synopsys Inc. has introduced "behavioral retiming," an optimization technique that claims to improve device performance by 15 percent for appropriate circuits. Behavioral retiming takes gate-level net-lists and moves registers to optimal locations without impacting control logic.

Like the very first tools introduced by Synopsys, behavioral retiming takes in one gate-level net-list and outputs a better one. But in this case, the optimization occurs at a behavioral level. "It has to understand the sequential nature of the design to do the optimization, because we're going beyond clock boundaries," said T.J. Bore, group marketing manager for behavioral synthesis.

Retiming is not a new concept, but until now it's had limited applications because of the polynomial compute complexity associated with the probl em. But Synopsys claims to have discovered new algorithms that reduce the problem to a near-linear complexity as circuit size grows. Bore said the optimization can retime 30,000 gates in eight hours, and he noted that it supports hierarchical design.

MicroUnity, Terayon focus on broadband link for Internet access

By Loring Wirbel

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The stampede for Internet access thundered into Silicon Valley last week, and it swept right past the mythic $500 network computer. Instead, component suppliers, OEMs and TV and telephony carriers zeroed in on the broadband communications links they hope will reach homes and small businesses in the next year.

Pointing the industry's new direction like a weather vane, John Moussouris, CEO of MicroUnity Systems Engineering Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., focused on advanced cable modems in his keynote speech at IEEE CompCon 96 here.

Backin g away from set-top boxes, MicroUnity hopes to leverage its broadband DSP skills to build advanced modems with high-bandwidth return-path modulation. Using new codec front ends for its Media Processor CPU, the MicroUnity architecture can slide into both cable modems and set-top devices--and get a new lease on life, considering the moribund state of the company's original target market, interactive television.

"Bringing broadband services into the local loop will be an important goal for this architecture," Moussouris said. "Standard processors can be optimized to support either voice or data, but not both in a straightforward manner. Our goal is to reduce the implementation of a broadband loop to less than 10 W of power, and less than a square centimeter in size."

The company is likely to find competitors at both chip and system levels. In a separate development, Terayon Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., went public last week with a new chip-set architecture to be used in both cable modems and hybrid fibe r-coax head ends. The set uses spread-spectrum, synchronous, code-division multiple-access methods to achieve multimegabit upstream speeds that could not be realized in standard, quadrature phase-shift keying modems.

Cyrix going into PC business to push its processor

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

RICHARDSON, Texas -- Taking a few pages from Intel Corp.'s playbook, Cyrix Corp. is said to be preparing to manufacture PCs as a way of promoting its fledgling high-end processor, the 6X86. The company is reported to be sampling early versions of a 6X86 system and hiring aggressively to ramp up production of machines targeted at the cream of the computer market: power users at home and in large corporations.

The move mirrors the push into motherboards and systems that Intel made so aggressively in 1993, when the Pentium processor was moving slowly into the PC market. The effort follows Cyrix's establi shment of a systems-architecture R&D center in Longmont, Colo., that parallels the Intel Architecture Labs in Hillsboro, Ore. Both groups define system-level architectures that advance the use of their parents' microprocessors.

Cyrix is not ready to disclose full plans for the systems business yet, but did outline last week its broad strategy behind the move. "We've been investigating how powerful the Pentium brand is since we started preparing to launch the 6X86," said Steve Tobak, vice president of corporate marketing. "We put together a number of aggressive branding concepts and honed that down to the point where we are now ready to launch a couple of initiatives."

Rather than mount a "broad-based $100 million broadcast-TV campaign" to promote its Pentium-class processor, Cyrix is setting up a retail- and corporate-focused division, under Steve Lapinski, to spearhead its new systems drive. The group is dropping the 386-to-486 chip-upgrade products it sold to retailers and directly to large corp orate accounts in favor of the new products.

Apple and Microsoft face off on 3-D APIs

By Junko Yoshida and Ron Wilson

REDMOND, Wash. -- Racing to connect the next generation of multimedia games to new 3-D rendering hardware, Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. both announced 3-D graphics application programming interfaces (APIs) last week. Apple may have too little influence in the Windows world, and Microsoft may be too late, for either to create a de facto standard for the all-important Christmas selling season. But the new APIs are changing the way some chip designers and systems builders are thinking about 3-D acceleration.

Early last week, Apple caught Microsoft by surprise, announcing that it would ship its QuickDraw 3D package not only for the Macintosh, but for Windows 95 this month and Windows NT later this year. Microsoft countered by pushing forward the public announceme nt of its Direct3D package, previously planned for today. A further Microsoft announcement--the Quartz media-stream management environment, now called Active-Movie--was made today as planned.

Designated QuickDraw 3D Rave (Rendering Acceleration Virtual Engine), the Apple product is essentially a thin layer of software extracted from a QuickDraw 3D graphics tool kit unveiled last summer for the Macintosh OS. By exposing the hardware-abstraction layer (HAL), Rave allows developers to write highly optimized 3-D software.

Rave was not part of Apple's original plan for QuickDraw 3D. But "when hardware vendors saw how well it works and how complete it is, they kept telling us that this is exactly what 3-D graphics software vendors have been waiting for," said John Alfano, product marketing manager for QuickDraw 3D at the Cupertino, Calif., computer maker.

Judge favors Viewlogic over former Chronologic e mployee group

By Brian Fuller

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge here has thrown out most of the claims by employees of the former Chronologic Simulation Inc. against Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) in a suit that erupted last May after Viewlogic purchased Chronologic. While that suit's success remains in doubt, a Viewlogic countersuit against Chronologic founder John Sanguinetti is still pending.

U.S. District Judge Thelton E. Henderson, in a Jan. 23 opinion on several preliminary motions, rejected the guts of Chronologic's case: that Viewlogic had promised Chronologic (Los Altos, Calif.) autonomy after the merger and then abruptly yanked it away. Henderson did not, however, rule on Chronologic's charges of securities fraud.

Viewlogic, searching for a way to expand into the simulation business, bought Chronologic in March 1994 for $26.5 million in stock, after Chronologic was wooed by Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). But discord built in 1994 and early 1995 when Viewlogic reorganized its business and its stock price plunged. Chronologic sued last spring (see May 29, 1995, page 1), claiming that Viewlogic CEO Alain Hanover and other executives reneged on promises to keep the Chronologic operation autonomous.

No provision

In the ruling, Henderson said that the merger agreement executed by both companies had no provision spelling out autonomy. In one particularly blunt passage, Henderson wrote, "Given the ferocity with which plaintiffs make this argument, it seems incredible that such an important provision would not have been more specifically and explicitly covered in the document governing the relationship between the parties participating in the buyout."

Henderson pointed out that the agreement spells out "unequivocally" that "the corporate powers of Chronologic passed to Alain J. Hanover, the president of Viewlogic."

Microsoft starts drive to turn PC teleco m platform

By Alexander Wolfe

REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. has launched an ambitious strategy for computer-telephony integration (CTI), unleashing a torrent of new technologies aimed at turning the PC into an advanced, telecom-capable platform. Specifically, Microsoft will bring voice-modem, digital-simultaneous-voice-and-data (DSVD) and ISDN capabilities to its Windows operating systems this year.

The moves are expected to boost CTI far beyond its current status as a technology that turns PCs into glorified answering machines, a feature that Compaq established in the marketplace via its Presario home-computer product line.

"We're about to see the next generation of CTI products, which are PBXes on the PC platform," said Charles Fitzgerald, Windows telephony program manager at Microsoft and a keynote speaker at the Computer Telephony '96 conference the week of March 11 in Los Angeles. "In addition, every modem will become a telephone designed as a PC peripheral."

Microsoft ha s briefed modem developers on its plans in several recent closed-door meetings. Indeed, major modem vendors are already working hard to incorporate the new modem capabilities in upcoming products--even though a major market for CTI is just beginning to jell.

HDL wars subside, but trouble persists

By Richard Goering

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- An end to the language war between Verilog and VHDL may be in sight, but that didn't stop sniper attacks over other issues at last week's International Verilog Conference (IVC) and VHDL International User Forum (VIUF) shows here. Discussions revealed that a struggle still looms as users grapple with the synthesis and simulation of deep-submicron ICs, as well as with language interoperability and a lack of standards.

"The whole controversy is an antiquated issue. Let's call it a day and declare a victory for HDL design," said Aart de Geus, president an d CEO of Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), in his IVC keynote address. But his own company set off a new round of controversy when it offered to provide its register-transfer level (RTL) language subset for standardization, but not the compiler directives and constraints many users had asked for.

The two sides appeared to bury the hatchet in terms of which hardware-description language should reign supreme. The warm-and-fuzzy feelings come none too soon, given the challenges that HDL-based design faces. Much work remains before tools can handle multi-million-gate, 0.25-micron circuits. As de Geus put it, "The silicon physicists are somewhat kicking our butts." Needed for next-generation designs, he said, are higher levels of abstraction, speedier verification through techniques such as cycle-based simulation, systematic reuse of intellectual property and built-in knowledge of physical IC effects.

"The tools have not kept up with the complexity of the designs we're trying to do," said Alex Silbey , manager of design automation at Silicon Graphics Inc. (Mountain View). Silbey, who is finishing a 1.2-million-gate system-on-chip, said he needs Verilog simulators 100 times faster than those he has now. He also said synthesis tools are poor at maximizing device performance. "Every critical path in our designs is hand-instantiated."

Tele-TV to buy new set-top boxes

RESTON, Va. -- Tele-TV, the phone company interactive-TV venture, will announce plans today to buy several million "unity" set-top boxes capable of handling digital signals regardless of their source.

Tele-TV president Ed Grebow said last week the partners expect to place an order for the advanced set-tops in May and to begin deploying them with hybrid fiber coax and other wireline networks by late 1997. Tele-TV completed a deal last week with Thomson Consumer Electronics (Indianapolis) to buy as many as 3 million wireless-on ly set-tops through 1999 (see Sept. 25, 1995, page 2).

That purchase surprised some observers, who expected Tele-TV to proceed immediately with the unity box, which is expected to include 4 Mbits of memory and a network-interface module for $275.

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