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

03/29/96

Cirrus taps 3DO for 3-D graphics-chip help

TriQuint, Philips in GaAs IC deal

Tele-TV selects Silicon Graphics' servers

Mentor, Cadence sign landmark tool-access pact

Synopsys tool optimizes power consumption
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

03/28/96

N+I preview: LAN/WAN shifts focus with move to Soho

N+I preview: Chip vendors target MAC, ATM applications

NEC trims expansion plans

Snake Technologies is latest place-and-route firm launched

PCS networks get superconducting base stations

03/27/96

Display prototype uses eye's retina as screen

Research database has a mind to map the brain

Embedded-processing world thinks big

03/26/96

Trimble tunes GPS for OEM markets

Zuken-Redac gives Visula partitioning capabilities

Samsung bases printer controller on ARM processor

Ball-grid arrays get workable standards

03/25/96

From WinHEC: Microsoft intends to turn PCs into home appliances

Game develope rs look for audio keys to Yule '96 sales

From Wireless '96: GSM becomes the new target for chip houses

Wall-hanging TV goes on sale in Japan

Motorola revamping its IC-products sector

Unicad, CCT in merger talks?

Cadence presses case vs. Avant!

Cirrus taps 3DO for 3-D graphics-chip help

By Junko Yoshida

FREMONT, Calif. -- Cirrus Logic Inc. has licensed a 3-D engine from 3DO Corp. tha t it will integrate with its own video graphics controller and other PC technologies to build a 3-D accelerator for multimedia PCs and graphics boards. Products integrating the accelerator are predicted to arrive by Christmas.

Cirrus, one of the first companies to foresee the potential of consumer 3-D graphics for the PC platform, has been working internally on 3-D graphics technology for some time but has seen schedules slip badly for its home-brewed solutions. The 3DO engine, developed as part of that company's next-generation, 64-bit M2 videogame platform, has already been validated in silicon.

Indeed, a major factor in the choice of the M2 chip was that the "3-D graphics specification was not a paper design," said Keith Uhlin, general manager of entertainment graphics at Cirrus Logic. "We were able to actually touch the silicon and get a clear view of what it can do."

From 3DO's perspective, the agreement furthers the company's effort to redefine itself as a diversified technology prov ider by licensing bits and pieces of its M2 technology to PC-system and -subsystem developers.

TriQuint, Philips in GaAs IC deal

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. and Philips Semiconductors announced a wafer-sourcing agreement this week, a move indicating the steady migration of gallium-arsenide ICs into mainstream technology.

Philips will still offer standard ICs but sees GaAs technology as a cornerstone to future competitiveness, especially in communications. "Gallium arsenide is needed for certain functions in the phone that silicon can't handle," said Cees Jan Koomen, executive vice president with Philips Semiconductors. "GaAs is gaining popularity for its speed, with cellular phones being a particularly hot market.

"Going after mobile is one of our key strategies," said Steven sharp, chief executive of TriQuint. In addition to getting a wafer source, Phi lips gains access to TriQuint's expertise with GaAs process technology, something the company needs if it's going to make a splash in the GaAs market, Koomen said. "We needed a strong manufacturing partner to build the business," he said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but officials said Philips will not take an equity stake in TriQuint, as it has with fabs owned by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. and IBM Corp. "That was never even discussed," Sharp said.

Tele-TV selects Silicon Graphics' servers

RESTON, Va. -- Tele-TV, the phone company interactive-TV alliance, said it will use Silicon Graphics digital media servers for near-video-on-demand services over its wireless set-top boxes.

The initial order for servers that will support Tele-TV's Multichannel Multipoint Distribution System is worth $1 million and could grow to more than $5 million in several years, offic ials said.

With server and set-top suppliers selected, Tele-TV said it expects to introduce digital-TV services during the fourth quarter in Boston, Los Angeles and Norfolk, Va. In February, Tele-TV completed a deal with set-top maker Thomson Consumer Electronics for as many as 3 million converter boxes.

Mentor, Cadence sign landmark tool-access pact

By Brian Fuller and Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In an "unprecedented" agreement for the EDA industry, the two largest providers--Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) and Cadence Design Systems--have signed a pact providing reciprocal access to each other's tools. The move will facilitate tool interoperability and allow both companies to move ahead with their design consulting services.

The agreement, in the works for nearly a year, covers all of the design-automation tools that Mentor and Cadence offer. "The two largest companies have worked out an arrangement to serve as a model for the future," said Tony Zingale, senior vice president of marketing for Cadence.

The pact has two major thrusts, said Callen Carpenter, Mentor director of corporate development. One is to make it possible for Mentor or Cadence personnel to use each other's tools in design consulting or "outsourcing" situations. Another is to create design flows that are more integrated than vendor-interoperability programs, such as Mentor's Open Door or Cadence's Connections, typically allow.

Design outsourcing emerged last year as a major trend in design automation. In the most highly publicized deal, Cadence's Spectrum Services organization acquired more than 100 engineers from Unisys's ASIC operation and sold the services of that group back to Unisys's on a consultant basis.

Synopsys tool optimizes power consumption

By Richard Goering

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- In an announcement that changes the focus of synthesis, Synopsys Inc. next week will announce Power Compiler, said to be the first commercial synthesis tool that automatically optimizes for power consumption. The introduction reflects a fundamental shift in IC design, where portability and packaging issues have made power minimization a paramount concern.

"This is a major announcement because it's changing the heart of what synthesis is all about," said Aart de Geus, Synopsys president and CEO. Until now, de Geus noted, synthesis tools have optimized for timing first and area second. With Synopsys' new methodology, however, power consumption becomes the second priority and area is the third.

Slated for third-quarter delivery, Power Compiler is a gate-level optimization tool sold as an option to Synopsys' Design Compiler Expert. It incorporates Design Power, an analysis tool previously introduced by the Synopsys, and adds two new constraints -- maximum dynamic and leakage power. While Synopsys and some observers are hailing its introduction, the power reduction claims now are no more than 15 percent, and the tool's use can bring with it a small die size hit. In addition, competitors argue that power problems can be more efficiently addressed in the high-level architecting of code.

N+I preview: LAN/WAN shifts focus with move to Soho

By Loring Wirbel

LAS VEGAS -- NetWorld+Interop will open here next week with its flag firmly planted in Soho (small-office/home-office) soil. The first evidence that LAN and WAN internetworking specialists were moving down their respective food chains was served up at the show two years ago. This year, the shrinking-footprint trend is revealed in most of the major hardware introductions, including LAN and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches in the private network and smaller Integra ted Services Digital Network adapters for public links.

It's a fundamental change for the internetworking industry. The increased role of distribution and reseller channels hints that LAN/WAN planning is no longer a "big-iron" buy.

Among the market segments, switched 10-Mbit and 100-Mbit Ethernet will see the most show activity. Intel Corp.'s Network Products Division is shipping its first hub products. Volume leaders, such as Hewlett-Packard Co., are broadening low-end lines. And offshore specialist CNet Technology Inc. is pushing into the North American market.

N+I preview: Chip vendors target MAC, ATM applications

LAS VEGAS -- Chip vendors will be as busy as their OEM customers at NetWorld+Interop here next week, where the number of new standard products for LAN and Asynchronous Transfer Mode switching is at an all-time high. Media-access control (MAC) and ATM protoc ol-layer offerings lead the pack, though new twists on transceivers ensure an important role for analog specialists.

Bit Inc., the Beaverton, Ore., company formerly known as Bipolar Integrated Technology, is making an initial foray into Ethernet switching, using the core of its ATM segmentation-and-reassembly (SAR) processor. Motorola Inc.'s custom IC group (Phoenix) is releasing the first standard product from its ATM core-development program. AMD Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) is enhancing its multiport repeater chips for Ethernet, and several vendors are updating line-interface and user network-interface (UNI) devices for ATM.

Bit joins such recent entrants as Texas Instruments Inc., MMC Networks Inc. and Galileo Technology Inc. in a very busy frame-switching silicon market. It has already sampled the BN2002 eight-port Ethernet switch for 10-Mbit networks and plans a June sampling of the BN3001 Fast EtherDirector, which allows eight ports in any combination of 10- and 100-Mbit switched segments. Bot h are spinoffs of Bit's ATM SAR device, said vice president of marketing Louis Pengue.

Even this digital onslaught does not begin to define NetWorld+Interop. Mixed-signal and analog specialists will be out in force, as signal conditioning becomes a primary differentiator with network speeds exceeding 100 Mbits/s.

NEC trims expansion plans

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Cutbacks in capital spending by Japanese chip makers may delay a major expansion at NEC Corp.'s Roseville, Calif., plant and push back 0.25-micron production in Japan.

NEC was planning a May or June announcement of plans to enlarge the Roseville site. But with business conditions leading Japanese semiconductor companies to scale back investments, the expansion may wait until 1998 or 1999, by which time a 0.25-micron process will be mandatory, said Hajime Sasaki, in charge of NEC's semiconductor divisio n.

"Roseville may need 0.25 micron by 1998 or 1999, but that is a very difficult consideration for us right now," he said.

Indeed, analysts feared that with most chip makers taking a cautious approach to semiconductor-related capital investments for the 1996 fiscal year, which begins today, 0.25-micron capacity may be delayed in Japan.

Fujitsu Ltd. is the major exception to the near-universal reports that semiconductor spending will remain flat. "Fujitsu will continue to invest large amounts," said Masuo Tanaka, who is in charge of Fujitsu's electronic components business. "We plan to invest $2 billion in fiscal 1996, and $2.5 billion in fiscal 1997 and 1998. That is about 25 to 27 percent of our total production value, which is higher than the 20 percent said to be a risky investment ratio. But without investment, we cannot survive."

Snake Technologies is latest place-and-rout e firm launched

By Peter Clarke

ST GEOIRE EN VALDAINE, France -- Snake Technologies is the latest in a series of European university spin-offs and startups looking to move into the EDA market. Formed by Philippe Duchene and Michel Oger of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne, Switzerland), the company looks to provide low-cost IC place-and-route software for PCs.

Oger, responsible for marketing and sales, said the company's Cellsnake and Gatesnake products are comparable to Cadence's Cell3 Ensemble and Gate Ensemble in terms of efficiency and features, but offer much lower price points.

Features

Snake's products offer over- and through-cell routing, timing-driven layout and routing based on distributed RC models and a maze-based router that copes with up to five layers of metal, said CEO Duchene, who helped write the code from scratch three years prior to the company's launch.

Both cell and gate products are priced at about $20,000. The PC version requires a 486 processor and 8 Mbytes of memory, though a 66-MHz Pentium with 16 Mbytes would be a typical configuration, Oger said. The software runs under Windows 3.1, 95 or NT with no price differentiation between the versions.

PCS networks get superconducting base stations

DALLAS -- Superconductor Technologies Inc. this week popped a surprise on the Personal Communication Services industry at the Wireless '96 Cellular Telephone Industry Association show.

The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company showed a subsystem for a PCS base station that will use a high-temperature superconductor filter and associated low-noise amp to cut maximum noise figures to the 0.6-dB range. The subsystem requires its own cryogenic cooler, which is mounted below the antenna at each cell site. STI also will offer superconductor subsystems for AMPS and GSM base stations.

Display prototype uses eye's retina as screen

By Gail Robinson

SEATTLE -- An innovative display technology might offer communications- and computer-product designers an extremely compact way of looking at the world by integrating the best screen available for viewing large images in a small space: the human retina.

Researchers at the University of Washington and engineers at Micro Vision Inc. have developed a compact display prototype that scans images directly onto the retina of the eye. Called Virtual Retinal Display (VRD), it may overcome the limitations of current display technology for next-generation portable computers and personal-communications systems.

While conventional displays such as CRTs and LCDs operate by creating an image on an external screen for direct viewing, the VRD scans a pinpoint beam of light in a precise raster pattern over the retina of the eye. Basically, it s imulates the light receptor cells in such a way that the viewer perceives an external image that yields a large field of view.

To create an image, the prototype display's drive electronics decode signals from an image source, such as a computer or a video camera. The output of the electronics controls and synchronizes a low-power light source and a scanning subsystem. As the drive electronics decode the incoming image source, the intensity of the photon sources is modulated to recreate the intensity of an individual pixel.

Research database has a mind to map the brain

By R. Colin Johnson

SAN ANTONIO, Texas -- A brain-mapping database project that offers detailed readouts of actual recordings of the brain and relates them to the brain regions known or suspected to control various functions has grown to more than 6,000 entries and nearly 100 institutional research part icipants since its inception in 1994.

The BrainMap Database, sponsored here by the Research Imaging Center (RIC) of the University of Texas Health Science Center, now houses roughly 6,259 entries from 537 experiments reported on in 157 scholarly papers.

"The purpose of BrainMap is to promote our user's understanding of the functional anatomy of the human brain, by virtue of rapid, exhaustive access to image-derived data on behavioral functions," said RIC director Peter Fox.

BrainMap's software environment is dedicated to mining databases of brain functions. The behaviors of any region of the brain in which the user is interested can be "read out" from the database by merely specifying that region. Conversely, specifying any behavioral function of the brain in which a researcher is interested will return all the regions that, according to experimental results, perform that function.

Embedded-processing world thinks big

By David Lieberman

BOSTON -- If there's a theme to next week's Embedded Systems Conference here, it's "more": more processing power, more I/O, more features and functions, more bang for the buck. That will be apparent in system components covering a range of application complexity: 8-bit microcontrollers and 64-bit microprocessors, multiprocessing boards and hot-swappable systems, I/O-extension schemes and accelerated buses, DOS extenders and extended Windows NT.

Both Themis Computer (Fremont, Calif.) and General Micro Systems (GMS, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.) will announce single-board computers (SBCs) for the 64-bit VMEbus that pack multiple Sparc CPUs. Themis will show an SBC that scales from the power of a Sun Sparcstation 20 to that of a Sparcserver 1000. With an enhanced 64-bit VMEbus interface and 50-MHz MBus, the Sparc-20MP provides two MBus sites that accept a choice of processing modules. The modules contain one or two 50- to 60-MHz Supersparcs, 75- to 85-MHz Supersparc IIs or 90- to 150-MHz Hypersparcs, or four Hypersparcs, all with up to 1 Mbyte of Level 2 cache. The board has two SBus sites; expansion modules can integrate one or two extra SBus cards. It starts at $9,995.

GMS's V264 is divided into main- and accelerator-CPU sections linked by a high-speed gateway. Each section has a local 64-bit MBus and DRAM, SRAM and flash memory, and each runs its own operating system: Solaris or VxWorks. The main CPU has an extra MBus interface for a companion processor, keyboard/mouse interface, RS-232 serial port, RS-232/422 serial port, counter/timers and a pair of SBus expansion sites; the accelerator CPU has a pair of RS-232 serial ports and an optional interprocessor-communications bus.

Trimble tunes GPS for OEM markets

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Trimble Navigation Ltd. is broadening its OEM focus for global-positi oning-system receiver applications, offering high-performance modules for vehicle and mobile PC navigation as well as time-stamping in cellular base stations. Using Sierra, a multichannel GPS receiver technology, Trimble hopes to offer OEMs accuracy approaching differential GPS levels, in small form factors for portables.

GPS systems provide navigational accuracy in three dimensions, as well as atomic-clock-based timing down to 100-ns time windows. The receivers use signals from the Defense Department's Navstar GPS constellation of 24 satellites. In early years, the Pentagon demanded that civilian receivers be implemented with less accuracy than military receivers through a policy called "selective availability," though rumors are circulating that the government will announce a less-restrictive policy at the April 9 Space Symposium conference.

In the meantime, many navigation specialists have offered a technology, differential GPS, in which the "fuzzed out" DOD signals to civilian receivers are co rrected using a ground-based correction station. Even federal agencies are ordering the D-GPS stations despite DOD fears of the technology. For the most part, however, D-GPS has been relegated to high-end surveying and instrumentation applications.

Zuken-Redac gives Visula partitioning capabilities

By Richard Goering

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Bringing pc-board CAD closer to logical design, Zuken-Redac has announced Design Partitioning, an option that permits users of the company's Visula tool set to manage a design hierarchically from schematics. One result, according to the company, is easier re-use of predesigned blocks.

Like floor-planning tools in the ASIC world, Design Partitioning maps the schematic hierarchy into a layout hierarchy. But according Zuken-Redac product manager Mark Thompson, it's more powerful than previous interactive placement tools because it stores t he "entire intelligent data set" of the hierarchical blocks, as opposed to representative shapes of components and routes.

As a result, he said, a divide-and-conquer approach to board layout becomes much more feasible. "You can have multiple engineers working on a design simultaneously," he said. "Or you can represent a motherboard and daughterboard in one system, by representing the daughterboard as a subcircuit."

Thompson said Design Partitioning also facilitates design reuse, which has become one of the EDA industry's hottest buzzwords. Instead of redesigning such board elements as power supplies, memory circuits or interface logic, he said, users can simply store predesigned subcircuits and then load and copy them into a new board design.

Samsung bases printer controller on ARM processor

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Samsung Semiconductor announced the first chip to use its new ARM license. The company has put together a relatively standard laser-printer controller chip, including peripherals and system-logic functions. But by using the fast ARM7 mini-RISC core, augmented with its own BitBLT and queued DMA hardware, Samsung has tried to render external ASICs unnecessary for microprocessor support.

The KS32C6000 is built around a 25-MHz, 17-VAX MIPS ARM7 core. To keep the CPU occupied Samsung has buffered it with a 2-kbyte instruction cache. While far too small for the PC world, these small caches seem to be about right for the critical inner loops on page-make-up applications such as Postscript interpreters. The chip has no data cache, reflecting the decision to accelerate data movement with other sorts of hardware.

The two critical data movements in a printer are often those between character cache and frame buffer and between frame buffer and print engine. Samsung has accelerated each of these with hardware on the chip.

The critical path by wh ich character frames are BLTed into the frame buffer is handled by a custom graphics engine. This unit off-loads bit-block operations from the core processor.

Ball-grid arrays get workable standards

By Terry Costlow

NORTHBROOK, Ill.--The many designers and manufacturing engineers who are turning to ball-grid array packaging will soon have a solid guideline for their work. A jointly developed standard, J-STD-013, provides a wealth of information about BGAs and other high-density packages, including a some peripheral-lead varieties.

J-STD-013, expected to ship in six weeks or less, "is designed to provide confidence in the design through testing processes to ensure that the final assembly will meet the intended goals for product performance," according to its statement of purpose. The 86-page document was created by the Surface Mount Council, a group established by two stan dards organizations: the Electronic Industries Association (Arlington, Va.) and the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC, Northbrook). The document's key purpose is to facilitate the move to BGAs, which are increasingly valued for their ability to provide high density without requiring fine-pitch lines.

Usually, the trade-off point for shifting from peripheral to array packages is either when the lead count hits 208 or when the peripheral-package pitch falls below 0.5 mm, according to the document. The specification guides designers through many of the factors involved in the packaging decision. If that decision ultimately leads the designer to BGAs or other array packages, such as chip-scale types, the document provides data designers to simplify the transition. But it also provides a fair amount of information on peripheral-lead packages for those who want to stick with conventional packaging techniques.

From WinHEC: Microsoft intends to turn PCs into home appliances

By Alexander Wolfe

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Aiming to drive its technology deep into consumer-electronics territory, Microsoft Corp. plans to turn the home computer into "a PC that fits into your stereo cabinet," sources close to the company said.

From that vantage point, the PC will control digital audio from CD-ROMs and digital video disks (DVD). It will sport a DSVD modem to enable multiuser, networked gaming. And it will serve as an Internet-surfing terminal, routing Web pages for display on a home-entertainment center's large-screen TV.

Microsoft will disclose its intentions--in the form of specifications and design recommendations; it will not build hardware--April 1-3 at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC 96), here.

To round out its vision of the PC as a home appliance, Microsoft will also launch a new "instant-on" spec that will enable PCs to start up without lengthy boot-up sequences and noisy disk-drive accesses. These, the company believes, make the average consumer think of the PC as a forbidding high-tech system, rather than a user-friendly appliance.

Microsoft's plan is a refinement of its Simply Interactive PC (SIPC) strategy, which came to light earlier this year and will be unveiled formally at WinHEC. There, Microsoft will also release the first draft of PC 97, a document that contains the SIPC-platform spec.

Game developers look for audio keys to Yule '96 sales

By Junko Yoshida

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Can multimedia game makers come up with sound effects that are cool and--most important--new enough to help revive what appears to be the dwindling demand for home PCs this coming Christmas season?

Audio chip vendors and PC OEMs will face a host of next-generation audio implementation questions lik e that at the Computer Games Developers Conference scheduled here later this week as they begin to learn more about new 3-D audio technologies and an emerging set of requirements for Dolby's AC-3 on PCs.

In fact, both silicon vendors and system OEMs stand at a critical juncture. They must sort out coming audio features--be it AC-3, 3-D stereo or positional 3-D audio--and decide which are the must-have bells and whistles for multimedia PCs reaching the consumer market over the next 18 months.

Already by last Christmas, virtually all major multimedia PC vendors--Compaq Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Packard Bell, IBM and Acer America--had incorporated what they call a 3-D stereo feature in their PCs. However, what those PC OEMs claim as 3-D stereo audio is not the same thing as what more informed multimedia industry experts are now beginning to recognize and distinguish as positional 3-D audio. It is actually a process to add spatial enhancement to processed sound or music, so that sounds coming from a CD-ROM are placed on an arc, extending through and beyond two speakers in front of a listener.

Positional 3-D audio, meanwhile, is based on an audio-processing technology that allows sounds to be precisely and interactively located anywhere in the three-dimensional space surrounding a listener. A positional 3-D audio rendering algorithm processes a sound on the fly, allowing the position of sound objects to be moved or changed at any time, according to unpredictable user input.

From Wireless '96: GSM becomes the new target for chip houses

By Ashok Bindra and Ron Wilson

DALLAS -- In the booths and suites at Wireless '96 here, the hot topic among silicon vendors will be GSM (Global System for Mobile communications.) With increasing deployment throughout the developing world, and with two new lives to live courtesy of the European DCS1800 (Digital Communications System) and A merican PCS1900 (Personal Communications Service) specifications, the market for GSM handsets is exploding. New cost targets for traditional GSM, and tough new technical requirements for the new GSM frequencies, are turning this opportunity into a starburst of chip design activity.

"Time pressure is making old, time-proven GSM into a global standard," Tom Sennhauser, director of marketing at Siemens AG, explained. "The service providers who are spending a lot of money on auctions in the PCS frequency band are under tremendous pressure to deploy systems quickly. That is making them look hard at GSM, which is ready to go today."

GSM may be a stable, proven standard, but that doesn't mean handset vendors are satisfied with existing chip sets. They are demanding lower operating voltages and more integration, pushing for more user interface and fax/data features, and planning to exploit new extensions like the higher-quality enhanced full rate voice coding. All of these demands are driving silicon vend ors--despite carrier frequencies close to 2 GHz this remains a silicon market--to innovate.

Wall-hanging TV goes on sale in Japan

By David Lammers

KAWASAKI, Japan -- The wall-hanging television became an official product last Thursday when Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. put a 26-inch-diagonal plasma-display panel (PDP) on the Japanese market. The monitor sells for $10,000 and must be hooked up to an external VCR/tuner.

Despite the PDP's high price and Matsushita's own modest expectations--it will make only 100 of the displays per month on a prototyping line--the move is among the market-development steps required to take plasma-display technology into the mainstream.

Others are taking similar steps. NEC Corp., which has built a PDP-production facility here that can turn out about 1,000 panels a month, said it will ship samples of a 33-inch plasma computer monitor this summer at $10,000 per panel. Fujitsu Ltd. is equipping a much larger factory on the southern island of Kyushu and said it has sold out the first few months of production of its 42-inch panel, primarily to TV makers.

Alan Bell, an electronics analyst at Schroders Securities Japan, said the major question with plasma displays is how to get the cost down. The current answer is to "hit the cost problem with a very large hammer" by investing heavily in production facilities and product development.

Motorola revamping its IC-products sector

By Martin Gold

PHOENIX -- Motorola Inc. has torn up much of its $8.5 billion Semiconductor Products Sector and will rebuild the operation to focus on high-growth markets. Giving broader visibility to its digital-signal-processing technology, the company will target digital wireless and selected wireline communications, as well as consume r products like set-top boxes and digital videodisks.

The new Communications & Advanced Consumer Technologies Group will pull together digital signal processors, mixed-analog/digital-IC technology, the ASICs operation and the sector's high-performance embedded-systems division. Motorola's Israel design center and key communications design teams will play a major role in the new group's strategy. The only part of the sector not affected by the reshuffling is the still-huge discrete-products business, which includes RF devices, power products, sensors and hybrid modules.

The new operation, to be headquartered in Austin, Texas, will be managed by Fred Shlapak, a corporate vice president and general manager of the sector's European Semiconductor Group. No significant reassignment of people is expected.

Unicad, CCT in merger talks?

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Cooper and Chyan Techn ologies (CCT) might acquire Unicad Inc. (Westford, Mass.), according to reports circulating at last week's PCB Design Conference. Representatives of both companies confirmed that technology issues are being discussed but said no decision has been made concerning a possible merger.

Because CCT's autorouters are resold by several pc-board-CAD vendors, including Mentor, Accel Technologies, PADS Software and Viewlogic, CCT OEMs have reportedly been concerned about a possible move by CCT beyond autorouting. But Geoffrey Indrajo, CCT director of product marketing, said his company has "no interest" in becoming a full-line pc-board-CAD vendor.

Fred Hammett, Unicad director of sales and marketing, said his company was talking to CCT and other providers about technology transfer. While Unicad hasn't ruled out being acquired by someone, Hammett said that no such move is imminent.

But a source at Viewlogic said it has a right of first refusal on any merger Unicad merger.

Cadence presses case vs. Avant!

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Avant! Corp. is facing a new legal challenge from Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.), which has revealed plans to file a motion April 19 for a permanent injunction against the sale of Avant!'s ArcCell and ArcCell-XO. Also, Avant! lost a motion March 12 that would have prevented the district attorney from sharing with outside experts evidence seized in a Dec. 5 police raid.

Avant! is facing both a criminal investigation from the Santa Clara County district attorney's office and a civil suit from Cadence over alleged theft of Cadence's proprietary source code. Avant! has denied charges that ArcCell and ArcCell-XO contain Cadence code.

In a move termed "unusual" by legal experts, the district attorney won permission March 12 to share confiscated material with experts in the civil case. But Avant! was allowed to submit a "protective order" to prev ent Cadence's civil counsel from viewing the material.

The next phase of the case is a July 9 hearing on Cadence's request for the injunction.

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