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

05/03/96

Intel rolls new Pentium Pro hardware and software support

Startup Diba shares its 'Idea' for consumer info terminals

Congressional copyright talks stall over liability issue

Avant! widens focus in IC physical design

PCI developers see PCI bus pushed in new direction
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

05/02/96

Europe pushes Japan on access to IC market

Revised MCC road map eyes waste management

Drive startup targets PRML read channel

Two new companies aim at IC verification

SID Preview: New applications will be on display

05/01/96

Asante switching hub goes to 100 Mbits

Altia tools simplify making hardware graphical prototypes

OrCad beefs up PLD, FPGA design support

Tektronix rolls out three digital multimeters

Low-temperature anneal produces a better TFT

SID Preview: Reflective LCDs reflect LCD revolution

04/30/96

Thomson, Samsung, introduce cordless phone chips

Harris IGBTs vie with MOSFETs in motor control apps

Bare-die b arriers tumbling

Hitachi revs its popular SH RISC processor

Motorola takes own route to FPGAs

Intel updates 83C51 controller for keyboards

04/29/96

European Commission considers plan to tax bits

State Dept. argues that APIs for PGP crypto are "arms"

Inspector Gen'l urges U.S. to trash foreign-labor programs

Philips fires off answer to the Simply Inter active PC

Actel, QuickLogic, make antifuse FPGAs more flexible

Battleground in workstation wars shifts to interconnect

FCC proposal targets new wireless devices

Intel rolls new Pentium Pro hardware and software support

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. on Monday will ratchet up its push into the business computing segment with second-generation chip-set, board and software announcements targeting the Pentium Pro processor.

The new 440FX PCIset chip set is optimized for 32-bit software, using CPU-to-DRAM pipelining and dynamic deferring. The chip set suppor ts the Universal Serial Bus as well as Bus Master IDE for drive access. In volume, the price will be $94.

Intel also will roll out two new motherboards: the VS440FX ATX form factor, for single-processor configurations, and the PR440FX custom ATX, for dual-processor systems.

In addition, Intel will push deeper into systems territory with a software announcement geared toward helping network managers monitor personal computers hooked into a network. LANDesk Client Manager, building on earlier Intel software for the network, is a DMI-compliant agent and interface that will help managers monitor such factors as PC heat dissipation.

Startup Diba shares its 'Idea' for consumer info terminals

By Junko Yoshida

BELMONT, Calif. -- Startup Diba Inc. has launched an embedded-system platform for low-cost consumer information appliances. Hardware reference designs for the Idea (int eractive digital electronic appliance) platform enable products that offer gateways to various information services without reliance on a personal computer.

Diba plans to license its software technology to consumer- electronics manufacturers and information-service providers. It has no plans to manufacture its own hardware products.

"Our business model will be based on collecting a licensing fee per box. We are ready to give away our hardware reference designs free to any system and service providers," said J. Stuart Read, vice president of market development at Diba.

Among the available hardware reference designs are Diba Internet, for Web browsing; Diba Mail, offering e-mail, fax and phone functions; and Diba Kitchen, which packs a CD player, TV, recipe-search function, menu planner and access to nutritional information.

At the heart of the platform is the Diba Application Foundation application software. The run-time software, which can extend to 350 kbytes, sits on top of a pSOS-ba sed microkernel to provide optimized Idea applications, according to the company.

Congressional copyright talks stall over liability issue

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Digital-copyright legislation may be dead for this year after the collapse of negotiations between Congress and industry on liability and copyright-management issues.

The impasse prompted the House intellectual property subcommittee to schedule a May 15 session to consider amendments to digital-copyright legislation. Talks between on-line service providers and Hollywood executives sponsored by Rep. Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., stalled recently over the issue of on-line providers' liability for copyright violations. The two sides are continuing to talk, congressional sources said, but remained deadlocked over service providers' duties when copyrights are violated by their customers.

An industry executive involved in the talks said, "I just don't know how these issues are going to get resolved." The official predicted a bill would not make it through Congress this year.

Among the issues to be resolved are whether a notification and removal system would be mandatory or voluntary for on-line providers and how long service providers would have after notification to remove materials that violate copyrights. Computer-industry officials said it's unclear when on-line providers would have to act on violations and what the consequences would be.

Avant! widens focus in IC physical design

By Richard Goering

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Expanding into new market niches in IC physical design, Avant! Corp. next week will unveil two products: Star for 3-D interconnect extraction and delay calculation, and Solar for post-route physical optimization. The Sunnyvale company is also announcing a high- performance option for ArcCell, its cell-based layout product.

Star provides more accurate interconnect-delay analysis for critical nets than EDA tools currently offer by dint of its links to a 3-D field solver from Technology Modeling Associates (TMA; Palo Alto, Calif.). It also incorporates filtering and network-reduction techniques so users aren't overwhelmed with data.

Interconnect analysis is a significant concern for chip designers as feature sizes shrink. This week, two startups--Simplex Solutions and Frequency Technology--will announce plans to field their own 3-D extraction and analysis tools (see story below).

Avant!'s other new product, Solar, offers physical optimization via cell sizing, buffer and repeater insertion, and logic restructuring. It claims to reduce worst-case delays by up to 43 percent.

All these products are driven by the increasing importance of interconnect delays in deep-submicron design.

PCI developers see PCI bus pushed in new direction

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- This week's PCI Spring Developers' Conference and Expo showed how far the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus has diffused beyond its beginnings on the personal-computer motherboard. Much of the emphasis here was on new applications: secondary, special-purpose PCI channels; point-to-point links; PCI-based communications systems; and even PCI for embedded computing.

The new applications have enmeshed the bus in a web of new requirements. Dedicated PCI-like links need to run as fast as 132 MHz and may have special latency requirements but virtually no arbitration. PCI in communications systems may need to handle large numbers of relatively slow devices--a particular problem for the original bus design. Embedded PCI may not need the full functionality of the bus, but it may have extreme cost constraints.

The upshot has been a reversal of the evolutio nary direction for PCI. The bus had become an almost invisible, standardized element of the PC architecture. There was pressure to go faster--met by 66-MHz and 64-bit proposals. But the evolution toward greater speed was contained within the all-governing PCI 2.1 specification.

Now, that single evolutionary path is splintering, as the focus shifts from hardware-speed enhancements to two new endeavors: improvement of the existing bus-bandwidth utilization and elimination of unnecessary complexity from the hardware.

Europe pushes Japan on access to IC market

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Demands by the European Union (EU) for increased access to the Japanese semiconductor market failed to produce any resolution during meetings held here this week.

The European Commission (EC) appealed to a delegation led by Foreign Minister Yukihiko Ikeda for support in expanding the U.S.-Japan s emiconductor trade agreement to include the EU. The EU is likely to reject a proposed global agreement on reducing and eliminating tariffs on information-technology products, unless it gets assurances on the semiconductor issue.

Europe and Japan both oppose a simple continuation of the U.S.-Japan pact, though for different reasons. Europe is concerned that the agreement, nominally about foreign market share in Japan, has benefited the United States but not Europe, while Japan is opposed to the setting of numerical targets at all.

Though the five-year pact has succeeded in raising foreign market share in Japan to above 20 percent, European-produced semiconductors account for less than 1 percent, far below Europe's share of the worldwide semiconductor market.

In a related development, U.S. and Japanese industry officials remain deadlocked over government participation in a renewed trade pact after an April 26 meeting in Hawaii. The United States wants to maintain a "government umbrella" over a ny new deal. Tokyo wants an industry-only deal.

The current agreement expires July 31.

Revised MCC road map eyes waste management

By Terry Costlow

AUSTIN, Texas -- Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. (MCC) has redrawn its environmental road map for the electronics industry to outline strategic business opportunities that will save money and yield efficient manufacturing.

This second version analyzes strategies to minimize waste, while the original examined environmental issues in industry segments such as semiconductors and circuit boards. The theme is that thinking environmentally means thinking economically.

"It's somewhat effective to think of waste going down the drain as money going down the drain," said Greg Pitts, director of environmental programs at the MCC. "In manufacturing computer equipment, there's generally more processing material that goes out as waste than the product material that gets sold, even when you exclude the significant amount of water that's used. There is ample opportunity to save money by using techniques that are more ecologically efficient."

He noted that a recent Dell computer was designed to meet proposals that are now being discussed in Europe. The pending legislation requires that computer makers take back junked equipment, putting the onus on the manufacturer to separate plastics and circuit boards that use lead solder, isolating each so it can be recycled or disposed of properly.

Drive startup targets PRML read channel

By Terry Costlow

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- A year-old startup will crack into the burgeoning disk-drive market next week with its first product. Marvell Semiconductor Inc. hopes to become a major read-channel supplier by taking advantage of a technology shift.

As disk-drive densities climb, engineers are moving from age-old peak-detect read channels to partial-response, maximum-likelihood (PRML) read channels. Though PRML has been around for several years and has gained recognition over the past two or three years, analysts say that the disk-drive technology is just starting to move into the marketplace.

"I believe that less than half the drives now ship with PRML," said Mark Kirstein, senior analyst at In-Stat (Scottsdale, Ariz.). "All the drive makers have announced PRML drives, but they're at the top of their performance spread. I'm not sure that many PRML drives actually shipped last year."

Drive makers, who expect to consume close to 120 million read-channel chips this year, are all moving to PRML read channels in order to keep to the trend of increasing density by 60 percent per year.

Two new companies aim at IC verification

By Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Two ambitious startups next week will enter the emerging market for full-chip extraction and verification. Though their initial strategies differ, both Simplex Solutions Inc. and Frequency Technology Inc. (Los Altos, Calif.) hope to establish market share with 3-D interconnect-modeling and -analysis offerings that address pressing issues in deep-submicron-IC design.

Given IC developers' intense concern about deep-submicron interconnect delays--as well as such second-order effects as cross-coupling and electromigration--Simplex and Frequency Technology should get a good reception. Today, chip makers must choose either EDA tools that offer fast but relatively inaccurate 2-D modeling or technology-CAD (TCAD) software that provides precise but very slow 3-D modeling and characterization.

Both startups are headed by EDA veterans and backed with venture capital. Simplex has just hired Penny Herscher, formerly general manager of the design environme nt group at Synopsys Inc., as its new president and chief executive officer. The smaller Frequency Technology is headed by Marty Walker, founder of Analog Design Tools and a director of that company before its 1989 acquisition by Valid Logic.

SID Preview: New applications will be on display

By David Lieberman

SAN DIEGO -- The Society for Information Display (SID) conference opens here the week after next with a push to find profitable applications for the display world. Technologies ranging from electroluminescent and plasma displays to organic LEDs will be offered as solutions to thorny technical and interface problems in systems ranging from the cockpit to the driver's seat.

Leading the charge in ac plasma displays, SGS-Thomson (Grenoble, France) will report on a new driver for these devices that improves efficiency. "Reduction of voltage drops in drivers is a key poi nt because luminance of panels depends on the voltage applied on its electrodes," the company will report.

New activity in vacuum fluorescent displays (VFD) will also be in evidence, as Futaba Corp. (Chiba, Japan) addresses driver needs of a different sort. The company will report on a superbright active-matrix VFD for cars that it has developed with the Electrical and Electronics Research Department of General Motors (Warren, Mich.). Also focusing on a car's driver's seat, a development group from the Optoelectronic Computing Systems Center at the University of Colorado (Boulder) will give details on an AM-LCD for automotive heads-up displays (HUD). The group's liquid-crystal-on-silicon technology has found application in optical correlators and holographic interconnect systems.

Asante switching hub goes to 100 Mbits

San Jose Calif. -- Asante Technologies Inc. has seen th e future, and it is skewed to 100-Mbit switching. Asante, a stackable-hub specialist and an early player in shared Fast Ethernet hubs, plans two waves of 100 Base TX/FX switching-hub introductions over the next six months.

The first family, 52xx, will offer fixed and expandable configurations of 100-Mbit segment switches. Later this year, Asante will use a new adaptive frame-switching ASIC at the heart of a high-end family, the 710xx, capable of auto-negotiation and per-port enabling of full-duplex links.

Many initial purchasers of combo 10/100 network interface cards were purchasing desktop 100-Mbit connectivity as an investment protection and still using links at 10 Mbits/second. However, the last few months have seen an explosion of workgroups implementing 100-Mbit ports at the hub.

The 5216 and 5216xp differ only in their expandability. The former is a fixed-function segment switch with dual Fast Ethernet full-duplex uplinks, while the latter has open slots to allow users to choose TX (C ategory 5 wire), FX (fiber optics) or FDDI as an uplink port.

Altia tools simplify making hardware graphical prototypes

By Loring Wirbel

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Altia Inc. has added an interpreted language to its embedded-systems suite to let marketing or ergonomic-design specialists create graphical prototypes of hardware designs. With release 2.0 of the Altia Design environment, developers who lack detailed programming skills use a pop-up series of If-Then statements to create front panels with switches, knobs and displays that maintain complex interrelationships.

Altia's software for Unix and Windows has proved popular for developing hardware ranging from test equipment to cellular-phone handsets to automated teller machines. Altia developers knew that not all links among objects in a design kit could be graphically based yet realized that non-engineering users did not want to learn code.

The answer for the second software release was the creation of a control editor, which uses event-driven links, without imposing the full burden of a state-machine model. As the user creates or defines objects, a series of menu prompts allows only links that can be established logically at that level.

OrCad beefs up PLD, FPGA design support

By Richard Goering

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Updated releases of OrCad Simulate and OrCad Capture for Windows improve support for gate-level PLD and FPGA design with free net-list interfaces and libraries.

The releases mark the first volley in a two-part campaign that will later add support for HDL-based design, said Jim Plymale, OrCad's vice president of marketing.

"What we have now is a complete, gate-level design solution that's vendor-independent and also works at the system level," said Plyma le. "That's pretty unique in this market."

OrCad Capture 7.0 includes net-list interfaces for back-end tool sets for Actel, Altera, AMD, Lattice and Xilinx, with others in the works. Previously, Plymale said, users had to go to these vendors and buy special kits.

The interfaces were developed by OrCad and use EDIF and VHDL, except for the Xilinx interface, which directly generates Xilinx XNF files from schematics. AMD back-end support is provided by Minc Inc. (Colorado Springs, Colo.).

Capture 7.0 also includes libraries of schematic models for each of those five PLD/FPGA vendors. Plymale said these libraries were provided by the vendors with the exception of Altera; that library was developed by OrCad.

Tektronix rolls out three digital multimeters

By Stan Runyon

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Tektronix Inc. has rolled out a family of three digital multimeters (DMM), primarily aiming at design verification and qualification.

At the high end of the line, the DMM870 characterizes a design or checks its performance under different conditions. At $289, it provides a dc accuracy of 0.06 percent and a resolution of 4-3/4 digits, or 40,000 counts.

The midrange and entry-level units, the DMM850 ($249) and DMM830 ($199), provide the same display resolution as the DMM870. But their accuracies drop to 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively.

For characterization, the two higher-end units carry a number of features. For example, the DMM870 and DMM850 measure temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. Both carry dual numeric displays, so users can read two measurements at once on a signal--say, frequency and amplitude--without any switching required.

Both units also time-stamp, or label, minimum and maximum values that occur during testing. The DMM870 (which is backlit) goes on from there, letting engineers set high- and low-limit tolerances, with a beep ind icating when those settings have been exceeded. Also, a 1-ms peak-hold function in the 870 helps to detect anomalies by recording the minimum and maximum readings of short-mode events.

Low-temperature anneal produces a better TFT

SEOUL, South Korea -- While reflective LCDs offer the potential to bring down the price and power consumption of portable displays, advanced research at the high end remains focused on performance. One problem that has plagued LCD technology from the start is the poor switching performance of liquid crystals.

That problem spawned the move to active-matrix technology, which places transistors behind each pixel to enhance the switching speed. Built over large areas in polycrystalline silicon, the thin-film transistors (TFTs), while slow compared with the high-performance, single-crystal variety, are fast enough for human-interface applications.

Seoul National University's Department of Metallurgical Engineering is working on an approach to TFT fabrication that promises a lower-cost manufacturing process for high-performance LCDs. The technique lowers the fabrication temperature for TFT circuits to below 500ýC, allowing the use of cheap glass substrates while boosting the quality of the transistors, said researchers Seok-Woon Lee and Seung-Ki Joo. The key to achieving high performance with low-temperature annealing, the researchers report, was their employment of a process known as metal-induced lateral crystallization to recrystallize the transistor channel.

SID Preview: Reflective LCDs reflect LCD revolution

By David Lieberman

SAN DIEGO -- The future of liquid-crystal displays is jelling at Japanese labs and other research facilities worldwide. More than a dozen papers slated for the Society for Information Dis play (SID) conference, which kicks off here May 14, will testify to the pursuit of reflective LCD technologies, which promise a low-power advantage over current displays.

The emergence of reflective technologies that are bright enough for use in multicolor displays has fired the imaginations of portable-system developers. Chuck McLaughlin of the McLaughlin Consulting Group (Menlo Park, Calif.) said designers "lust after" the technology.

By manipulating ambient light, instead of depending on an integral backlight or sidelight, reflective LCDs could "drastically reduce the power consumption, thickness and weight" of displays for notebook computers, a team from the Functional Devices Research Laboratories of NEC Corp. (Kanagawa) will report. The need for reflective displays is perhaps most pressing for handheld applications, in which the restrictions imposed by very low power have forced designers to settle for relatively low-performance displays.

Many of the reflective LCD projects to be high lighted at the conference involve LC materials other than the conventional, twisted-nematic (TN) types. Even papers from TN stalwarts Toshiba and NEC blatantly reject the mainstream TN-family LCs for consideration of reflective color LCDs.

Thomson, Samsung, introduce cordless phone chips

LINCOLN, Mass. -- SGS-Thomson and Samsung Electronics have brought to market cordless-telephone chips that combine low-voltage operation with expanded feature sets.

SGS-Thomson is offering a complete analog front end, while Samsung is concentrating on the radio-frequency back end.

The STM chip, ST5090, is a full-duplex data converter designed for either GSM cellular handsets or CT2 and DECT digital cordless phones. A matched set of A/D and D/A functions provides either 14-bit linear or 8-bit compressed/expanded conversion. The switch between the linear and compander modes, like most of th e other functions of the chip, is controlled via microwire interface.

Samsung recently announced an RF amplifier/receiver chip for the mass-market 43- to 49-MHz cordless band.

The move was spurred by a recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission to expand that band to 25 channels from the original 10, according to Samsung. In crowded markets, users of existing 10-channel cordless phones are having trouble finding an open channel. The FCC has responded by permitting the phones to use more channels, but most silicon in the market today is limited to 10 channels.

Harris IGBTs vie with MOSFETs in motor control apps

By Ashok Bindra

MOUNTAINTOP, Pa. -- Harris Semiconductor claims its third-generation insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBT) offer lower conduction losses and switch at up to 50 kHz to compete against MOSFETs in motor-control, switching-power- supply and other applications.

To lower the price, the 6-A, 600-V IGBTs have been built on size-1 (74- x 98-mil) dice, according to Wallace Williams, staff engineer for applications at Harris. Versions in die sizes 2 and 3 are being readied for later release.

Designated HGTD3N60C3, the ultrafast switching (UFS) series delivers 50-kHz switching at up to 2.1 A, 480 V. Other third-generation IGBTs in the works include 12-, 20- and 30-A devices with 600-V breakdown voltages.

According to Harris, the faster switching is made possible by appropriately controlling the lifetime of minority carriers, without a deterioration in the saturating conditions, and by optimizing the cell geometries.

Two target applications for the UFS IGBTs are fractional-horsepower-motor control and line-voltage switching power supplies.

Bare-die barriers tumbling

By Terry Costlow

AUBU RN, Ala. -- The infrastructure for bare chips continues to grow. The Alabama Microelectronics Science and Technology Center at Auburn University has released dummy parts that make it easier and cheaper to test rework and manufacturing lines. Concurrently, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. (MCC) and Sematech announced that the application of bare die will be highlighted at their third workshop on known- good die (KGD).

Much of the focus of the packaging industry is shifting to application, since the availability of KGD has become less of an issue over the past two years. The makers of multichip modules (MCM) are now forging ahead, saying that bare-die availability is no longer a roadblock, and more circuit board vendors are starting to talk seriously about implementing chip-on-board (COB) technology.

The Auburn University program is designed to facilitate the shift from discussion to manufacture. Auburn, working under a grant from Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), has designed a ser ies of standard test die. The bare parts will make it possible to evaluate materials, processes and designs of MCMs, chip-on-board and direct chip attachment. While it's unusual for a university to offer commercial parts, SRC and Auburn decided that semiconductor makers wouldn't be interested in shipping non-functioning parts.

Hitachi revs its popular SH RISC processor

BRISBANE, Calif. -- Hitachi America Ltd. continues to proliferate the world's largest-selling RISC architecture: the 32-bit SH family. The company claims to have shipped more than 14 million units of SH processors to over 600 designs, including the Sega Saturn.

The road map for the SH family calls for continuous boosts in performance without increasing power consumption. It also calls for strict upward compatibility of binary code. The 7702, the first member of the SH-3 family, attempts to meet the goals set out in the road map.

Using Hitachi's mature 0.5-micron CMOS logic process, the chip delivers 45 Mips at 45 MHz and under 0.5 W, according to Hitachi. The part augments the already-streamlined SH instruction set with a 32 x 32 multiply- accumulate unit, giving the device substantial signal-processing capability.

Growing family

The SH-3 family will spawn several members, including different mixes of on-chip peripherals and different performance levels extending to 100 MHz.

The 7702 is the first member to use a new five-stage execution pipe developed by Hitachi, providing single-cycle operation.

Motorola takes own route to FPGAs

PHOENIX -- Motorola has begun actively marketing its own family of FPGAs. Designed by Pilkington PLC, the fine-grained Motorola Programmable Array (MPA) line has a unique hierarchical interconnect structure that pushes it outside the mainst ream of FPGAs.

This week, the company announced the 6400-macrocell MPA1064. Two serial EPROMs for loading the SRAM-configured FPGAs and a design software package for the family were also released.

Pilkington's architecture for the MPA is based on tiny, two-input macrocells, each one a two-input NAND gate. Each of these cells also has a predefined secondary function, which may be used in place of the NAND gate. A quarter of the cells can be D-type flip-flops, a quarter can be wired-OR gates, and the remaining half can be two-input XOR gates. Thus, in the 6,400-cell device, there are 1,600 internal flip-flops possible, not counting the input and output latches in the interconnect structure.

Intel updates 83C51 controller for keyboards

Chandler, Ariz. -- Intel Corp.'s Special Markets Division has upgraded its popular 83C51 controller for keyboards, sweeping in some external components and offering software compatibility with controllers for the emerging Universal Serial Bus (USB).

The latest upgrade incorporates LED drivers, an RC resonator with integrated capacitor, power-on reset circuitry and key scan functions. The controller replaces 11 discrete components needed with its predecessor.

The integrated RC resonator, which eliminates the need for a clock crystal, has a frequency range of 4 to 6 MHz with 5 percent accuracy.

Other features of the chip are 4 kbytes of ROM, a 16-bit timer and 128 bytes of RAM.

An enhanced instruction set permits reduction of code size, supporting the three extra function keys of Windows 95. It also supports quasi-directional I/O ports.

European Commission considers plan to tax bits

By Peter Clarke

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- A report prepared for the European Commission (EC) urges it to consider levy ing a "bit tax" on information sent over the Internet and other networks.

The EC report reasons that the value of the average cyberspace transaction will increase as time goes by, resulting in fewer physical transactions. The upshot, the report says, will be a shrinking government tax base. Evidence of such a trend may already have surfaced: Use of the Internet to import goods and services electronically from outside the continent has allowed some Europeans to avoid payments under Europe's value-added-tax (VAT) system.

Luc Soete, chairman of the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) that prepared the report, observed that sending his group's report by mail or courier, rather than electronically, would involve taxes on fuel purchases and on the profits of the companies involved in physically shuttling the document to recipients. "As society moves toward the information society, tax revenue needs to shift emphasis from material goods to virtual goods and services," he said. I think we will see a very rapi d introduction [of such a tax structure] in one or two years' time."

He acknowledged the prevailing "negative view about a bit tax" and attributed it in part to "concern that it could inhibit adoption of information technology. But once people have the technology, not many would go back. Whether the tax is 1 cent per bit or 1 cent per kbit is, of course, completely open."

Europe is not alone in considering an Internet tax. A recent decision by the Florida Department of Revenue to levy a tax on Internet-access services drew howls of protest. Nonetheless, many states are said to be considering similar levies.

The interim report can be accessed from http://www.ispo.cec.be/hleg/hleg.html.

State Dept. argues that APIs for PGP crypto are "arms"

By Loring Wirbel

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department may have halted attempts to bring criminal charges against Phil Zimmerm ann, author of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) public-key cryptography algorithms, but the State Department is taking an increasingly hard line on PGP. State is now arguing that application programming interfaces (API) allowing PGP program insertion should be subject to control under arms-trading statutes.

Warning letters sent out in the last few weeks reflect the bizarre status of cryptography algorithms in the government's Export Control Act. Under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) promulgated under the act, the government can restrict any encryption programs the National Security Agency (NSA) is uncomfortable with. The new moves represent the first time State has tried to extend ITAR to software that only provides hooks for encryption packages, however.

"There is room to maneuver and make strong arguments that the rules on crypto APIs have some serious ambiguities," said Kenneth Bass, an attorney specializing in export control with the Washington law firm of Venable Attorneys a t Law.

Inspector Gen'l urges U.S. to trash foreign-labor programs

By Robert Bellinger

WASHINGTON -- More fuel has been added to the immigration-reform fire, with the release of a scathing report claiming that the Department of Labor's foreign-labor programs "do not protect U.S. workers' jobs or wages from foreign labor."

In an audit prepared for the Labor Department, the U.S. inspector general has recommended that both the Permanent Labor Certification (PLC) and the temporary H-1B Labor Condition Application (LCA) programs "be eliminated as they currently exist."

To replace them, Labor should launch more effective programs funded in part by the employers who benefit from foreign labor, the report said. "[Labor's] role under the current program design amounts to little more than a paper shuffle for the PLC program and a rubber stamping of applications for the LCA prog ram," it charged.

The Clinton administration backs the suggested reform, which would require an act of Congress. Engineering groups, including the IEEE, agreed, but industry and free-market advocates trounced the findings.

"This documents all the things we have been saying," said Edith Holleman, board member of the American Engineering Association, a Fort Worth, Texas, group that has long complained that engineering employers abuse the certification programs. "The Permanent Labor Certification program is a sham. And the H-1B is not being used for [its intended] purpose."

Philips fires off answer to the Simply Interactive PC

By Junko Yoshida

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- A powerful consumer-electronics conglomerate fired a salvo of digital multimedia announcements intended to defend the TV's turf from Microsoft's entertainment-oriented Simply Interactive PC and a legion of simil ar initiatives.

Slated for launch over the next six to 12 months are the Multimedia Access Terminal (MAT), a $300 Web browser designed for display on a conventional TV; the Smart Card TV, with slots in the back for add-in cards; NTSC/VGA TVs; plasma displays; DVD digital-video players; and high-definition TVs.

The announcements here underscore the polarization of the computer and home-electronics industries, as they compete for the consumer's digital-entertainment dollar. Ironically, the PC and consumer-electronics camps have mapped similar battle plans: Each side seeks to win by making its platform look, feel and function more like the other's.

Philips believes the TV will lose ground to PCs unless traditional home-entertainment electronics companies develop more PC-like platforms that retain the TV's ease of use. Company executives emphasized the latter when they described the target market as comprising consumers who "won't put up with staying on help lines for hours" and who are "not int erested in upgrading PCs every few years just for the thrill of spending more than $2,000."

Actel, QuickLogic, make antifuse FPGAs more flexible

By Ron Wilson

BOSTON -- Actel Corp. and QuickLogic Corp., the two most prominent proponents of antifuse field-programmable gate arrays, are moving to mixed architectures that combine antifuse circuitry with other types of logic, EE Times has learned. The information was disclosed during active dialogue between vendors and users at PLDCon 96 here last week.

Both Actel (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and QuickLogic (Santa Clara, Calif.) aim to increase the flexibility of their product offerings. But the two are moving in quite different directions. Actel, which has already added SRAM cells to its logic arrays for memory purposes, is preparing a heterogeneous architecture that will include both one-time programmable antifuse logic cells and in-ci rcuit programmable SRAM-based logic cells. QuickLogic, for its part, is adding diffused, fixed-function blocks on the die with FPGA cells.

A source close to Actel explained that combining antifuse and reprogrammable circuitry offers a unique set of advantages. Antifuse-based FPGAs are generally conceded to have denser, faster interconnect than those based on SRAMs. But the antifuses can only be programmed once. SRAM circuitry, on the other hand, can be reprogrammed in place. This makes it possible to adapt a design to changing protocols or interface standards in the field, without hardware upgrades.

Battleground in workstation wars shifts to interconnect

By Alexander Wolfe

The battleground in the workstation wars is shifting from the processor-performance skirmishes long fought by competing RISC camps to a new front: ultrafast system interconnects, which many experts belie ve offer a better way to boost power into the supercomputing realm.

"In parallel computation, the ability of processing nodes to communicate without bogging down is directly related to the speed of the interconnect," said Michael Burwen, president of market analysts Superperformance Computing Service (Mountain View, Calif.).

Separate efforts have borne fruit at Digital Equipment Corp., IBM, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems. All four vendors have fielded buses and interconnection subsystems that link the many individual nodes in a multiprocessor system or workstation cluster. The efforts are being buttressed by parallel work on fast, internal system buses, which speed communications among processors, memory and storage devices inside the same box.

Driving the developments is the increasing prevalence of clusters--typically, groups of four to eight individual workstations tied together by a high-speed connection. Moreover, each workstation in a cluster will itself often have as many as ei ght on-board CPUs.

FCC proposal targets new wireless devices

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week launched a proposal to set aside 350 MHz of RF spectrum to spur development of unlicensed PC-like devices that would support high-speed data transfers over new wireless local-area networks.

If adopted, the measure would provide schools, libraries, hospitals and individuals with free access to wireless frequencies that could be used to bypass telephone networks. The new wireless LANs would also provide access to the Internet and other public networks.

The proposal would allot spectrum in the 5.15-to-5.35-GHz and 5.725-to-5.875-GHz bands for what the FCC calls "unlicensed NII/Supernet devices." FCC officials said these could take the form of a PC card or an external device.

"These devices may further the universal serv ice goals of the [1996] Telecommunications Act by offering classrooms, libraries, health-care providers and other users inexpensive networking alternatives that may access advanced telecommunications services," the FCC said in adopting the measure.

The spectrum being discussed is currently used by the government for navigation systems such as the Microwave Landing System and by industry for fixed satellite services and amateur radio.

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