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

05/10/96

Sony proposes its own DVD-audio format

IEEE urges government-industry cooperation in laser comsat research

Rambus fixes latency problem in its 16M DRAMs

German design house Sican opens in U.S.

SID Preview: LCD vendors aim to knock CRTs off desktop

Synopsys to field synthesis-through-layout suite
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

05/09/96

Cascade courts the fabless with software leasing option

From CICC: Rhines urges design integration

Apple to tip new strategy

Soft demand loosens fab capacity in Taiwan

Boom forecast for information industry

05/08/96

Upgraded HTML released by industry consort ium

Genetic algorithms beat humans in creating robotics

VLSI Tech's net-interface module targets cable set-top

MESFETs give GaAs to mobile devices

Board brings fuzzy logic to control engineering

Snyder seeks IEEE presidency as petition candidate

05/07/96

Lucent unleashes Inferno technology for 'Net and networks

Software quality-checkers target Net

Developers still adding upgrades to CompactPCI

Intel, HP look to manage multiple environments

Shomiti takes new tack in LAN analysis

05/06/96

Halla named CEO of National Semiconductor

From Internet World: Fab 3, Netscape 3.0, pack 'em in

New image system takes on CCDs

From NCTA: Debates how interactive cable TV will work

Cable vendors move to open architectures

IBM pushes its ASICs to 0.18 micron

Intel takes road show to Asia

30-day truce seen in copyright fight

Big talk by IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, about speech recognition

Sony proposes its own DVD-audio format

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- Sony Corp. has thrown a monkey wrench into digital video disk (DVD) standardization efforts by proposing an audio-recording format t hat differs markedly from the ideas of most of the companies working on the spec.

Since Sony is a powerhouse in DVD, it may force a delay in DVD audio standardization if it insists on promoting its Direct Stream Digital (DSD) format. Sharp Corp. and several other companies are considering the proposal, but a Sharp spokesman said "that does not mean Sharp will support DSD as the DVD audio format."

Sony's scheme features 1-bit quantization with high-speed sampling, 64 times that of a CD's 44.1 kHz. The dynamic range within 20 kHz will be more than 120 dB, according to a Sony spokesman.

"DSD differs from conventional digital formats, which are automatically defined by the sampling frequency and quantization bits," the spokesman said. "Compared with that approach DSD offers flexibility" and eliminates "the down-sampling and oversampling filters used in conventional media." The result, he said, is "less noise."

IEEE urges government-industry cooperation in laser comsat research

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- The federal government should sponsor demonstrations to establish the viability of nascent laser satellite communications, which provide a range of advantages over conventional microwave technology, according to an industry study.

Space-flight demonstrations are critical, concludes the study sponsored by the IEEE's United States Activities branch, since Japan and European competitors are proceeding with their own flight testing. The study argues that testing is too expensive for U.S. industry to undertake alone, and that a Pentagon-NASA partnership should lead the way on flight demonstrations.

"Laser systems offer valuable performance capabilities and are ready and ripe for implementation," concludes the IEEE report written by Burton Edelson and Geoffrey Hyde.

Laser satellite communications use optical frequencies to relay data in space or the ea rth's atmosphere between satellites, satellites and ground terminals or satellites and aircraft. The report found that the United States has invested heavily in laser satellite communications technology over the last three decades, but the authors did not attempt to quantify the investment.

Rambus fixes latency problem in its 16M DRAMs

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Rambus Inc. and five of its DRAM-manufacturing partners will announce today that they have developed a concurrent 16-Mbit Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) that speeds up first-access latency--the Achilles' heel of the Rambus architecture.

The 16-Mbit concurrent RDRAM employs the multiple-memory-bank technology that Rambus and its partners developed for the 64-Mbit density. The first silicon of the concurrent architecture, benefiting from the speed boost of sub-half-micron manufacturing processes, has led Rambus to claim 600-Mbyt e/second peak transfer rates, as well as parity with or superiority to synchronous DRAMs in first-access-latency performance.

Introductions by NEC Corp. and Toshiba Corp. in mid-1997 will be followed by 16-Mbit parts from South Korean Rambus partners LG Semicon and Samsung Electronics, as well as by Oki Electric's Semiconductor Division. Hitachi Ltd. will stick by its original plan to manufacture RDRAMs at the 64-Mbit density and will bypass the 16-Mbit concurrent RDRAM.

All six RDRAM-manufacturing partners will introduce 64-Mbit RDRAMs, using a four-bank concurrent design, in mid-1997 or later. But the 16-Mbit parts will have a cost advantage for at least a year, until bit crossover occurs.

German design house Sican opens in U.S.

By Junko Yoshida

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO -- German microelectronics-design house Sican GmbH has opened a subsidiary here, aiming to crack the U .S. market with a series of multimedia building blocks.

Sican (Hannover Germany) is fairly well-known in Europe but has had a low profile in the United States. The subsidiary, Sican Microelectronics Corp., hopes to build a U.S. technology-licensing business on the explosive demand for highly complex multimedia and communication chips, including RF and asynchronous-transfer-mode (ATM) designs. Many chip and system vendors have been unwilling or unable to undertake such design efforts in-house.

"Sican is not a fabless chip company," stressed subsidiary president Steve Szirom. The biggest difference between Sican and ASIC houses, according to subsidiary executives, is the level of modification available to customers as predeveloped building blocks.

"Most ASIC companies will give you a complete core and hide the internals. Unless you can give them a huge silicon commitment, it's extremely difficult for you to convince them to modify their basic building blocks for you," said Frank Schirrmeiste r, department manager of media-chip technology.

SID Preview: LCD vendors aim to knock CRTs off desktop

By David Lieberman

SAN DIEGO -- Liquid-crystal-display vendors will invade next week's Society of Information Displays (SID) conference, here, with the intention of knocking the CRT off the desktop.

At the conference, NEC Electronics Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) will announce wide-angle active-matrix (AM) LCDs aimed squarely at the desktop. And Hitachi America Ltd. (Norcross, Ga.) will demonstrate and discuss a 13.3-inch in-light-switching AM-LCD that takes LCDs to new heights of viewability.

Viewing angle doesn't matter much in the mother of all LCD markets, the portable computer. For computing while commuting, in fact, some perceive narrow angle as a no-cost privacy shield. But viewing angle does matter on the desktop, where users are used to CRTs and their wide vi ewing cone. The viewing cone of LCDs has been not only low, but asymmetrical as well: typical specs might be ý45ý on the horizontal access and +15ý/-30ý on the vertical. Light-emitting display technologies such as electroluminescent displays, plasma displays and CRTs, in contrast, typically have a ý80ý to ý90ý viewing cone on both the horizontal and vertical axes.

In recent days, Sharp Electronics (Camas, Wash.), the Electronic Components Division of Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and the Electronic Device Group of Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) have all brought enhanced-angle LCDs to market, claiming viewing cones in the ý50ý to ý60ýrange.

Synopsys to field synthesis-through-layout suite

By Richard Goering

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Synthesis market leader Synopsys Inc. has laid down the gauntlet and signaled its intent to fiel d an integrated synthesis-through-layout tool solution. The move puts the Mountain View company on an apparent collision course with IC-CAD vendors such as Cadence, Avant! and Compass.

The vehicle is a strategic partnership and minority investment in Cooper & Chyan Technology (CCT; Cupertino, Calif.), whose "shape-based" technology underlies a physical design solution both companies will field. Due in the second half of 1997, the solution is essentially complete except for final chip-level verification and extraction. It will include design-planning, placement and global-routing technology that Synopsys acquired earlier this year from IBM Corp.

Synopsys announced it has purchased 9.9 percent of CCT for approximately $17.5 million, and that the pair would jointly develop a detailed router for 0.25-micron ASICs. The router, to be owned and sold by CCT, will be based on technology that company uses in its pc-board Specctra router and its more recent IC Craftsman, a router gaining considerable att ention in the full-custom market.

Cascade courts the fabless with software leasing option

By Richard Goering

BELLEVUE, Wash. -- Cascade Design Automation has become one of the first EDA vendors to offer licensing options based on renting or leasing software. The options are part of Cascade's new Fabless Semiconductor Initiative (FSI), aimed at providing better support for small- to medium-sized fabless IC vendors.

Cascade has been serving fabless vendors for several years with Epoch, a tool set that includes module generation, IC placement and routing, and timing and power analysis. Epoch supports more than 80 semiconductor processes and enables users to produce a portable IC layout.

Denise Slocomb, Cascade's product manager for libraries and physical design, said the initiative is aimed at a new wave of fabless IC vendors. "These are small startup firms with less than 100 people and, in some cases, less than 10," she said. "They've got to get silicon out fast, and they're low on capital."

One aspect of the FSI program involves some improvements to Epoch. Slocomb said the tool set offers improved placement and routing for better density; an on-line "data book" for storing timing and power information; additional high-speed, low-power compiled memories; and better support for data paths in standard cells.

From CICC: Rhines urges design integration

By Chappell Brown

SAN DIEGO -- Circuit designers are falling behind the rapid advance of silicon-process technology as the industry moves to 0.35-micron design rules and beyond. Current methods will require a major restructuring if the electronics industry is to benefit from the rapid gains being made at the process level.

That view of the future of electronic design emerged in a keynote address delivered by Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor Graphics Inc., earlier this week at the Custom Integrated Circuit Conference (CICC) here.

Addressing the groundwork for circuit design that needs to be done now to move into the next century, Rhines described a highly integrated approach in which system designers, embedded-software engineers and hardware designers would merge their efforts in a total design and prototyping environment. Without that kind of collaboration, which would generate a critical ability to anticipate the consequences of design decisions, the promise of highly integrated systems on a chip will not be realized, Rhines concluded.

"Technology changes about 3 percent per month, and a large group of you go to work each day solving the problems required to make that possible," said Rhines, addressing the audience of advanced circuit designers. But despite the expertise being focused on circuit design, chips using state-of-the-art 0.35 and 0.25 design rules are mostly scaled down versions of work developed in the previous generation.

Interconnect problems

Apple to tip new strategy

By Craig Matsumoto

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Gilbert Amelio, the new chief of Apple Computer Inc., will announce his strategy for a corporate turn-around at the company's developers' conference here next week. Along the way during his self-imposed 100-day grace period., he's been dropping hints about his plan.

It's apparent he won't drop any of Apple's major product lines, analysts said. In fact, Amelio sees potential for the Newton MessagePad, a much-maligned product.

Amelio also has stated he won't cut staff any further. Apple already has plans to drop 2,800 employees, part of the restructuring costs wrapped up in $740 million in losses for the quarter ended in March.

"He's done a lot of intelligent things so far in terms of trying to target margins rather than market share," said Michael Kwatinetz, a financial analyst with PaineWebber Inc. (New York). "But that's just a start."

Indeed, Amelio's biggest choices lie in rebuilding Apple's executive team. Already, he's brought chief administrative officer George Scalise from National Semiconductor and hired a new chief financial officer. But several vacancies remain. Most notable is the head of R&D, after David Nagel took the plum post of running Lucent Corp.'s Bell Laboratories.

Soft demand loosens fab capacity in Taiwan

By Mark Carroll

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The balance of power in the semiconductor market here has shifted back to the buyer. After more than two years of tight capacity at Taiwan's fabs, the softening semiconductor market has opened up fab lines and prompted vendors to move design customers to more sophisticated--and higher margin--proc esses.

Local forecasters estimate that the book-to-bill ratio has tumbled to 0.8 this year. But comments from Taiwanese foundry customers are perhaps the most telling indicator of the current situation.

"This year, TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.] is sending its top salespeople out to visit us," said a representative of one of Taiwan's largest ASIC-design houses. "Last year, they never came to us; we had to go to them and stand in line."

The president of another design house observed that "prices began going down at the beginning of the year. March saw an acceleration of the process. It's also a lot easier to obtain foundry time."

And a representative of a third chip designer said prices "have declined by a reasonable amount this year, if you order in quantity. The foundries are achieving higher efficiencies, so they are passing some of the savings back to us."

Boom forecast for information industry

By Martin Gold

SOMERSET, N.J. -- Fueled by a communications revolution, today's $1.5 trillion global information industry could double by early next century. That was the prediction of keynoter Victor B. Lawrence at the recent Electro 96 here.

"Communications networking is contributing to the global digital and multimedia thrust that's transforming the way we live, work, play, travel and communicate," said Lawrence, the director of advanced communications technology at the Bell Laboratories operation of Lucent Technologies. "The pace of recent change in communications technologies is coming faster than at any time in the fast-moving history of communications."

Customer demand and global competition are spawning these advances in technology, he said, and regulatory and political influences such as the privatization of telecommunications around the world and the recent landmark telecommunications bill enacted by Congress play a major par t as well.

He cited broadband digital communications, network access for consumers and businesses, wireless communications, and data networking including the Internet as the enablers for what he calls the communications revolution.

Upgraded HTML released by industry consortium

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- An HTML upgrade released Tuesday by a Web consortium adds widely deployed features like applets, tables and text flow around images along with backward compatibility to the HTML 2.0 standard.

The World Wide Web Consortium at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science said the new version called HTML 3.2 responds to calls for clarifying the status of the markup language as a non-proprietary standard.

The new HTML specification was developed by MIT together with consortium members IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Netscape Communications Corp., Novell and Sun Microsystems Inc.

The consortium is continuing to work with vendors on HTML extensions for multimedia objects, scripting, style sheets, layout, forms, higher quality printing and math. The group plans to incorporate this work into new versions of HTML

Genetic algorithms beat humans in creating robotics

By R. Colin Johnson

ROME -- Genetic algorithms evolve better robotics controllers than humans, according a researcher with Italy's National Research Council.

Researcher Stefano Nolfi observed that neural networks solve one thorny problem of artificial intelligence (AI)--automatic pattern recognition--but that robotics AI applications also require intelligent controller design. It appears that genetic algorithms might be the ideal solution to that problem.

"By following the evolutionary approach, a simpler, more robust solution can be obtained," Nolfi said.

Robotics design ers solved the shortcomings of traditional AI by harnessing neural networks to learn tasks that were difficult to program and by assigning the easier tasks to separate modules. The approach, sometimes called behavior-based robotics, isolates the robotic-controller function in independent modules; some of the modules are neural networks, but the rest use conventional AI programming techniques.

Older, manual design methods can only try a few controller designs, since an engineer must decompose each one into modules, debug the modules and then integrate them back into a working system for testing.

VLSI Tech's net-interface module targets cable set-top

By Junko Yoshida

LOS ANGELES -- Trying to leverage its presence in digital satellite-decoder ICs in the cable set-top market, VLSI Technology Inc. this week showed off a single-chip 16 to 256 quadrature-amplitude-modulatio n (QAM)/forward-error-correction (FEC) receiver. The VES1514 was unveiled here at the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) show.

The chip integrates QAM, FEC, adaptive equalization and descrambling. VLSI Technology (San Jose, Calif.) said that the part will serve as the front-end network-interface module in digital cable set-top boxes and cable-modem applications. The VES1514 complies with the digital video broadcasting-cable (DVB-C) standard.

DVB, developed as a pan-European digital-TV standard for satellite, cable and digital-terrestrial broadcasting, is gaining momentum internationally. Digital-satellite service providers in the United States and Japan, as well as some U.S. telco/cable operators, are opting for DVB standards-based specs.

MESFETs give GaAs to mobile devices

By Gail Robinson

WARREN, N.J. -- With the growing consumer demand for smaller, wireless products such as cellular phones and pagers, gallium-arsenide MESFET technology is emerging as a power saver. Usually associated with high-frequency applications because of its speed advantages, GaAs's combination of other unique properties, such as a low on-resistance, give it an edge in portables. One example: a new switched GaAs dc/dc converter, introduced recently at the International Wireless Convention Exposition.

Designed by Anadigics Inc., the AVC7660 converter runs at 250 kHz, can work with small (0.1-microfarad) external capacitors and comes in a 4- x 5-mm, SOT-25 package. In comparison, similar silicon 7660 dc/dc converters, offered in the larger SO-8 package, have a clock frequency of 10 kHz, resulting in the need for 10-microfarad external capacitors.

The converter design originated in work with GaAs power amplifiers. "The technology is highly efficient for RF power amplifiers where you can get a good output without burning a lot of power," said Robert Bayruns, vice preside nt of research and technology at Anadigics here. The high speed of electrons in the material is ideally suited for power amps, he said, where the device acts like a switch.

Board brings fuzzy logic to control engineering

By R. Colin Johnson

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Learning to apply fuzzy logic to control engineering is the goal of a fuzzy-logic applications-software helper from Rigel Corp. The board-based system, called Flash, offers a simplified learning environment for engineers just getting started with embedded fuzzy-logic control.

Before fuzzy logic, engineers often resorted to table lookups when performing nonlinear control. But what happens when the input to be evaluated is not contained in the lookup table?

"We used to come up with homegrown schemes to interpolate between values in a lookup table, but we discovered that fuzzy logic can do this in a much mor e manageable format," said chief engineer Sencer Yeralan.

Rigel hopes to integrate fuzzy logic with a next-generation development system. "We create a database-like application that more efficiently manages the hundreds of registers and data-type combinations used by modern microcontrollers," Yeralan said. "Fuzzy will be another data type in our arsenal."

Snyder seeks IEEE presidency as petition candidate

WASHINGTON -- Joel Snyder, vice president of professional activities and chair of IEEE-USA, is seeking to run as a petition candidate for the IEEE presidency this year.

Snyder has been circulating petitions at IEEE sections and meetings, to round up the required signatures to get on this year's ballot. He must collect signatures from 1 percent of the voting membership.

If he qualifies, Snyder would face a director of the National Science Foundation, Joseph Bord ogna, and the former vice president of regional activities, educator Vijay Bhargava. Both were nominated by the IEEE board.

Already, a presidential debate has been scheduled by the Philadelphia Section for June 25.

As a candidate, Snyder is expected to emphasize his work in professional activities. Most recently, he appeared at the White House Rose Garden to hear President Clinton present his proposed Retirement Savings and Security Act. The proposal would create what Snyder has called a "more portable" pension than currently exists. A second issue in which Snyder has been directly involved is the push for tighter immigration policies.

Lucent unleashes Inferno technology for 'Net and networks

By Alexander Wolfe

MURRAY HILL, N.J. -- Lucent Technologies, the new AT&T company, yesterday fired off Inferno, a collection of software technologies aimed at both the In ternet market and the emerging low-cost network-computing arena.

The company also established a dedicated business unit to thrust Inferno to the center of the network-computing marketplace.

"Inferno is designed to support highly interactive applications -- from e-mail to pay-per-view movies -- over any communications network," said Mike Skarzynski, who was named vice president and general manager of the business unit that will market Inferno. "It runs on very inexpensive devices or as software on a larger Windows 95 or Unix platform."

When news of Inferno first leaked out in January at the Uniforum conference in San Jose, Calif., Bell Labs developers had portrayed the technology as a competitor to Sun's Java programming language. However, Lucent executives yesterday took pains to paint Inferno as a broad software "suite."

"If you report this as an Internet story, you're missing the point," said Phil Winterbottom, one of Inferno's developers at Bell Labs. "This is all about building a n etworking infrastructure where you can access information."

The Inferno suite includes a programming language -- called Limbo, but it also is equipped with a network operating system, communications protocols and an application programming interface.

On the broader networking front, Lucent officials said they were aiming Inferno, in part, at the nascent market for low-cost Internet access terminals.

"We are talking to all the usual suspects who are planning Internet devices," said Skarzynski, who declined to name the companies. "We very much want to play in that market."

Lucent is also seeking to license Inferno for applications in set-top boxes, multimedia PCs and advanced telephones. "Inferno is a unique network operating system that adapts to whatever you plug into it, from a high-end workstation to an inexpensive handheld device," said Dennis Ritchie, head of systems-software research at Bell Labs.

"We like to think of Inferno as becoming the 'dial tone' for information servi ces," said Skarzynski. "It will let users call up any information they want from any terminal."

Inferno was developed by many of the same Bell Labs computer scientists who wrote Plan 9, an operating system that has served as a research test-bed for network-aware OS concepts.

Lucent officials are planning to offer a free beta version of Inferno and are readying a software developer's kit. The company said that further information on Inferno would be available on the Web at http://inferno.bell-labs.com/inferno/. However, that site appeared to be inaccessible as of yesterday. The Bell Labs home page is on the Web at http://www.bell-labs.com.

Software quality-checkers target Net

By Loring Wirbel

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Two leading software quality-checking companies, Pure Software Inc. and NuMega Technologies Inc., have rolled out products aimed at Internet applications.

Pure, based here, has launched a load-testing tool for Web servers, PurePerformix/Web, to test the quality of distributed applications for multiuser intranets, while NuMega has updated BoundsChecker 4.0.

BoundsChecker supports Microsoft Corp.'s ActiveX interfaces and integrates with the Visual C++ Developer Studio debugger. NuMega (Nashua, N.H.) has also launched a SoftICE debugger for Windows NT. Both companies are targeting intranet and open Internet applications as the core market for many of the new features.

PurePerformix has been a general client/server load tester since 1987. Because bottlenecks at Web servers have become a commonplace Internet feature, Pure developed a version of Performix specifically to simulate Web calls from clients using HTTP. Unlimited numbers of users for a server can be simulated, and the tool simulates the real use of Web applications (including those with Java applets), rather than using artificial benchmarks. Web applications can be refined during developm ent, performance of a Web application can be tested, and "stress tests" can be run to determine the maximum number of simultaneous hits a Web server can take.

Developers still adding upgrades to CompactPCI

By Terry Costlow

WAKEFIELD, Mass. -- Though there's not much of a market yet for CompactPCI, an industrialized version of the popular Peripheral Component Interconnect standard, its promoters are racing to add functionality for the passive backplane. The PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) has begun six upgrades, including hot swapping, bridging for more than eight cards and a VME 2-mm connector.

The moves are being made as more companies join the trade association, which has 122 members. As they join, companies want to add features they need, and there are more members to pursue these technical issues. There's a lot of interest despite the fact that th e market for the ruggedized bus architecture, which was only standardized last fall, hasn't yet taken off. Even representatives of other trade associations are aware of the interest CompactPCI is generating.

VME vendors are showing a high level of interest in CompactPCI because its 132-Mbyte/second peak rate surpasses VME's 80 Mbytes/s, and because CompactPCI chip pricing should leverage the high volumes of the PC industry.

Intel, HP look to manage multiple environments

By Loring Wirbel

HILLSBORO, Ore. -- Intel Corp.'s network products division is moving its LANDesk management suite to Windows NT and to the Internet. Version 2.5 of the software is migrating from its NetWare roots to cover general client/server architectures in the latest release.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView group is trying to handle mixed collaborative groups by rolling out IT Collabo ration Program, a set of software and services for workgroups that uses mixes of HP-UX, Novell NetWare and Microsoft Windows NT/95 environments.

The moves are indicative of the mix of network operating systems present in client/server environments and the attempts by network-management vendors to handle management of all platforms from a common console.

While Intel's LANDesk still does not manage Unix systems directly, the support of TCP/IP in version 2.5 allows LANDesk applications in remote control, inventory and software distribution to be handled over the Internet via a Winsock interface.

The HP OpenView IT/Administration for Workgroups package is the company's first of several intended to target heterogeneous workgroups. The workgroup-level package is a simplified and lower-priced version of the original OpenView IT/Administration. The smaller package can manage up to 250 nodes centrally from an HP-UX for NetWare console.

Shomiti takes new tack in LAN analysis

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Dedicated hardware for LAN analysis is typically left off the short list of exciting technologies deserving of venture-funded startups. But Shomiti Systems Inc. intends to leverage its proprietary packet-capture ASICs to convince the world that its radical advancements for analyzing high-speed LANs give it an edge over the likes of Network General Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Wandel & Golterman.

"I've had many people ask why any sane person would look at this type of market," said Shomiti vice president of marketing Yancy Lind, who came to the company from switching-hub specialist Alantec. "The issue here is applying the silicon-design lessons learned in packet-forwarding engines and applying them to network-management issues.

"We've adopted the slogan 'silicon-assisted LAN management' because we don't think too many others are thinking of dedicat ed ASICs to handle the LAN-analysis problems that will confront Fast Ethernet, frame switching or ATM [asynchronous transfer mode]."

But as a company pushing proprietary hardware, Shomiti also realizes it may have to use software-only tools to get a foot in the door. Consequently, it will offer its Century Analyzer package for Windows to network managers in a standalone version as well as with the dedicated Century Management Engine hardware.

Halla named CEO of National Semiconductor

By Craig Matsumoto

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- National Semiconductor Corp. named Brian Halla as chairman and chief executive officer effective May 3. Halla fills the spot vacated by Gilbert Amelio, who took the helm of Apple Computer Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) Feb. 2.

Previously, Halla was executive vice president of the logic products group at LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.) and was conside red the right-hand-man to LSI Chairman and CEO Wilf Corrigan. Halla's division included LSI's CoreWare product line, used to develop single-chip systems such as the processor for the Sony Corp. PlayStation.

Halla was unavailable for comment Friday. National Semi and LSI Logic officials could not be reached for comment.

It is unclear whether National's "office of the president" will remain intact. Amelio created the post, which consisted of himself and Chief Operating Officers Richard Beyer, Ellen Hancock and Kirk Pond.

Early speculation was that one of the three remaining presidents would replace Amelio, with sources naming Hancock as a front-runner. Until the May 3 announcement, National's board insisted it was considering both internal and external candidates for Amelio's job.

The new job finds Halla overseeing a sprawling standard-products company after working recently to shepherd LSI's recovery to a dominant position in the ASIC business, which the company invented more than a dec ade ago. During Halla's tenure, LSI turned around a struggling business and pushed envelopes in process technology and design creativity. LSI also introduced two leading-edge process generations, the half-micron family and the new 0.35-micron G10 family, and watched the company entrench itself among the top three ASIC vendors in the world.

At National however, Halla will find a company still struggling to complete a turn-around initiated by Amelio, the former Rockwell Semiconductor chief. While industry as a whole grew more than 40 percent last year, National managed only single-digit growth rates and has slumped back during the first quarter of 1996.

From Internet World: Fab 3, Netscape 3.0, pack 'em in

By Larry Lange

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Internet mania took on the trappings of a "happening" here last week at Mecklermedia's annual Spring Internet World conference. Three of the Internet's Fab Four--Gates, Joy and Jobs--gave command keynote performances before packed houses. Though Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen was absent, Netscape stole some thunder from the keynoters by announcing the long-awaited version 3.0 of its Navigator client software.

Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates devoted much of his speech to Microsoft's development efforts for the intranet market. In a telling remark, he noted "In some ways, the browser is becoming almost an operating system itself. In a little bit, if we're not careful, we'll basically have a whole new operating system . . . sitting on top of existing operating systems, if we don't do the integration in the right way."

Sun Microsystems Inc. cofounder Bill Joy's keynote was characteristically technical and subdued, as he restated his belief that the Java programming language will be the Holy Grail of computing: an application that can enable software to run across all operating systems.

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc. cofounder and Next Corp. chairman, closed out the keynotes with a pitch for Next's WebObjects product suite as the "real solution for the real world." The software lets companies build interactive server-based Web applications for both the Internet and intranets.

Netscape Navigator v3.0 attracted plenty of attention. Among the features are Live3D, with an integrated Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) viewer; LiveAudio, which enables users to hear Web pages with AIFF, AU, MIDI and WAV files; and LiveVideo, which lets users view AVI video files.

Netscape's move threw down the gauntlet to Microsoft and even to some providers of "plug-ins"--multimedia extensions that augment older Netscape browser applications.

New image system takes on CCDs

By Yoshiko Hara

TOKYO -- Dai Nippon Printing Co. has devised an experimental image-capturing scheme, based on a new material c alled Elgraphy, that boasts better than three times the resolution of CCD digital still cameras. The system offers resolution of more than 20 million pixels per frame, the Tokyo company said, a significant improvement over the 6 million pixels for charge-coupled-device (CCD) digital cameras, and even better than traditional silver-halide photography.

Masanori Akada, general manager at Dai Nippon's Central Research Institute, said "Though the final price of the system will be a matter for the hardware companies to decide, I hope it will be less than $10,000."

Elgraphy is a multilayered panel that consists of a glass substrate with indium-tin-oxide (ITO) electrodes residing atop a liquid crystal called M-LCPC, along with an organic photoconductor with amplification capabilities. Excluding the substrate, the layers are about 20 microns thick.

The organic photoconductor works as a sensor to capture an image, while M-LCPC, a smectic-type liquid crystal, acts as a memory to retain the image.

From NCTA: Debates how interactive cable TV will work

By Loring Wirbel and Junko Yoshida

LOS ANGELES -- The cable-TV industry pulled up to a crossroads here last week, as it struggled to define consumer interest in interactive services and determine the most appropriate technologies for delivery. The technical issues raised at the annual National Cable TV Association conference extended from the head end to the switching infrastructure of the fiber/coax network.

Amid the debates, cable set-top vendors pushed for adoption of open architectures (see related story below).

The first production cable-modem shipments, announced last week, raise difficult issues for system developers and carriers, known as multiple-system operators (MSOs). Chief among them is whether home coaxial interfaces should be optimized for the PC rather than the TV platform. There's also concern that if Internet access becomes a defining function, MSOs and OEMs will have to bring bridging, routing and switching into the cable infrastructure for the first time.

Modem and head-end equipment developers have had to establish relationships with router and packet-switch vendors to gain internetwork-protocol (IP) experience.

Tight links with modem manufacturers for telephone-based return-path services are critical for cable-modem manufacturers that opt for an analog phone-line link from subscriber to head end.

Other alliances link OEMs with middleware developers, which produce tools and protocol stacks to help content providers move video multicasting to IP packet service.

Cable vendors move to open architectures

By Junko Yoshida

LOS ANGELES -- General Instrument's announcement here last week that its digital encoder/decoder system will comply with the MPEG-2 stan dard was one more sign of a swing toward open architectures on the part of the cable set-top-box industry.

Those attending the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) convention saw mounting evidence that vendors are opening up their system architectures, broadly licensing their technologies and leaning toward standards-based, rather than proprietary, solutions.

Another key vendor, Scientific-Atlanta, announced it had licensed its core digital set-top technologies to several consumer-electronics giants, including Thomson Consumer Electronics, Toshiba and Pioneer. Made available for licensing are the PowerTV operating system, the PowerKEY digital conditional-access system, which uses both public and private-key cryptography, and up to seven chips that go inside an interactive set-top for hybrid fiber-coax networks.

In another development, Hewlett-Packard Co. surprised the industry by announcing at the NCTA show that it will not manufacture its Kayak digital/analog cable set-top box this year, despite having already picked up orders for a million units from Tele-Communications Inc., Comcast and Cox.

IBM pushes its ASICs to 0.18 micron

By Ron Wilson and Brian Fuller

FISHKILL, N.Y. -- IBM Microelectronics moved to reassert its dominance in ASIC process technology today, with the announcement of a 0.25-micron CMOS process. The process, which is currently in qualification and will be ready for customer net-lists in early 1997, has the shortest effective channel length yet claimed--0.18 micron, ý10 percent.

The first devices to use the new CMOS 6 process will be merchant PowerPC and SRAM products. These are currently being run in IBM's Burlington, Vt., fab, according to Jeffrey Pauza, manager of ASIC applications engineering for IBM. As they are manufactured, IBM is qualifying the SA-12 ASIC libraries for the new process.

The process shares many features with IBM's existing CMOS 5 processes. Like them, it will use five layers of general metal interconnect, plus a sixth layer at the bottom of the interconnect stack solely for local wiring inside cells. The sixth layer gives the company very high density on certain heavily used cells, SRAM in particular.

"Quarter-micron is going to have a very high growth potential," said Handel Jones, an analyst with International Business Strategies Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). "You can get both very high speed, very high complexity, and relatively low power because you can move to lower voltages."

Intel takes road show to Asia

By Mark Carroll

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Intel's highest-level executives rolled into Asia last week to reveal the company's vision of the PC for 1997 and beyond.

In Taipei, chief operating officer Craig Barrett took pains to point out that the future of computing lie s not in a $500 Internet box but rather in traditional PCs with data-storage capabilities. Barrett was leading Intel's annual Technology Forum in its first-ever presentation outside the United States.

In Hong Kong, chief executive officer Andy Grove joined Barrett and the heads of Intel's microprocessor, desktop and mobile-product divisions to spell out what they hope consumers will want in a PC next year.

"In the United States now, you have the situation in some locations where even the current Internet traffic is jamming up the telecom infrastructure," he said. "CPU development has doubled in capacity, historically, every 18 months. In comparison, telecom bandwidth has doubled every 100 years. Of course, we will supply Internet boxes with embedded CPUs if there is a market demand. We feel, though, that today's PC is a much more efficacious machine."

Grove also noted that Intel is focusing heavily on embedded CPUs: "The embedded market is four times that of the CPU market. We will sell to a ny kind of appliance. But I think there will be literally hundreds of these types of devices."

30-day truce seen in copyright fight

WASHINGTON -- The PC industry, Hollywood studios and consumer-electronics manufacturers have agreed to a 30-day truce to work out a compromise on copyright protection.

Repesentatives of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) and Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association (CEMA) have agreed to continue separate technical and policy talks before reconvening here June 3. Technical talks aimed at developing performance standards for a computer-based copyright-management system will be led by a PC industry group called the Technical Working Group.

Meanwhile, the policy group will continue to discuss what parts of a copyright-management scheme need to be addressed in legislation. MPAA and CEMA, a branch of the Electronic Industries Association, earlier proposed the Digital Video Recording Act of 1996. But the draft legislation was rejected by the PC industry. A delay in reaching a compromise will likely delay the scheduled 1996 introduction of digital video disks.

Big talk by IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, about speech recognition

By Alexander Wolfe

AUSTIN, Texas -- In a bid to resuscitate its OS/2 Warp operating system and give Windows 95 a run for its money, IBM Corp. has launched a highly public campaign to bring speech-recognition technology to the PC.

Microsoft Corp., for its part, is speaking softly about its plans but has just shipped to its top software developers a CD-ROM packed full of its own speech-programming tools for Windows 95 and NT. And Microsoft researchers have developed the Windows Highly Intelligent Speech Recognizer (Whisper), which is bil led as a practical, highly efficient speech engine that can run completely in software on a desktop PC.

Meanwhile, AT&T's advanced speech products group (Middletown, N.J.) has turned technology developed at Bell Labs into a product--the Watson speech-recognition engine--that can run applications built with the Microsoft tools. AT&T executives said that nearly 70 independent software vendors have already signed on with plans to develop everything from speech-aware children's games to voice-activated telephony applications.

"With Pentium, there's now enough horsepower on the desktop to make speech a viable technology for every PC," said Dave Basore, general manager of the AT&T group. "For the first time, there's an economical platform that can support speech, and the algorithms are getting better every day."

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