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

05/17/96

Startup proposes IP extension for two-way data over cable

From SID: LCD-on-silicon displays turn heads

Mentor tools integrate software and hardware simulation

National packs dc/dc converter in a chip

SGS-Thomson Micro upgrades fabs, processes
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

05/16/96

Falling prices of 4x CD-ROMs spur intro of 8x, 10x models

Dole supports encryption bill

From ATM Year '96: ATM-chip pressures mount

Taiwan memory vendors chase DRAM niches

Israeli verification firm enters U.S. market

IPOs: the wisdom and whim of betting on the Net

05/15/96

Java to ride agent Wave?

AAES in financial hole; seeks higher dues from IEEE

Breakthrough ceramic can take the heat

Silicon inductors boost RF design

05/14/96

Sony 3.5" tape drive, boosted by E2PROM, is faster, and holds 25GBytes

PMC-Sierra rolls an ATM-policing chip

3Dlabs, TI, in graphics accelerator deal

Mitel adds TDM switches

Shannon intros microprocessor-neutral motherboard

Altera offers Mega as core library for PLDs

Mentor jumps into built-in self test (BIST)

05/13/96

Microsoft's video-ready 'Cyclone' PCs to combine TV, Web

From ATM Year '96: ATM switching takes it on the chin

Cadence-Avant! feud escalates

From CICC: big changes afoot for IC design

Grand Alliance's HDTV scheme gets FCC's green light

U.S.-Japan trade friction rising

Startup proposes IP extension for two-way data over cable

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Cable-modem startup Terayon Corp. and its financial backer, Cisco Systems Inc., will present to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) new extensions to IP for a two-way data-over-CATV environment.

Cisco and Terayon plan to jointly develop a high-capacity cable head end based on Terayon's synchronous code-division-multiple-access technology. The two will work on the proposed I/F4 standard, defining the interface between routers and the Terayon head-end concentrator.

Terayon vice president of marketing Jacob Tanz said that the effort will c omplement existing standards efforts for cable modems within the IEEE 802.14 working group, the Davic Council, CableLabs, and the ATM Forum's Residential Broadband group.

Meanwhile, Terayon has expanded its executive staff with two key appointments. Dennis Picker, formerly the director of Motorola's cable data products business unit, has joined Terayon as vice president of engineering, a new position reporting to president and chief technology officer Shlomo Rakib. Masuma Ahmed, PhD, former standards project manager at CableLabs, has become Terayon's director of technical marketing, reporting to Tanz.

From SID: LCD-on-silicon displays turn heads

By David Lieberman

SAN DIEGO -- A new player has jumped into miniature displays, offering a technology alternative in a field that's been drawing increasing attention. This week at the Society for Information Display (SID) conferen ce, Displaytech Inc. (Boulder, Colo.) said it will ship developers' kits for its ChronoColor ferroelectric LCD-on-silicon display in the first quarter of 1997.

Displaytech is chasing the same applications in camcorder viewfinders, head-mounted displays, projection displays and portable viewing devices as many of the other technologies in the field. Those include polysilicon active-matrix LCDs, single-crystal-silicon LCDs, active-matrix electroluminescent displays, LED arrays and field-emission displays.

The miniature displays, typically measure less than 1 x 1 inch.

James Hurd, president and chief executive officer of Planar Systems (Beaverton, Ore.), said of the mini-displays: "The most exciting part," he said, "is the concept of deskless computing, where, instead of looking at information on a display that's arm's-length away, you slip on a pair of display glasses."

Mentor tools integrate software and hardware simulation

By Terry Costlow

WILSONVILLE, Ore. -- Leveraging its recent purchase of real-time software provider Microtec, Mentor Graphics Corp. has introduced the Seamless Co-Verification Environment (CVE), one of the first linkages between instruction-set software simulation and hardware simulation. The rollout is part of Mentor's Integrated Systems Design strategy, aimed at bringing together tools and techniques for embedded software and hardware design.

The CVE tools link digital logic simulation or hardware emulation to Microtec's X-ray instruction-set simulator and debugger, making it possible for both hardware and software designers to see how their projects mesh. That should help embedded-system engineers improve designs and get to market faster by letting the two groups check for interoperability problems before they build prototypes.

With an "intelligent" co-simulation kernel based on proprietary optimization algorithms, Mentor claims tha t its integrated products will let system designers achieve anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times better simulation performance than they now can.

The environment requires processor models, and Texas Instruments, Advanced RISC Machines, Hitachi and Hewlett-Packard are all supporting Mentor's move by developing processor-support packages.

National packs dc/dc converter in a chip

By Ashok Bindra

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- National Semiconductor Corp. is chasing after a larger chunk of the sub-25-W dc/dc-converter market by taking its switcher to the next level of simplicity. The company has assembled five external passive and active components, along with a proprietary buck-converter chip, as part of a lead frame to build a complete 1-A dc/dc converter in a 24-pin dual-in-line package.

Reliability of the LM2825N converter, for which the company is seeking a patent, is an order of magnitude higher than that of standard converter modules now on the market, said John Prendergast, marketing manager for power products at National.

Market-research firm MicroTech Consultants (Santa Rosa, Calif.) pegs this year's market for sub-25-W-dc/dc modules at roughly $275 million, or about 18 percent of a projected $1.5 billion market for dc/dc converters of all varieties. National hopes to grab a share of that with the LM2825N, which is aimed at applications in distributed power systems, on-card switching regulators and replacement modules.

SGS-Thomson Micro upgrades fabs, processes

By Martin Gold

AGRATE BRIANZA, Italy -- To protect its base in power semiconductors and broaden its position in mixed-technology devices, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (STM) has launched several submicron processes and developed new architectures.

No fewer than five 8-inch wafer fabs will provide the capacity to support new devices resulting from the technology thrust. Included is a fab coming on stream in the fourth quarter for non-volatile memories and another planned for later in the decade.

The centerpiece of the technology arsenal is a new submicron generation of the company's bipolar/CMOS/DMOS process. The BCD5, in 0.6-micron lithography, integrates power functionality with memory, microcontroller and a DSP core on one chip. The process is aimed at applications in harsh environments, such as automotive engine control, ink-jet printers and power supplies.

Complementing BCD5 is another new process, CD5,

in which the bipolar portion is eliminated for cost-sensitive applications.

"These processes bring power technology into the realm of VLSI," Bruno Murari, R&D director of the company's dedicated products group, told the U.S. and European press during recent briefings here and in Catania, Italy.

Falling prices of 4x CD-ROMs spur intro of 8x, 10x models

By Terry Costlow

CHICAGO -- CD-ROM manufacturers, stung by the sharp pricing decline for 4x-speed drives, have begun rolling 8x and 10x units. Philips, Mitsumi and Samsung all unveiled 8x drives in recent weeks, while Pioneer and Pinnacle have moved to the 10x platform.

Two shifts that have bedeviled many segments of the electronics industry in recent months--increased capacity by vendors and decreased demand by personal-computer makers-- have pounded 4x CD-ROM prices down so far that vendors moved their timetables for 8x drives ahead.

"What manufacturers are trying to do is to get out of the 4x market and get to safer ground," said Robert Abraham, vice president at Freeman Associates (Santa Barbara, Calif.), a market research firm. "That's a temporary solution as people go on to 10x, 12x, 16x. Perhaps users would be better served if they agreed on where the next speed point will be."

The move to 8x raises questions about the future of 6x drives. They haven't taken a substantial amount of market share from 4x drives, though sales are increasing, and some vendors don't plan to unveil 6x products. The 8x CD-ROMs move data at 1,200 kbytes/second.

Dole supports encryption bill

WASHINGTON -- In an election-year challenge to the Clinton administration's encryption policy, legislation intended to lift export restrictions on encryption technology is being supported by Bob Dole, the likely Republican presidential nominee.

The streamlined encryption bill introduced this month by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., would allow unrestricted export of public-domain encryption programs like Pretty Good Privacy, require the Commerce Department to allow export of encryption technologies if similar products are available elsewhere in the world, and forb id the government to impose a mandatory key-escrow system in which the government or another third party would have access to computer files.

"The [Promotion of Commerce Online in the Digital Era Act of 1996] would promote the growth of electronic commerce, encourage the widespread availability to strong privacy and security technologies for the Internet, and repeal the outdated regulations prohibiting the export of encryption technologies," Burns said in a May 2 letter distributed on the Internet.

From ATM Year '96: ATM-chip pressures mount

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Semiconductor vendors serving the asynchronous-transfer-mode market face unprecedented pressures as ATM advocates wake up to the reduced possibilities for ATM applications. The flaring tempers here at the recent ATM Year '96 reflected the pressures' severity.

OEMs expect suppliers to slash prices on such standard catalog parts as user network interfaces (UNI), ATM-switching-fabric ICs and segmentation-and-reassembly processors (SAR). Consequently, IC developers must move up the protocol stack quickly, offering such functions as cell scheduling, policing and traffic management in a bid to offer greater differentiation and obtain better margins.

Gigabit Ethernet is one source of anxiety and contention. Cisco Systems Inc. chief technology officer Ed Kozel apparently struck a nerve among some ATM Year '96 participants when he said that "if semiconductor vendors continue to milk the 622-Mbit market for ATM, Gigabit Ethernet is sure to prevail in the backbone."

But Steve Perna, vice president of marketing at PMC-Sierra Inc. (Burnaby, B.C.)--one of the first to offer a 622-Mbit UNI--said Kozel's comments do not reflect reality. "We're regularly going through 40 percent-per-annum price reductions on our Suni-Lite, which is much better than the semiconductor industry's 15 percent averages," he asserted.

Taiwan memory vendors chase DRAM niches

By Mark Carroll

HSIN CHU, Taiwan -- As the DRAM-market advantage has switched overnight from seller to buyer, memory vendors here have shifted from broad to narrow marketing strategies.

TI-Acer Inc., Mosel Vitelic Co. and Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp. are all using specialized approaches. With capitalizations that are a fraction of those of major Japanese and Korean DRAM manufacturers, and with little visibility in big accounts, they have no choice.

The strategy becomes even more important as an estimated 100,000 8-inch DRAM wafers per month get set to come to market next year. To survive, vendors will have to augment production expertise with marketing savvy, observers said.

Taiwan's share of the world DRAM market is growing but it's still just a third of 1995's $40 billion market, according to research firm Integrated Circuit Engineering Inc. (Scottsdale, Ariz.).

Vanguard has the most unusual marketing strategy, having adopted a "territorial model," said marketing director David Pie. It sells DRAMs in countries where large DRAM makers have not licensed their technology.

Israeli verification firm enters U.S. market

By Richard Goering

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Armed with a new tool set aimed at solving the functional-verification problem for large ICs and boards, InSpec Ltd. will open its U.S. office here this month. The privately held Israeli company was launched last year to market Specman, a tool that generates test benches and monitors Verilog and VHDL simulation runs.

With market research showing that 40 to 60 percent of design time is going into verification, InSpec has a timely message. "This is the last frontier," said Yoav Hollander, InSpec foun der and vice president of technology. "The last thing that's not automated is logical verification."

While simulators have been around for years, tools that help designers generate test vectors and control simulation runs are just beginning to appear. Recent activity includes BestBench from Diagonal Systems, Vera from Systems Science and QuickBench from Chronology.

IPOs: the wisdom and whim of betting on the Net

By Craig Matsumoto

MONTEREY, Calif. -- Netscape started as a school project. Yahoo! was first a hobby, then a business based on a model that skeptics still say won't work out.

Both emerged from labs that make the Hewlett-Packard garage look lavish. And yet, both hit the stock market with initial public offerings that made instant millionaires of their founders--and netted a tidy sum for the venture backers who discovered them.

Fueled by good press, p ublic curiosity and a string of wildly successful IPOs, private technology companies are streaming into the public stock markets with a fervor verging on desperation. The problem for the venture capitalists is how to sift through the masses of sound-alike companies to find the few core players that truly will shape the future.

The message wasn't lost on those attending Venture Market West, held here this month.

"What's happening in the Web-software industry is similar to what people were seeing in the biotech industry five years ago," said Dennis Fernandez, vice president of venture-capital firm Vertex Management Inc. (Redwood City, Calif.) "It's risk money, but the upside is big."

"As far as the Net is concerned, I'm willing to skip this first round," said vice president Keith Ebert of investment banker C.M. Oliver & Co. Ltd. (Vancouver, B.C.).

Java to ride agent Wave?

By Brian Santo

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Agent technology may branch into an entirely unexpected direction with the proposed integration of Java and a self-propagating, recursive programming technology called Wave.

The Wave language allows programmers to write extremely compact algorithms that can be launched onto a network, where they can self-replicate, split or be modified as they spread to accomplish their tasks. The algorithms or elements of an algorithm--called waves--operate with variables that access only local data in current nodes or data items transferred with the wave as it moves from node to node. In contrast, Java's mobility is limited to the transfer from server to client.

Sun Microsystems is looking into the possibility of extending Java on top of the Wave model or letting Wave carry Java, passing it along to Java interpreters.

Meanwhile, new graphical user interface for Wave, written in TCL with VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), is being explored by sever al of the architects of VRML.

AAES in financial hole; seeks higher dues from IEEE

By Robert Bellinger

WASHINGTON -- The American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES), the umbrella organization that includes the IEEE and 16 other technical societies, is in "dire" financial straits.

The new executive director, Tom Price, who took the job only four months ago, has drawn up a plan to pull the society out of a $400,000 hole. Two or three staff members have been laid off, at least two publications or directories have been terminated and the pre-college program has been discontinued.

Price is refocusing the AAES to fill a public-policy role. "In my opinion, there's a real need for an organization that represents the U.S. engineering profession," said Price, who holds both engineering and law degrees. He noted that doctors and lawyers have federal public-policy organizations. And, though individual engineering societies--such as the IEEE--have their own lobbyists, "they focus on programs that specifically affect their members."

Price sees AAES targeting such issues as promoting long-term R&D programs, boosting engineers' role in environmental concerns and campaigning for such engineering-workplace issues as portable pensions.

He insists that AAES will survive this latest setback, which he blames on slow sales of its publications.

Breakthrough ceramic can take the heat

By Gail Robinson

CORVALLIS, Ore. -- A new ceramic that shrinks uniformly when heated over a wide temperature range may become a valuable commodity in circuit-board manufacture and in optical and laser-device design. Discovered by researchers at Oregon State University, zirconium tungstate--a compound made from zirconium, tungsten and oxygen--is said to contract evenly in all directions when heated from near absolute zero (-459.4ýF) to 1,050K (1,430.0ýF).

The material may prove useful for counteracting heat-expansion problems in circuit boards, improving the performance of ceramics in electrical insulators and enhancing the optical capabilities of microscopes and telescopes. The compound's behavior and properties were recently published in a technical paper in the journal Science.

The findings of the project, conducted in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, N.Y.), stand in stark contrast to traditional heat-expansion principles, which dictate that a material's chemical bonds lengthen as temperatures rise and the atoms move apart. The new compound's behavior is due to the vibration of the oxygen atoms that bind the zirconium and tungsten atoms together. As the temperature increases, the oxygen atoms vibrate more strongly and pull the other atoms closer together.

"This compound is unique," said Arthur Sleight, the l ead researcher at Oregon State. "No other compound has shown qualities like this."

One company is already scaling up for production of the material. Teledyne Wah Chang (Albany, Ore.) is offering quantities of up to 100 grams to qualified users on a first-come, first-served basis.

Silicon inductors boost RF design

By Chappell Brown

TORONTO -- A new simulation approach to microstrip inductors at the University of Toronto may solve a longstanding problem for silicon IC technology: how best to build inductances on-chip. The simulator, and projects that successfully use inductors designed with it, show that computer-optimized layouts can boost the quality of inductors by 50 percent.

"An accurate, scalable model of spiral-microstrip inductors that could be applied to a wide variety of designs simply has not been available," said John Long at the University of Toron to, who developed the simulator with Miles Copeland at Carleton University (Ottawa). The project surfaced in a session on RF design at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) in San Diego, Calif., two weeks ago.

The ability to integrate inductors could lead to monolithic silicon RF components that would lower the cost of mobile-communications products. In a separate development, a completely different approach to high-quality inductor design is being pursued at the University of California, Los Angeles, by a group that will soon be able to integrate an entire radio on a single silicon chip.

Sony 3.5" tape drive, boosted by E2PROM, is faster, and holds 25GBytes

By Terry Costlow

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Sony Electronics Inc.'s Tape Streamer Products Division has put an E2PROM chip in an 8-mm tape cartridge to speed data accessing. The Advanced Intelligent Tape drive a lso uses an advanced recording material that increases density to 25 Gbytes, giving the 3.5-inch drive roughly the capacity of most 5.25-inch tape drives.

Sony is entering a market that has emerged as one of the hottest areas in tape. The 25-Gbyte capacity is suitable for backing up networks, disk arrays and other high-capacity systems that have driven solid growth in high-end data storage. Capacity can be increased to 50 Gbytes by using a data-compression technique licensed from IBM Corp.

"The amount of storage capacity is going up so rapidly that there's an increased need for backup," said Ray Freeman, president of Freeman Associates (Santa Barbara, Calif.). "Economically, as people increase their storage requirements rapidly, they find they can't afford to spin everything on disks. They're putting some of it on tape, often using tape libraries so data can be accessed easily and quickly.

"The Internet also fosters the need for increased storage. As people drag information home, their disk drive fills up quickly, so they put a lot of it on tape."

PMC-Sierra rolls an ATM-policing chip

By Loring Wirbel

VANCOUVER, B.C. -- All asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) OEMs working in WAN interfaces these days are interested in integrated policing chips. Canada-based PMC-Sierra Inc. offers an "RCMP" police unit to handle routing, control, monitoring and policing in a single device.

The RCMP architecture is offered in 200-Mbit/second (RCMP-200) and 800-Mbit/s (RCMP-800) versions for T1/E1 concatenation, and broadband links to 622-Mbit backbones, respectively.

RCMP marks PMC's first foray into the higher ATM Layer of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) ATM protocol stack. ATM Layer functions have been offered in integrated ASIC form in the past, but PMC has added performance-monitoring and fault-management features to the core RCMP architecture. The chi ps use a proprietary address-translation algorithm to handle all incoming virtual path indicator/virtual circuit indicator translations and counting, for up to 65,536 VCs (number of VCs is dependent on the size of external SRAM used). Programmable search keys can be up to 55 bits long. Search resolution is guaranteed at a sustained 622-Mbit throughput, using a 34-bit search key.

3Dlabs, TI, in graphics accelerator deal

By Junko Yoshida

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- 3Dlabs Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. have signed a cross-licensing agreement under which 3Dlabs will license its Permedia 3-D-graphics core to TI in exchange for rights to the Dallas company's RAMDAC technology. TI has also taken a 5 percent equity stake in 3Dlabs.

The partners will "co-source" pin- and software-compatible Permedia-based 3-D-graphics chips and RAMDAC-integrated, Permedia-based derivatives starting in t he fourth quarter, said Alun Roberts, TI's strategic marketing manager for mixed-signal products. 3Dlabs will receive guaranteed fab capacity and access to a 0.35-micron process technology from TI.

"TI gets a rock-solid 3-D-graphics technology from 3Dlabs without inventing one on its own, while 3-Dlabs will get an excellent low-cost source of chips," said Geoff Ballew, a semiconductor-application-market industry analyst at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose).

3Dlabs will continue to rely on current foundry IBM Microelectronics for its own products, Ballew said, "but TI's extra push in volume adds a lot of muscle."

"This is a major step to establish our Permedia as a de facto 3-D graphics standard," said 3Dlabs marketing vice president Neil Trevett.

Mitel adds TDM switches

By Loring Wirbel

KANATA, Ontario -- Mitel Semiconductor has introduced two time-division-multiplex ed (TDM) network switches that constitute the centerpiece of the company's isochronous circuit-switching strategy. The MT90820 and MT90840 share many circuit blocks. But the former is intended as a central digital switch for 2,048 x 2,048 channels, while the latter is intended to link several platforms across the MC-3 multi-chassis pipe.

Mitel is looking to both architectures to lead it through the back door to asynchronous-transfer-mode (ATM) switching, with future chips offering TDM-to-ATM interfaces. "TDM networks will be around a lot longer than most people anticipate, and the way to bring ATM in from the WAN is to offer links to TDM telephony services," said marketing vice president Peter Burke.

While TDM architectures are considered old-fashioned in the client/server and internetworking worlds, they remain a necessary part of computer/telephony-integration platforms, where servers are used for voice response and automated call distribution, Burke said. Along with National Semiconductor Corp. 's IsoSwitch architecture for IsoENET, the Mitel family is one of the few standard-IC offerings to support TDM circuit switching.

Shannon intros microprocessor-neutral motherboard

By David Lieberman

NEW DURHAM, N.H. -- A motherboard from Shannon Computers Inc. provides a microprocessor-independent system platform for those who don't like having to scrap their motherboard every time they change processors.

Called the Platform 2000, this baby-AT motherboard is for OEMs who like to host applications on different processing architectures and for those who'd like to leverage a motherboard over several generations of a design. It's equally at home with a Pentium CPU board or a 486 CPU, PowerPC CPU or Alpha CPU. With that approach, "pin compatibility of next-generation processors is not an issue," said company president Paul Gibbs.

Using a 64-bit PCI bus as its local bus, the Platform 2000 comes with an on-board Fast SCSI-2 controller and bus-mastering IDE, both resident on PCI. Also on-board is a super I/O chip for serial, ECP parallel and floppy-disk-drive interfacing, a "green" keyboard/mouse controller, as much as 512 kbytes of boot memory, an industry standard BIOS and a PCI/ISA-bus bridge chip.

The motherboard has four ISA-bus slots and three 64-bit PCI slots, one of which accepts a CPU module that contains system DRAM and, in some cases, an L2 cache.

Altera offers Mega as core library for PLDs

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Altera Corp. has announced its MegaCore function library, a collection of megafunctions designed specifically for Altera PLDs. The company is also launching OpenCore, a program that allows designers to "test drive" the megafunctions before licensing them.

MegaCore functions are pre-verified designs for system-level buildin g blocks such as processors, microcontrollers, DSPs, FIFOs and memory functions. The library complements the Altera Megafunction Partners program, under which third-party providers offer synthesizable, technology-independent cores.

The idea behind the library is to allow engineers to differentiate their products without having to recreate standard logic functions. The functions will also help designers who work with large PLDs, which are now pushing 100,000 gates.

"We wanted to help kick-start the industry and show that this can be done for programmable logic," said Bob Beachler, Altera's director of strategic marketing and communications. "Also, we have a lot of core competency in fitting designs into devices, so we can add some value in this area."

Mentor jumps into built-in self test (BIST)

By Stan Runyon

WILSONVILLE, Ore. -- Mentor Graphics Corp. is adding memor y built-in self-test (BIST) to its arsenal of design-for-test (DFT) solutions, in a challenge to LogicVision, a young company that focuses solely on BIST technology. At the same time, LogicVision is working to take its BIST technology to the next step: addressing the test challenges of core-based, or systems-on-a-chip, designs.

For Mentor, the launching of MbistArchitect--a synthesis product aimed at testing memory arrays in systems-on-silicon, ASICs and other ICs--is the next logical step in providing an automated test solution. In an attempt to overcome LogicVision's three- or four-year lead in memory BIST, Mentor turned to proprietary technology developed and used by Digital Equipment Corp. In one application, Digital had integrated the BIST into a large ASIC carrying five embedded memories.

"Combining RAM BIST and ATPG [automatic test-pattern generation] proved to be the only practical way to generate high-quality test patterns," said Ulf Stoeckelmann, a group manager at Digital's Computer Sys tems Division. "Without our memory BIST, it would have taken three months to create the patterns manually."

Microsoft's video-ready 'Cyclone' PCs to combine TV, Web

By Alexander Wolfe

REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. is mounting an aggressive campaign to connect its Windows-based PCs to the emerging world of interactive television (ITV), according to a confidential marketing plan obtained by EE Times.

The centerpiece of the thrust is "Cyclone," Microsoft's code name for a broad collection of video-capable Windows NT-based platforms.

Microsoft's objective is to ally with powerful cable-television equipment and service providers to forge an infrastructure for connecting home computers to TV set-top boxes and cable-modems.

Cable companies could then deliver a wealth of enhanced data services, including the "broadcast PC"--television programming linked to the Wor ld Wide Web. Microsoft also envisions multimedia magazines--on-line journals with audio and video enhancements.

Indeed, according to the confidential marketing plan, Microsoft is telling potential cable-industry customers that "interactive TV is not dead but will naturally evolve out of current Internet technologies."

That tack is being taken in response to the rapid emergence of the cable-modem, which is expected ultimately to force a union between the PC-based world of Internet services and the video-centered cable-TV market.

From ATM Year '96: ATM switching takes it on the chin

By Loring Wirbel

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The asynchronous transfer mode took two body blows last week, and the ATM-switching advocates convening here at ATM Year '96 had ringside seats.

First, the resource-reservation protocol (RSVP) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force app roved a draft standard for the RSVP signaling protocol. RSVP will allow TCP/IP networks to reserve and prioritize bandwidth to serve many of the quality-of-service (QOS) functions thought to be the exclusive realm of ATM.

The next day, 11 semiconductor vendors and OEMs announced the formation of the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance, a trade coalition to support Gbit extensions to the Ethernet standard under the rubric of the IEEE's new 802.3z working group. Ed Kozel, chief technology officer of Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose), warned ATM '96 attendees that gigabit Ethernet uplinks look much more economical for corporate backbones than 622-Mbit/second ATM pipes.

Indeed, many internetworking developers are echoing the observation by NetStar Inc. vice president of marketing Mark Garver that "no one is willing to pay the cell tax of ATM any longer." (ATM relies on identically sized, 53-byte cells, instead of variable-sized frames, to switch data, voice and video.)

"End-to-end ATM is not now a reality and may never be," observed conference chairman John McQuillan. "IP will have a clear advantage in many networks; shared and switched Ethernet will continue to grow. ATM developers have to concentrate on those areas where ATM's advantages are truly needed."

Cadence-Avant! feud escalates

By Richard Goering

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- New and potentially damaging allegations against Avant! Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) surfaced last week as a U.S. District Court magistrate unsealed portions of an April 19 brief filed by Cadence Design Systems. The brief seeks an injunction against sales of Avant!'s ArcCell and ArcCell-XO IC-layout products, which Cadence claims contain stolen source code.

The move was the latest turn in a nasty legal battle between broadline EDA supplier Cadence and startup point-tool vendor Avant!, whose flagship product competes heavily with similar Cadence software. Avan t! has countered that Cadence has resorted to "corporate terrorism" through the courts, alleging that the broadline EDA company can't compete on technology in IC-layout products.

Cadence based its original allegations on the discovery of matching character strings in Avant! code. The recent injunction request includes testimony from four Cadence expert witnesses who examined Avant! source code and found what the brief called "massive amounts of literally and near-literally copied Cadence source code."

Moreover, the document provides a detailed account of payments allegedly made to Mitch Igusa, a former Cadence employee who is charged with six felony counts of source-code theft, through the "Saurus Fund," an alleged slush fund that Cadence claims was set up by Avant! executives.

From CICC: big changes afoot for IC design

By Richard Goering and Chappell Brown

SAN DIEGO -- The conclusion at last week's Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC): change is coming fast and furious to IC-design methodology. One technical panel approached consensus on the need to link physical design of million-gate ICs to logical design. There was less agreement at a separate panel on the business implications of deep-submicron ICs, as panelists and speakers from the floor debated the virtues of customer-owned tooling (COT).

The panels capped a three-day technical program that presented recent research in such areas as low-power design and analysis, device modeling and simulation, programmable-logic architectures, process technology and test.

The business panel underscored the prevalence of deep-submicron design.

Robert Pepper, president of Level One Communications, presented data from the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) that showed a 40 percent compound annual growth rate for CMOS wafer demand over the next three years. The highest predicted growth rate--229 perce nt--is for 0.35-micron processes and below; 0.36 to 0.5 micron came in second, with 169 percent. Some 88 percent of the designs will require three or more layers of metal, according to the FSA survey. Pepper predicted that fabless companies will represent 20 percent of the semiconductor market by 2000.

Grand Alliance's HDTV scheme gets FCC's green light

By Junko Yoshida

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Communications Commission last week unanimously voted to adopt the Grand Alliance digital-HDTV system as the authorized technology for terrestrial broadcast in the United States.

While the 4-to-0 vote of the commissioners represents a great leap forward for the Grand Alliance system, FCC chairman Reed Hundt cautioned that the vote approved only a notice of intent to issue a standard, not an order. After the FCC issues the notice this week, the commission will receive comments for 45 days, with an additional 15 days set aside for reply. After the comment period, the FCC notice becomes an order and digital-broadcast licensees will be required to use the proposed digital-TV standard.

Among criticisms already received, according to Hundt, were comments from director Steven Spielberg, speaking on behalf of an entertainment industry that remains dubious of some technical features of digital TV.

The notice did contain a new twist, which has already begun to make some people in the industry nervous. The FCC is asking for adoption of a sunset provision stating that, "after a meaningful period of time, the standard might be automatically lifted," explained Saul Shapiro, assistant bureau chief for technology policy at the commission's mass media bureau.

U.S.-Japan trade friction rising

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Renewed trade frictions between Japan a nd the United States appear more likely than a renewed semiconductor agreement as positions harden and time runs short to break the current impasse in negotiations.

Both sides in the simmering dispute over whether to extend the accord when it expires on July 31 maintain there are reasons to continue discussions, but they can't agree on who should do the talking: industry or government. What's more, officials speaking at a conference here last week said the inability to break the deadlock coupled with the downturn in key sectors such as PCs could spawn a return to the nasty chip-trade battles of the 1980s.

"If an agreement is delayed much longer, it could be serious," warned Art Zafiropoulo, chairman of Ultratech Stepper Inc. Added U.S. trade official Ira Shapiro, "Our concern is that a downturn can breed backsliding" by Japan on semiconductor trade.

Japanese officials also expressed concern about what an industry downturn could mean for U.S.-Japan cooperation, but they disputed American asse rtions that government should continue to play a role. "If there's no profit or prospects for future [chip] development, that's a big problem" for both countries, said Kazuhiko Nishi, chairman of a new Japanese Internet company called ASCII Corp. "But it's not government's role to make everybody happy."

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