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

04/12/96

Mondale puts fate of U.S.-Japan IC pact in industry's hands

Autodesk spins out 3D Web tool operation

From NAB: Vendors tout serial interfaces for video editing

Synopsys, Cadence sign truce, seek better integration
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

04/11/96

N+I wrap-up: ATM 's favor is fading in LANs

GPS heads for new markets, maybe even the Net

Battered California Micro rebuilds, rebounds

Wide-net strategy works at Microchip

ITO contact offers window into high-power lasers

04/10/96

Prospects for U.S. programmers not bad after all

Job situation brightens for engineering grads

HP builds blue laser using second harmonic

2-D optical insulators on the horizon?

Incases adds multiboard analysis to EMC Workbench

04/09/96

SGS-Thomson chip can bring satellite TV to PCs

DSP answering devices boost phone message time

Mitsubishi, Mitsui set IC assembly plant in Beijing

Cadence opts out of EuroDAC

Another HDTV station planned

04/08/96

Microsoft ushers in era of the simply interactive PC, Windows for PDAs

Three teams start competition for next-generation fighter plane

Researcher discovers that Net interferes with real life

Partnering escalates as embedded market gets too big to go it alone

PC makers claim Hollywood's copyright proposal will kill DVD

From N+I: Switching alliances unite IC vendors

Mondale puts fate of U.S.-Japan IC pact in industry's hands

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- When President Clinton arrives here Tuesday night for a summit meeting with Japanese prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, U.S.-Japan security issues are expected to be on the front burner. But tucked in among the talks about downsizing U.S. bases on Okinawa and the tinderbox situations in Korea and the Taiwan Straits, will be some crucial moments when the two leaders discuss extension of the U.S.-Japan semiconductor trade agreement.

The 10-year-old agreement expires at the end of July.

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale said Washington "wants an extension of the U.S.-Japan semiconductor trade agreement, but first there should be an agreement between the two industries, which would then be endorsed by the governments."

Doing his part to keep the process moving forward this week was William (P at) Weber, the Texas Instruments executive who is the current chair of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). Weber met with Sony Corp. chairman Norio Ohga, the chairman of the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ), to prepare for another round of "three-on-three" talks, planned for late April. If the industries reach a formal agreement--which remains far from certain--the June SIA-EIAJ meeting could result in an agreement that the two governments would then begin considering in negotiations.

Autodesk spins out 3D Web tool operation

By Alexander Wolfe

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- Creating content on the Web--3-D style--is the objective of a startup that launched its first products this week. The company, Kinetix, unveiled Hyperwire, a visual authoring tool for creating multimedia titles in Java environments.

Kinetix, which is an independent business unit of CAD- software vendor Autodesk Inc., will also take over marketing of Autodesk's 3D Studio Max animation software for Windows NT.

Hyperwire, which also handles 2-D content development, is built around a real-time, programmable 3-D simulation-and-playback engine called "Topper." Hyperwire supports the VRML 3-D Web standard, including the Moving Worlds implementation of VRML 2.0. Titles created with Hyperwire can be distributed over the Web and can be played on platforms running Windows 95, NT, Macintosh or Unix operating systems.

Hyperwire imports animation models for the company's 3D Studio and 3D Studio Max programs. Those offerings are billed as workstation-class animation packages that support graphics-acceleration and multiprocessing.

Preview copies of Hyperwire are available over the Web, at http://www.ktx.com .

From NAB: Vendors tout serial interface s for video editing

By Terry Costlow

LAS VEGAS -- Proponents of serial interfaces are looking to next week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show to promote use of serial data links for digital editing and storage.

A new Fiber Channel Association committee was scurrying earlier this week to finalize tutorial sessions on the architecture. And providers of both Fiber Channel and the competing Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) plan to announce products here that will court video-system developers with promises of high bandwidth and a ready upgrade path.

The Fiber Channel effort marks the debut of the Video Special Interest Group, which will hold four special technical sessions during the conference here. Hewlett-Packard Co., Silicon Graphics Inc., Eastman Kodak and Tektronix Inc. will show how Fiber Channel can meet the requirements of audiovisual applications.

Fiber Channel hardware debuts are also slated. Ciprico Inc. (Plymouth, Minn.) is unveiling its first Fib er Channel RAID (redundant array of independent disks) subsystem. And Hewlett-Packard is tapping Fiber Channel's networking capabilities for new broadcast and news-editing equipment and broadcast video servers.

The new interfaces' primary source of appeal for video applications is their speed. Peak data-transfer rates of 200 Mbytes/ second for Fiber Channel and 80 Mbytes/s for SSA don't just surpass the 30 Mbytes/s needed for many applications; they provide a path for growth. That, some believe, will have video-system developers opting for serial channels over SCSI, which is just now moving beyond 20 Mbytes/s.

Synopsys, Cadence sign truce, seek better integration

By Richard Goering

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Heralding a new era of cooperation between the two powerhouse EDA rivals, Synopsys Inc. and Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.) have settled a three-year-old lawsui t and agreed to "optimize and verify" an integrated design flow.

Though aimed at users of the Silicon Architects Cell-Based Array (CBA) libraries, the integration might benefit designers who have combinations of Synopsys and Cadence tools.

On top of a recent pact between Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) and Cadence to provide access to each other's tools, the Cadence-Synopsys agreement signals an era of glasnost among the big EDA vendors.

But for Synopsys and Cadence, a bridge had to be crossed: a 1993 suit in which Synopsys claimed Cadence and Seed Solutions Inc. (Chesterfield, Ohio) misappropriated trade secrets.

The suit was settled through private mediation.

Synopsys's acquisition of Silicon Architects last year was one catalyst that brought the companies together. The companies both noted that Silicon Architects used Cadence layout tools internally before and after the acquisition and that many users of its CBA library also use Cadence layout tools.

N+I wrap-up: ATM 's favor is fading in LANs

By Craig Matsumoto

LAS VEGAS -- Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching is finding favor as the backbone of computer networks and WAN access services, but its support as a LAN technology appears to be fading, as evidenced at the Networld+Interop show, here.

ATM still gets high marks on a theoretical basis, but its deployment continually is hindered as industry finds ways to outdo ATM on the LAN. ATM is a hard sell to existing network owners, because it is expensive and can't run existing network software without emulation. As a result, its future as a LAN technology is being put off even further--some say for good.

"Every month, the threshold of what ATM has to do goes up," said David Delaney, chairman of frame-relay vendor Plaintree Systems Inc. (Ontario, Canada). "There's a good chance that the vision of a homogenous ATM world is g one, that it's never going to happen."

The toughest market to promote right now is low-speed ATM for LAN services. While ATM services at 1.5 Mbits/second are important in the WAN interface world, IBM Corp.'s attempts to drive a standard at 25 Mbits/s for the LAN workgroup seem to be moving very slowly. A handful of players--IBM with NWays, Advanced Telecommunications Modules Inc. with Virata and Whitetree Inc. with WS2500--is promoting such architectures for multimedia services. But one design engineer at an ATM segmentation processor company said off the record that "ATM25's success depended on a very aggressive push in early 1996 by IBM and its alliance partners. Right now, I don't see enough interest in ATM25 jelling to make this happen."

GPS heads for new markets, maybe even the Net

By Loring Wirbel

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- President Clinton's loosening of restric tions on Global Positioning System data could spur market applications that take GPS far from its original commercial roots in vehicular navigation and geodetic-survey equipment.

At a special GPS International Association (GIA) meeting that kicked off this week's Space Symposium at the Broadmoor Hotel, developers talked of new applications using GPS in weather prediction, marrying the technology with cellular radio for emergency-response networks and linking GPS with RF ID systems for trucking and marine terminals.

GPS is a space-based system of 24 Navstar satellites, run by the Defense Department and Air Force Space Command. It provides high-resolution position information along three axes as well as a highly accurate time stamp.

Scott Pace of Rand Corp.'s Critical Technologies Institute predicted that use of GPS to "time stamp" and synchronize Internet Protocol and asynchronous-transfer-mode traffic over the Net could one day dwarf navigational applications in the commercial world.

Battered California Micro rebuilds, rebounds

By Craig Matsumoto

MILPITAS, Calif. -- Passives manufacturer California Micro Devices Inc. is on a slow recovery ramp in the wake of a scandal that shook up top management, prompted an SEC investigation and unleashed a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits. While the full drama has yet to be played out, California Micro's new management team is taking pains to ensure a happy ending.

The trouble became evident to outsiders when California Micro rescinded its financial results for the fiscal year ended June 1994, reporting losses in place of the profits it had announced originally. An investigation into the discrepancy led to the ousting of the executive staff and an exchange of lawsuits that won't go to court before December.

Yet even with the unresolved legal issues, California Micro, led by replacement chief executive office r Jeffrey Kalb, is climbing back to profitability. For the third quarter, ended Dec. 31, profits were $2.7 million on revenue of $10.6 million, up from losses of $3 million on revenue of $8.2 million a year earlier.

California Micro uses semiconductor process technology to combine multiple passives on a chip. It claims virtually no competition in thin-film resistors. It also builds capacitors and is working on techniques to maximize capacitance per given area--a feat it hopes will impress makers of portable computers.

Wide-net strategy works at Microchip

By Brian Fuller

CHANDLER, Ariz. -- If you're looking for a leading indicator of the health of the semiconductor business, you might look at Microchip Inc. By focusing on trailing-edge technology for a slew of applications, the memory and microcontroller company has strung together 17 straight quarters of revenue growt h.

Microchip, which issued 1993's most successful initial public offering, has captured the imagination of Wall Street analysts with its wide-net strategy. No single customer is responsible for more than 3 percent of the company's business; indeed, its top 10 customers represent just 12 percent of total revenue. Similarly, no single region commands more than a third of its business. And its target markets run the gamut from PC applications to cellular phones to cars and washing machines.

So if Microchip goes down this year, it probably won't go alone.

But its management expects no such decline. The company's current quarter--the last of its 1996 fiscal year--is flat with the December quarter. For more than a year, however, quarterly revenue growth has averaged 10 percent.

"The problem is in PCs," said president and chief executive officer Steve Sanghi. "There's no other problem."

ITO contact offers window into high-power lasers

By Gail Robinson

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- A transparent structure built into the n-side of an unstable resonator semiconductor laser (URSL) may help target performance problems in laser cavities during high-power operation.

Developed by researchers at the Center for High Technology Materials at the University of New Mexico, the indium-tin-oxide (ITO) contact allows users to measure the optical-field distribution and beam propagation directly and to examine the filamentation. That condition is known to create spatial coherence collapse, which is a principal cause of laser failure.

While transparent contacts have been successfully used to observe the insides of low-power lasers, window contacts are not used in wider-striped, high-powered (about 1-W) diode lasers, because they affect current spreading at high levels.

"The key advantages in using the ITO structure are its transparency and its conductivity," said researche r Xinqiao Wang. "And it doesn't affect the operations of the diode laser, so you can view what is happening as the device is working under normal conditions."

Previous systems have been reliable, Wang noted, but have been limited to indirect measurements. Because metal contacts are commonly used, windows must be opened to let out light for observation. That can disturb the device operation.

Prospects for U.S. programmers not bad after all

By Robert Bellinger

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The author of the 1992 book Decline and Fall of the American Programmer has written a new book: Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. How's that?

"While my mood four years ago was one of pessimism," author Edward Yourdon admits in his followup book (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J.), "I'm now cautiously optimistic about the future of the American programmer."

Score a backflip for the man who wrote in 1992 that "the American programmer is likely to suffer the same fate as the dodo bird and the dinosaur." Those programming relics, it turns out, are alive and well in their equivalent of "Jurassic Park": Small, hip American software houses such as Netscape.

But the problems that led to Yourdon's gloomy assessment of the fate of Cobol and Basic programmers four years ago haven't gone away. In fact, substitute the words "design engineer" for "programmer" and you'll find uncanny parallels between the two job categories, comparisons that Yourdon agrees hold up.

Chinese, Indian and Russian programmers work for less pay, some as little as $2,000 a year. U.S. businesses have indeed boosted their export of software work. In India, annual software exports have grown to $325 million, of which 56 percent comes from contract operations, Yourdon reports.

To remain competitive, programmers have two choices: "find the tools and methodology to be 10 times more productive to compensate for the fact you're more expensive," Yourdon told EE Times. The other alternative is to recognize routine applications work is a "commodity business" and let it go to low-wage centers. Better that the remaining vestiges of 1980s-style programming get on with their lives, latch on to the Internet and take charge of their careers, he believes.

Job situation brightens for engineering grads

By Robert Bellinger

BETHLEHEM, Pa. -- Though the engineering-employment market has been cooled by layoffs at several electronics companies recently, the two ends of the job market--new grads and executives--continue to heat up.

Salaries and job offers have risen to record heights for this year's BSEE, computer-science and computer-engineering graduates, according to a new survey of college career services offices.

The National Association of Colleges and Employer s (NACE) reports the "highest demand this year is for computer-science graduates." Software-development employers are leading the way, offering an average starting salary of $34,565. Consulting firms and computer- and business-equipment manufacturers are also recruiting BS/MSCS degree holders.

While BSCS grads are receiving a lot of attention, the BSEEs still command excellent starting salaries, averaging $37,662, up 4.5 percent over last year's offers. Close behind are computer engineers, up 4.7 percent, to $36,591. Only chemical and petroleum engineers do better.

HP builds blue laser using second harmonic

KANAGAWA, Japan -- Leveraging the large second-order optical non-linearities of GaAs crystals, Hewlett-Packard researchers have built a vertical surface-emitting laser that produces blue light.

The technique, developed at laboratories here, makes an end run around the requirement for large bandgaps and high energy--problems that have plagued attempts to build blue LEDs. While blue-emitting laser diodes have been built in large bandgap materials such as zinc-selinium or silicon-carbide, the high power required to get shorter-wavelength light generates heat that quickly degrades the devices. The HP team started with a conventional GaAs-based VCSEL-emitting red light and modified its structure to enhance the second harmonic, which is in the blue region.

The new device follows conventional VCSEL design, which uses dual superlattice structures to create mirrors enclosing a lasing cavity. But, instead of using a (100 )oriented substrate, the researchers tried a (311) lattice orientation.

The reason for this change is the behavior of light in the GaAs crystal. The second harmonic is completely suppressed in the (100) direction but has a maximum in the (311) direction. Also, GaAs has a strong second-order optical non-linearity that enhances the generation of the s econd harmonic. During lasing, the effects combine to create a strong vertical blue light emission from the VCSEL. The device was operating in pulse mode at room temperature, emitting 482-nm pulses at 10 nW.

2-D optical insulators on the horizon?

MALVERN, England -- Optical researchers at Britain's Defense Research Establishment have devised a simplified approach to fabricating photonic bandgap materials that could allow more versatile applications for their unique optical properties.

Research has shown that building materials with a pattern of dielectric variation that imitates the structure of semiconductors, such as silicon, produces a similar bandgap effect. The resulting structures have been used to build superior microwave cavities, because of the total reflection of microwaves at forbidden wavelengths. But building these structures in 3-D is difficult and has limited their usefulness.

The DRA researchers have discovered that two-dimensional patterns in GaAs layers will do just as well. As a result, semiconductor fabrication techniques can be applied in building "photonic insulators."

The researchers have examined models of an array of circular regions of contrasting dielectric constant in a GaAs layer. At a high enough contrast between the two regions, the model shows that all incident light will be perfectly reflected because of the optical-bandgap property. The structure could form an alternative to multilayered mirrors now employed in electro-optic devices. In addition, the new reflecting structure could be more easily engineered to operate at different wavelengths.

Incases adds multiboard analysis to EMC Workbench

By Richard Goering

DALLAS -- Incases Engineering has added multiboard analysis to its EMC Workbench product , which provides signal-integrity and electromagnetic compatibility simulation. The new capability, called Multiple PCBs, will be part of the EMC Workbench 3.0 release, slated for July.

In its initial release, Multiple PCBs will support signal-integrity simulation. In a subsequent release, support will be added for EMC simulation through Comoran, a routine that calculates the electromagnetic behavior of 3-D transmission lines and finite conduction planes. Comoran was added to EMC Workbench for single boards earlier this year.

Multiboard signal-integrity analysis is becoming an increasing problem, said Peter Wolfers, Incases director of worldwide marketing. "Many customers have requested this because they're getting increasing speeds on the backplanes connecting multiple pc boards together. Because of this, people are seeing timing and crosstalk problems."

SGS-Thomson chip can bring sat ellite TV to PCs

By Peter Clarke

GRENOBLE, France -- Confident that the direct-broadcast satellite-digital-TV market is poised to boom SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (STM) has developed an integrated digital-satellite-receiver front-end chip for such receivers.

The chip, the STV0196, includes blocks for Nyquist filtering, quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) demodulation, Viterbi decoder, de-interleaver, Reed Solomon decoder and energy dispersal descrambler.

The STV0196 has been optimized for power consumption and STM expects to sell the chip pair to both set-top box makers and tuner subsystem builders. The tuner plus front-end may be designed into set-top decoders separately or be increasingly used for add-in cards. The cards could offer satellite services to the PC, either for showing satellite TV in a window on the TV or for dedicated company Intranet programming. STM has a demo board that includes the STV0190, STV0196 and tuner. This can be hooked up to a PC via the parall el port.

DSP answering devices boost phone message time

By Ashok Bindra

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- ROM-coded, DSP-based processors are bringing caller ID and full-duplex speakerphone capabilities to digital telephone answering devices (DTAD), while doubling their message-recording time and cutting system cost.

The processors also provide a glueless interface to a new memory option, the Nand flash devices. Two suppliers to reveal DTAD processors with such features are Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) and Lucent Technologies (Berkeley Heights, N.J.), an AT&T spin-off that includes the former AT&T Microelectronics and Bell Labs. These processors were announced at last month's DSPX show here.

Based on the TMS320C25 DSP core, TI has derived two DTAD processors MSP58C81X/83X with direct on-chip interface to Nand flash memories for audio applications. C81X offers 14 minu tes of record time and C83X 28 minutes. The flash memory gives designers an alternative to supply-limited audio RAM (ARAM), said Young H. Oh, systems engineering manager for new-product development at TI's Semiconductor Group.

Lucent has released a ROM-coded DSP1604/5 that incorporates LG30 software to provide caller ID and full-duplex speakerphone in DTADs. In addition, Lucent DSPs embed the CELP+ speech-coder algorithm to give 15.7 minutes of voice-storage time, Lucent said. The DSPs offer up to 24 kwords of ROM, said Ken Brizel, product-line manager for consumer DSPs at Lucent. Compatible with Nand flash, the 40-Mips DSP comes in 68-pin plastic leaded chip carrier or 80-pin metric plastic quad flat packs. In lots of 100,000, the ROM-coded DSP is priced under $10.

Mitsubishi, Mitsui set IC assembly plant in Beijing

TOKYO -- Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and Mitsui & Co. Ltd. will join with the Stone Group Co., a private electronics manufacturer, to build a joint-venture semiconductor-assembly operation in Beijing, China. Long-range plans call for doubling the capacity of the assembly operation in several years and then building a front-end fab.

The three companies will establish Mitsubishi Stone Semiconductor Co. and spend about $100 million on an assembly-and-test operation that will begin operating in May 1997. The facility will take wafers from Mitsubishi and assemble about 5 million ICs a month, including ASICs, microcontrollers and memories.

Cadence opts out of EuroDAC

BRACKNELL, England -- Citing diminishing returns from its four-year presence, Cadence Design Systems has pulled out of EuroDAC, the European design-automation conference that this year will unfold in Geneva from Sept. 16 to 20.

"We've been in it for four years now, and it 's never really knocked our socks off," said Rich Wyckoff, vice president of corporate marketing for Cadence (San Jose, Calif.).

Instead, Cadence is increasing the frequency of its technical seminars for designers and expanding a nascent program to reach out to high-level executives with whom it often lacks visibility. The latest on that front starts this week at a Scottsdale, Ariz., resort, where 50 executives will schmooze with Cadence executives, who will outline corporate strategy with an emphasis on the services business. Another forum is slated for May in La Manga, Spain, just before the U.S. Design Automation Conference, and a third is set for October in Japan.

The major EDA companies collaborated in the early 1990s to try to establish EuroDAC as the main European EDA event in the hope of sidelining the numerous national EDA exhibitions across Europe.

Another HDTV station planne d

WASHINGTON -- Broadcasters and TV-equipment makers disclosed plans to establish a fully operational HDTV station here to showcase the technology for lawmakers while gaining experience in digital broadcasting and other new services.

The expected announcement by the Association for Maximum Service Television and the Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association comes a week after the Public Broadcasting Service station here also said it would establish the nation's first HDTV station. The PBS station is among the candidates to host the industry-sponsored station.

Organizers said that the three-year project will cost about $6 million and begin later this year when an HDTV transmitter and encoding equipment are installed. TV-equipment makers will lend their gear to the new station.

Microsoft ushers in era of the simply interactive PC, Windows for PDAs

By Rick B oyd-Merritt

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- By 10 o'clock last Tuesday night the overflow crowd of 3,000 people at Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here had dwindled to less than 200 who survived to the final question of the day: "So what do we call this thing now, if it's not a PC?" Microsoft shoved the nerdy PC into the terrain of consumer electronics toward a guiding concept it dubbed the Simply Interactive PC, or SIPC.

More quietly, Microsoft distributed on a CD-ROM its annual hardware recommendations at the conference. For the first time, this year's specifications, PC '97, contained recommendations for PC server designs. And Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates revealed plans to revive later this year the company's long-dormant plans for releasing a subset of the Windows operating system for personal digital assistants.

"We believe you can come out with a device without wireless connectivity if you aim it to be a PC companion and make it easy to synchronize and view your [PC] data on a PDA," said Gates. He sketched out a concept for a pocket PC that could be shipped in 1997 with a 6-inch color LCD that would run a subset of Windows that includes Microsoft's Web browser, a subset of its ActiveX technologies, but no built-in wireless communications.

But the SIPC, not the PDA, was the center of attention and debate at WinHEC last week. In his keynote Gates demonstrated "concept prototypes" from Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba that looked more like VCRs or muscular audio CD players than PCs. The demo systems hosted DVD players and output digital audio over Universal Serial Bus and 1394 connections.

"In the long run we want a PC in every house and we have a lot of work to do to the PC to make it appropriate for that," said Gates. "Everything we talk about under the SIPC banner is just sort of the first phase of what we need to do to achieve this vision."

Three teams start competition for next-generation fighter plane

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- In June, three contractor teams will submit proposals to build roughly 3,000 next-generation fighters for the United States and Britain. For the three bidders scrambling to make a June 14 deadline, winning the contract to build the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is a matter of survival. For the electronics industry, it's a shot at billions of dollars of business in a sector that offers weapon upgrades but little else over the next decade.

To be sure, the U.S. military continues to spend heavily on electronics as it modernizes its forces. But industry watchers predict slim pickings for those who don't win a piece of the JSF avionics work.

The Joint Strike Fighter "is not a make-or-break situation" for U.S. electronics companies, said Kernan Chaisson, a military electronics analyst in the Washington office of Forecast International/DMS (Newtown, Conn.). "But it's really the only new actio n in town."

The winner of the horse race to design and build the next generation of fighter avionics will also get the chance to use commercial technologies and an open avionics architecture to reduce cost and weight. The cost issue is a key focus of recent Pentagon acquisition reforms. Weight considerations and squeezing greater capabilities into smaller packages will be critical to winning the avionics contract, Pentagon and industry officials said.

Seattle-based Boeing heads one of the contracting teams vying for the fighter contract. The others are led by Lockheed Martin Corp. (Bethesda, Md.) and partners McDonnell Douglas Corp. (Saint Louis), Northrop Grumman (Pico Rivera, Calif.) and British Aerospace. One of the three bidders will be dropped later this year, while the other two build prototype fighters that will be used to decide the winner around 2000. The first aircraft are scheduled to be delivered in 2005.

Researcher discovers that Net interferes with real life

By Alexander Wolfe

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Caution: The information superhighway can be hazardous to your mental health. That's the message from a psychologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has studied "Internet addiction" through what he claims is the first on-line survey of Net use and abuse.

His findings: Some 45 percent of the survey's respondents said that they have repeatedly gotten less than four hours of sleep in a night because they were on line. Some 43 percent said they had made arrangements to meet someone they knew only from the Net. More than half report they've been told they spend too much time connected. And nearly three-quarters admitted accessing adult-only material.

"This survey shows that there is a subgroup of people who, as a result of Internet use, experience more interference than normal with their other roles in life," said the psychologist, Viktor Bren ner. "This survey is important because, at this time, there are no other data available about the psychological effects of Internet usage. There does seem to be such a thing as 'Internet addiction,' and we need to look at it more closely."

Brenner's survey confirmed some of the stereotypes surrounding Internet culture. "The Net is an attractive place for people with less-well-honed social skills," said Brenner, who nevertheless sees this as a symptom, not a cause of computer geek-dom. "The Net doesn't make people anti-social."

But it isn't just geeks who are being snared by the Web. "Early research on computer addiction focused on the stereotypical computer nerd," said Brenner. "I think the Net has broadened that boundary considerably."

The Internet usage survey is on the Web at http://www.mu.edu/dept/ccenter/intro-srv.html .

Brenner's paper, which tabulates survey results, is at http://www. csnet.com/prep under alphabetical listing "B."

Partnering escalates as embedded market gets too big to go it alone

By Terry Costlow

BOSTON -- At last week's Embedded Systems Conference, chip and software vendors announced a flurry of partnerships and hinted of even more collaborations to come. What's more, software providers said embedded-systems designers can expect to see microprocessors and microcontrollers bundled with operating systems later this year.

Last week's announcements underscored the realization that no one company can provide all the tools needed to gain market share in the diverse embedded-systems world. Sun Microsystems Inc. unveiled the 125-Mips, 100-MHz Microsparc-IIep, the first of a planned family of general-purpose embedded processors, and tipped plans to port the Japanese-developed TRON real-time industrial operating system to the new parts. The II-ep is the first Sparc chip equipped with a Peripheral Component Interconnect controller. Chorus Systems (Campbell, Calif.), meanwhile, disclosed plans to port its Chorus/ Classix OS to the Microsparc-IIe and Ultrasparc processors.

Temic Semiconductor (Yvelines, France), a Daimler Benz division, heralded its Sparc-chip-based foray into embedded systems by announcing pacts with software providers Chorus Systems and Cygnus Support (Mountain View, Calif.). And Advanced RISC Machines linked up with Microtec Research (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Wind River Systems (see related story, above).

The agreements follow the existing business model, whereby chip makers steer customers to RTOS vendors that have ported their software to a given processor architecture. But software providers are examining even tighter linkups with chip makers, in the wake of a recent pact between Wind River Systems and Intel Corp. that bundles Wind River's VXworks operating system with Intel's Intelligent I/O (I2O) processor. Eng ineers who buy the I2O receive a VxWorks license.

"Those arrangements will be more and more common," said Fred Rehhausser, marketing vice president at Chorus Systems.

PC makers claim Hollywood's copyright proposal will kill DVD

By George Leopold and Junko Yoshida

WASHINGTON -- The PC industry, shut out of early talks on digital copyright protection, appears headed for a showdown with Hollywood and consumer-electronics manufacturers over a proposed copyright-management solution for digital video recording.

Representatives of the movie and consumer-electronics industries are seeking legislation on digital video recorders that would protect copyrighted material while permitting some form of home recording. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) have jointly prepared a technical reference document de tailing the copy-management system proposed in the draft Digital Video Recording Act of 1996, slated to be introduced in Congress late this month.

But a leading computer-industry group here that has seen the draft document says the proposals, if implemented, could price DVD-ROM drives out of the consumer market and put the brakes on the convergence scenario in which PCs move from the study to the living room.

Computer-industry executives say the devil is in the details. Worst case, they envision the proposed system denying the PC its core function: the digital retrieval and copying of raw data. By requiring that the DVD-ROM drive recognize any flag and copy-generation-management system (CGMS-D) encoded in the disk header, the proposed spec essentially requires that the DVD-ROM drive pack the intelligence to decide whether to permit the data to be pumped out to a personal computer. Today, that intelligence resides on the PC, not on the drive; CD-ROM drives pump out data as instructed.

If an i ntelligent mechanism is indeed mandated for DVD-ROM drives, "there is no way we can meet the cost point necessary to make the DVD drive as popular as today's CD-ROM drive," said Aymar. "It will be a tremendous decelerator for DVDs on the personal-computer market."

From N+I: Switching alliances unite IC vendors

By Loring Wirbel

LAS VEGAS -- Key switching alliances, linking developers of asynchronous transfer mode hardware with top system OEMs in local- and wide-area-network markets, were announced last week at NetWorld+Interop.

Integrated Telecom Technology Inc. (Gaithersburg, Md.) disclosed a design relationship with Sahara Networks Inc. (Cheshire, Conn.), a closely watched startup working on ATM access concentrators for public networks. Sahara will be the first user of IgT's AAL1 segmentation and reassembly chip, optimized for ATM voice traffic on public networks.

M eanwhile, Ipsilon Networks Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), a newcomer performing IP switching over ATM hardware, made deals galore at NetWorld+Interop, where it gained several awards for its unusual hardware. Ipsilon has allied with Digital Equipment Corp.'s network products division (Littleton, Mass.) to work on future IP protocols and has allowed ATM specialist Scorpio Communications Inc. (New York) to port Ipsilon software to Scorpio workgroup ATM switches. NEC Corp. and Advanced Telecommunications Modules Ltd. also will port the Ipsilion software to their hardware.

For IgT, the alliance with Sahara validates its decision to concentrate on continuous-bit-rate ATM, handled in a segmentation/reassembly (SAR) chip over ATM Adaptation Layer 1. IgT president Ken Lee said that other semiconductor vendors had discussed developing AAL1 SAR chips but that the WAC-021-B processor IgT began shipping last week was "the first such device to be generally available, and to be ready to support voice channelization." The W AC-021 handles three timing configurations for mapping time slots into ATM virtual channels: network synchronous timing, SRTS timing and adaptive timing.

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