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

05/24/96

Oracle rallies support for Network Computer

Motorola spins a new 16-bit microcontroller line

Hitachi denies report it is scaling back on 16-Mbit DRAMs

GPS systems reach detente on single board

Synopsys, Viewlogic forge 'model' alliance
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

05/23/96

SIA lowers growth forecast for 1996

MedianiX intros digital audio chip for home theater

TI hopes Tartan deal will cut DSP design time

Motorola pursues pact to have Minsk fab make chips

NBC, Sarnoff will host HDTV station

Walsh named CEO of synthesis startup Omniview

05/22/96

High tech thieves head to greener pasture : Europe

Embedded code in recorded audio, film, combats piracy

Tool automates neural-net-variables analysis

Polymer mold promises 25-nm lithography

Proxim offering its wireless LAN specs as an open standard

IEEE-USA rallies for expanded IRAs

05/21/96

Smart cards are being prepared for use as credit cards

Ansoft Spice tool accounts for l ossy interconnects

Hal adds EDA workstation

EDO DRAM busts burst memory's speed advantage

GEC Plessey ICs target wireless data

05/20/96

Nintendo quietly preps mass-storage medium for Net game player

Oracle sets open spec for Net box

Gloom but not all doom for DRAMs

Reporter's Notebook: what it's really like to grind out Java

Fingerprint systems in commercial push

SIA roadmap focuses on lack of deep submicron R&D

Progress in DVD-copyright talks disputed

More delays emerge for copyright bill

Oracle rallies support for Network Computer

By Rick Boyd-Merritt

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amid much hyperbole, the product concept of a network computer took a step forward this week when Oracle Corp. gathered a surprisingly broad group of supporters behind its idea for a range of low-cost client devices that would depend on server-b ased software for their storage and processing clout.

Hardware companies planning to ship NCs later this year--including Apple and IBM--will use as many as five different system-software kernels and a variety of memory configurations. That's a concern for Netscape Communications Corp., whose Navigator Web browser is the one application all the different systems want to use. Also missing from the NC definition is agreement on some of the low-level functions a client operating system, however minimal, would normally control.

NCs are primarily geared to run applications that are written in Sun Microsystems' Java and executed locally on a Java Virtual Machine, which in turn would run on an operating system or system-software kernel.

Marc Andreessen, vice president of technology for Netscape, said his company in the next few weeks will announce plans to set up a new business unit to handle porting and licensing of Navigator for what he expects will be "a half-dozen NC-class devices over the next year."

The draft profile is available for comment on the Web at www.nc.ihost.com .

Motorola spins a new 16-bit microcontroller line

By Ron Wilson

AUSTIN, Texas -- Under pressure to find a smooth migration path for 68HC11 customers, Motorola Inc. has once again created a new 16-bit microcontroller family, the 68HC12, two members of which will be announced tomorrow. An attempt to meet the challenge of 16-bit 8051 derivatives and compiler-oriented Japanese MCUs, the series stands midway in price and performance between the 8-bit HC11 and the 16-bit HC16 MCUs.

This is the microcontroller giant's second attempt to provide a 16-bit migration path for HC11 users. The 68HC16, launched several years ago, has not been as popular as the company might have hoped. Aimed at a high-performance niche that never spread far beyond disk controllers and a few other applications, it has not proved an effective answer for either the super-8051 chips from Intel and Philips or the new generation of compiler-friendly 8-bit parts from Hitachi and NEC, among others. Motorola now sees the HC16s moving up the performance curve to 33 MHz and beyond, with system throughput increased even further by complex, 68300-style peripheral modules.

The HC12 family, in contrast, will be lower in price and closer to code compatibility with the HC11s, and extensions will be available for those using compilers and fuzzy-logic development tools.

Hitachi denies report it is scaling back on 16-Mbit DRAMs

TOKYO -- Stung by plummeting contract-order prices, Hitachi Ltd. will sharply scale back plans to boost 16-Mbit DRAM production, reported Japan's leading financial paper, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.

Korean semiconductor producers sell 16-Mbit DRA Ms for about $16, forcing Japan-based DRAM makers to lower their contract price to less than $18.68 in June--from the $24 to $28 range that prevailed in early May.

An Hitachi spokeswoman denied the report, saying there has been no decision to change the company's plan to boost production from 9 million units a month now to 15 million by yearend.

Spokesmen at several DRAM producers said that production boosts would proceed as planned.

"Yes, the price is dropping, but there is no cutback in investment," a Toshiba spokesman said. "We will shift to higher value-added products, such as high-speed or multiple-bit products." Toshiba produces 6.5 million 16-Mbit DRAMs a month, and that number is set to rise to 9 million by the end of this year

NEC produces 11 million units/month and plans to boost that to 18 million by yearend. Managers said that NEC would not cut back on its planned $2 billion investments for the fiscal year that started April 1.

Fujitsu is expanding 16-Mbit production from 4 million units/month to 10 million by March. In the summer of 1997, it plans to open a DRAM fab in the U.K. that will add another 30,000 8-inch wafers per month of capacity.

GPS systems reach detente on single board

By Loring Wirbel

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Global-positioning-system specialist Ashtech Inc. said a year ago that establishing a Moscow office would give the company an early lead in hardware for Glonass, the Russian equivalent of GPS. But Ashtech surprised everyone in the navigation industry at a St. Petersburg, Russia, conference this week, when it announced completion of a single-board receiver that can receive both GPS and Glonass signals.

Glonass, or Global Navigational Satellite System, is similar to the U.S. Defense Department's GPS Navstar system, in that both satellite constellations consist of 24 satellites each. GPS satellites are in six orbital p lanes 20,000 km above the earth, while Glonass satellites are in three orbital planes at 19,100 km. Accurate position and time fixes can be gained by reading signals from four navigational satellites.

But Thomas Hunter, vice president of sales at Ashtech, said that Glonass had its own advantages. The Russian government never implemented selective availability, a feature used by the Pentagon to "fuzz out" civilian reception of GPS signals. While President Clinton promised in a March 29 policy statement to phase out selective availability over the next four to 10 years, users of Glonass can gain added accuracy immediately. When GPS and Glonass are used jointly, the "95 percent circle of certainty" for civilian positioning is 11.89 meters, compared with 38.8 meters for GPS alone.

Synopsys, Viewlogic forge 'model' alliance

By Richard Goering

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- A pact between tw o EDA competitors, Synopsys Inc. and Viewlogic Systems Inc., promises to create a new methodology for modeling standard components and ASIC cores. The partnership revolves around Verilog Model Compiler (VMC), a product developed by Chronologic Simulation before its acquisition by Viewlogic.

Under the deal, called the Verilog FoundryModel program, semiconductor vendors will use VMC from Viewlogic's High-Level Design group (Fremont, Calif.) to generate secure object-code models from Verilog source. Synopsys's Logic Modeling business unit will then port the models to its Swift interface format, which is read by nearly all commercial Verilog, VHDL and gate-level logic simulators, and will distribute and support the models.

"This is new and significant because it provides a method for semiconductor vendors to create an accurate full-functional model directly out of their design process, compile it, protect the intellectual property and then make it available to all of their end users independent of wha t simulator they're using," said Dave Bullis, vice president of Synopsys' verification systems group.

The result, said Bullis, will be faster availability of IC and ASIC core models for end users.

SIA lowers growth forecast for 1996

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has revised downward--to 6.7 percent from 26 percent--its forecast for the 1996 global semiconductor market.

Reasons for the move included a drop in DRAM revenue because of an inventory glut. The revision calls for 7.8 percent growth in the United States this year and only a 0.1 percent increase for Japan, whose vendors have been hit hardest by the glut.

Looking farther down the road, the SIA predicts growth of 10 percent in 1997 and 16 percent in 1998.

The news came as major Korean DRAM suppliers, Samsung and Hyundai, dramatically cut their sales forecasts last week, citi ng the downturn in personal computers and manufacturing overcapacity. Samsung said that it expects its semiconductor sales this year to fall 13 to 15 percent short of earlier expectations. And Hyundai slashed its 1996 sales outlook by 20 to 30 percent.

MedianiX intros digital audio chip for home theater

By Craig Matsumoto

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Startup MedianiX Semiconductor Inc. has released its first products, hoping to impress the consumer-electronics market with a purely digital audio processor.

Along for the ride is New Japan Radio Corp., MedianiX's Japanese backer, which is using the California company as a stepping stone into the all-digital market.

New Japan for years has sold analog audio components in Japan and Southeast Asia. Wanting to shift toward digital technology, the company took a 50-percent ownership in MedianiX.

Using a DSP core from C larkspur Design Inc., MedianiX is developing single-chip sound processors for home-theater systems and karaoke machines.

Marketing director Don Phillips said MedianiX plans to one-up DSP players such as Texas Instruments Inc. and Motorola Inc. They concentrate on general-purpose parts, he said, and are "woefully too expensive for audio."

On top of that, most DSP activity in the United States has been geared toward visual signals, primarily in the PC, Leeder said. Audio processing is a more demanding endeavor.

TI hopes Tartan deal will cut DSP design time

By Ashok Bindra

DALLAS -- Having pushed digital-signal-processing technology through process and architecture, Texas Instruments Inc. now is turning its attention to the design methodology.

With its acquisition this month of leading DSP-software-tool developer Tartan Inc. (Pittsburgh) for an undisclosed sum, TI intends to peel back the layers of the development environment to focus on high-level languages as a way to slash design times. The Tartan acquisition is expected to close by month's end.

"Combining the strengths of the two companies, we hope to make a radical change in the development environment," said TI Semiconductor Group vice president and worldwide DSP manager Mike Hames. "Tartan is a clear technical leader in Ada and C++ compilers within the DSP industry, and this acquisition doubles our DSP-development-support resources."

The deal--the first acquisition by the TI Semiconductor Group, which is known for its partnering strategies--is latest in a string of moves intended to elevate TI's already prominent role in DSP. In February, TI unveiled plans to invest $2 billion in a 0.25-micron process and an advanced manufacturing facility largely dedicated to DSP chips. And in March, the company announced funding of research efforts at Rice University (Houston) intended to advance key areas of DSP.

Motorola pursues pact to have Minsk fab make chips

By Peter Clarke

Moscow -- Motorola is moving closer to a manufacturing deal with Integral (Minsk, Belarus) despite continuing difficulties in the emerging-market conditions of the former Soviet Union.

Integral is one of the few chip makers in the East that has managed to keep slow-paced negotiations moving and it looks like these will now pay off.

"We have a joint business plan with Motorola," Edward Kaloshkin, deputy director of Integral, said. "The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is willing to cooperate. They aren't against it, which means they are for it."

He spoke at the fourth annual East/West Electronics Forum organized by the Future Horizons consultancy (Sevenoaks, England).

Kaloshkin said he thinks that CMOS logic families will be the first parts manufactured by Integra l for the former U.S.S.R. market along with products to satisfy Motorola requirements. "We have signed an agreement for a mutual design center, which will work to fill the line," he said.

Integral has some 6-inch capability at around 1-micron, though there is plenty of room for expansion through additional investment.

NBC, Sarnoff will host HDTV station

WASHINGTON -- Two industry groups promoting digital TV have tapped an NBC affiliate as the host station for the Model HDTV Station Project.

The Association for Maximum Service Television and the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association also said that the David Sarnoff Research Center (Princeton, N.J.) will oversee construction of the model station, to be built at WRC-TV here. A team from HDTV Grand Alliance member Sarnoff helped evaluate four proposals to house the HDTV station.

The station will be a source of encoded digital-TV signals to help equipment makers develop HDTV receivers.

Walsh named CEO of synthesis startup Omniview

By Richard Goering

PITTSBURGH -- EDA veteran Mike Walsh has become president and CEO of Omniview Inc., a startup that has developed a unique board-level synthesis tool. Walsh is setting a new direction for the fledgling company, which showed an early version of its Fidelity product at last year's Design Automation Conference.

Based on the Micon program from Carnegie-Mellon University, Fidelity carries the ASIC logic synthesis concept into the board domain. It accepts a high-level block diagram along with constraints, selects components and outputs an optimized board-level schematic. Unlike so-called "board synthesis" tools sold by several pc-board CAD vendors, Fidelity operates in the logical domain only.

"I think there are some tremendous parallels to where Synopsys was six to eight years ago and where Omniview is today," said Walsh. "I think it's the same breadth of market opportunity in terms of a truly innovative technology and a new approach to design."

But, he said, Omniview introduced Fidelity too early, because a comprehensive library wasn't available at the time. He also said the company needs a sounder financial footing and to achieve that he's hoping to close soon on venture-capital financing.

High tech thieves head to greener pasture: Europe

London -- As predicted, high-tech theft has not shriveled up and gone away, even though U.S. law enforcement recently busted two rings targeting U.S. chip and component companies.

Now the targets are European technology companies and subsidiaries of U.S. electronics companies.

In February, a gang of thieves armed with shotguns stole more than $1.6 million in chips from a Unisys facility north of London.

A few weeks later, masked bandits forced a guard at gunpoint to open security doors at a Tandem Computer factory in Scotland. They made off with more than $1.5 million in CPUs.

About the same time, thieves stole $1.7 million in electronic components from a Scottish plant.

Last year, an Irish unit of South Dakota computer marketer Gateway 2000 lost $3.2 million in a holdup.

The European holdups occurred shortly after FBI agents and local law enforcement made the first of two sweeping roundups on the West Coast that effectively broke the back of high-tech theft gangs there.

On Feb. 26, more than 100 people were arrested or indicted in Operation West Chips. And less than a month later, federal agents arrested dozens of suspects the FBI said were "responsible for the national orchestration of an unprecedented crime wave involving heroin trafficking and armed high-tech business robberies."

Immediate impact

The imp act was immediate in the United States. Special FBI agent Richard Bernes told a security conference that from Feb. 28, when the West Chips operation started, through April 3, there were no American high-tech industry robberies.

Embedded code in recorded audio, film, combats piracy

By Peter Clarke

HAYES, England -- Researchers at CRL, formerly the Central Research Laboratories of Thorn EMI, have extended their technique of embedding identification codes in audio recordings to still and moving pictures. These codes, undetectable to the human ear or eye, can be deciphered digitally to prove the origin of the material. Identifying material in such a way could deter copyright piracy.

The visual "watermarking" technique is called VEC, for visual embedded coding.

CRL has already shown how digital codes can be added to analog or digital soundtracks in a system called ICE, for identification code embedded.

By placing the subaudible codes in narrow audio spectrum notches repeatedly throughout a piece of music or a soundtrack, even small clips cannot be used without the code being present. The technique works with audio that has been digitized and transmitted under compression. It is currently being used in the United States by Broadcast Data Systems, a radio-advertisement-monitoring company, to ensure that advertising is being played as often as radio stations claim.

Tool automates neural-net-variables analysis

By R. Colin Johnson

BRIGHTON, Mass. -- A new spin of Unica Technologies Inc.'s Pattern Recognition Workbench (PRW) automatically evaluates every possible combination of input variables in less time than it used to take to try just a few combinations manually.

"Now you don't have to worry about economy up front," said Yu chun Lee, director of research at Unica. "You can just start with a 'kitchen sink' model that includes every variable that might be even remotely related to your problem, and then let the sensitivity-based search find the most important variables."

Genetic algorithms and other automated searching methods figure centrally in Unica's approach, which is to automate the entire process of pattern recognition, not just the learning engine. Consequently, its genetic algorithms not only tune the learning parameters of neural networks, but also automate data-processing tasks by trying out thousands of different combinations to find the best.

Lee also claimed the new version of the PRW is fully 32-bit and runs up to three times faster than earlier versions. "We were already five to 10 times faster than our competitors, but the newer version is three times faster [than that]," Lee said.

Poly mer mold promises 25-nm lithography

By Gail Robinson

MINNEAPOLIS -- Researchers here at the University of Minnesota have developed a lithographic method that may offer IC manufacturers a less-complex way to fabricate 25-nm structures than such conventional methods as scanning-electron-beam and X-ray lithography.

The approach, called nano-imprint lithography, is based on a fairly simple, relatively inexpensive technique that uses compression molding to create a thickness pattern in the thin resist on a substrate. Anisotropic etching then transfers the pattern through the resist and onto the substrate.

The development, now under scrutiny by several large chip manufacturers, opens yet another avenue of exploration to industry as it seeks a viable lithographic technique for next-generation circuits with 0.1-micron-wide features.

To date, several successful experiments, conducted at the university's NanoStructure Laboratory, have yielded a feature size of 25 nm and period of 70 nm in resist greater than 100 nm thick. Using the technology and a lift-off process, the researchers have also fabricated metal patterns at the same dimensions. The structures have a smooth surface--roughness is estimated to be less than 3 nm--and sharp, almost 90ý angles in the corners.

Proxim offering its wireless LAN specs as an open standard

By Loring Wirbel

Sunnyvale, Calif. -- A newly formed wireless-LAN coalition is pledging levels of conformance testing beyond the goals set two months ago by the Wireless LAN Alliance. But the first task of the fledgling Wireless LAN Interoperability Forum (WLIF) seems to be to open the physical-layer and medium-access-control-layer specs of the 2.4-GHz frequency-hopping LAN developed by Proxim Inc.

Proxim marketing vice president Brian Button said that the company will offer chip- and board-layer specs to the forum as open standards and that it has pledged to seek a minimum of three component or semiconductor licensees--in North America, Europe and the Pacific Rim--for its RangeLAN2 architecture. But Button stressed that the first goal of WLIF will be to show vendor interoperability across client stations, chip sets and WLAN-access points.

Hence, if other system vendors want to open MAC-layer and PHY-layer details of proprietary implementations, WLIF will support the effort.

The formation of two WLAN industry groups in two months shows that many networking and radio vendors want to move wireless LANs from their vertical-market base to a broader, horizontal market.

IEEE-USA rallies for expanded IRAs

WASHINGTON -- IEEE-USA has endorsed proposals that would enable more tax breaks for Americans contributing to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA).

"Expanded IRAs will help many middle -income Americans, including engineers and scientists, save more for retirement and, at the same time, increase the supply of capital needed for productive investment in the nation's economy," said George F. McClure, IEEE-USA career-policy chair.

McClure spoke at a news conference called this week by the Savings Coalition, a group of organizations that favor easing restrictions on the use of IRAs.

He noted that most Americans depend on three sources of retirement savings: Social Security, employer-sponsored pensions and personal savings. Those savings are becoming increasingly important, especially for mobile professional and technical workers such as engineers, McClure said.

Smart cards are being prepared for use as credit cards

By Terry Costlow

ATLANTA -- The expected boom in smart cards, which has attracted attention from many major semiconductor providers, is also prompting component and module makers to ratchet up their engineering and production operations. Several vendors at the CardTech/SecurTech conference here earlier this month have developed readers and other mechanisms for what's seen as the next generation of credit-card technology.

Smart cards pack a chip loaded with a specific amount of money, and the amount of a sale is deducted from memory during a transaction. Used as a cash replacement, smart cards reduce the potential for theft and shorten transaction time by eliminating change-making, proponents say.

The nascent nature of the smart-card market provides time for companies to develop advanced products before there's really any revenue to be made. Only a few trials are set for this year, and bankers and merchants won't make major decisions on deploying smart-card technology until they analyze the results. That means that even in 1997, the market for smart-card readers will be fairly small.

But not for long. Most of the cards that will be used in the United States--a number that some predict will be as high as 2.5 billion by the year 2000--will be read by machines that make contact with leads on the surface of the card. That represents a huge opening for those who make components for those machines. To get to that number of cards, smart-card readers will have to be common in retail outlets and transportation centers.

Ansoft Spice tool accounts for lossy interconnects

By Stan Runyon

PITTSBURGH -- Sooner or later, anyone working with high-speed digital circuits will run into skin effect, a frequency-dependent phenomenon manifested by the appearance of eddy currents at the surface of a conductor. Those currents are not exactly harmless beyond a certain frequency point.

The problem: how to account for the delays, attenuation, dispersion, crosstalk or other possible resulting effects. Simplified models , in which transmission lines or interconnects are depicted as lossless or frequency independent, do not work.

Enter Maxwell Spicelink, version 3.0. Ansoft Corp., its developer, says 3.0 is the first EDA software package to provide accurate, frequency-dependent Spice models for lossy interconnects.

Overall, Maxwell Spicelink addresses high-speed digital design issues, including signal integrity and crosstalk, parasitic parameters, power and ground plane placement, and electromigration.

A particular asset of the software is electromagnetic analysis of interconnect structures, including 3-D modeling of package and die interconnects, pc-board connector and bus structures and semiconductor metallization.

Hal adds EDA workstation

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Aiming to make a big splash at the upcoming Design Automation Conference, Hal Computer Systems next week will unveil a hi gh-powered workstation designed to run EDA applications.

Hal, which is owned by Fujitsu, claims that its new Halstation 353 is the only Sparc-based workstation that's expandable to 3 Gbytes of main memory (base models are configured with 1 Gbyte).

The extra memory will cut the time needed to run IC-simulation applications, according to Hal.

Epic's TimeMill simulator has been benchmarked on the workstation. In tests conducted by Hal using TimeMill, a workstation equipped with 2 Gbytes of main memory took about 40 hours to do dynamic timing simulation and verification on a 5.3-million transistor IC design. With a third Gbyte of memory added, the same job took less than 90 minutes.

EDO DRAM busts burst memory's speed advantage

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The unprecedented speed of the latest extended-data-out (EDO) DRAMs, coupled with market skepticism, ma y have sealed the fate of the burst EDO DRAM. Mosel Vitelic is coming out with an EDO DRAM with a 15-ns cycle time, challenging the highest speeds quoted for burst EDO devices. What's more, EE Times has learned, the primary proponent of burst EDO, Micron Semiconductor Inc. (Boise, Idaho), has quietly ceased to promote burst EDO chips for new designs.

The Mosel part illustrates how quickly specialty-DRAM houses have been able to increase the speed of conventional EDO chips. The 1M-by-4 device has a 15-ns EDO cycle and a 40-ns RAS access time. This means that--at least in carefully laid out local memory applications such as frame buffers--the chips can produce short bursts of data at a 66-MHz rate. This rivals the speed of currently shipping synchronous DRAMs, which are moving from early 60-MHz parts to a goal of 80 MHz in this generation.

Another area in which the new devices will give SDRAMs a run for their money is cost. Mosel is pricing the 15-ns EDO DRAMs at parity with fast-page-mode 1M-by-4 D RAMs, undercutting the premium that many DRAM vendors are still charging for SDRAMs.

GEC Plessey ICs target wireless data

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. -- GEC Plessey Semiconductors Inc. (GPS) has been exploring the use of CMOS, single-chip high-frequency receiver chips in compact wireless-data applications. By using a single-conversion architecture--one mixer stage to take the signal all the way from RF to baseband--and crystal oscillators rather than SAW filters, the company has been able to achieve high performance, single-chip form factor and very low power dissipation in some specific applications. Two recent examples are an amplitude-shift keying receiver for moderate-rate data applications and a paging receiver.

The KESRX01 amplitude shift key (ASK) 290- to 460-MHz CMOS receiver includes a low-noise amplifier, a double balanced active mixer, a voltage-controlled oscillator, an I F filter, a phase-locked loop, a logarithmic amplifier, an RSSI detector data filter and a comparator.

By employing a crystal oscillator instead of requiring external SAW filters, the chip offers an unusually narrow 10-kHz channel width and gives the user a larger set of center

frequencies.

Nintendo quietly preps mass-storage medium for Net game player

By Junko Yoshida

LOS ANGELES -- Even as it wowed show-goers at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) here last week with its whizzy 64-bit videogame machine, Nintendo of America Inc. was quietly plotting the system's expansion. Next from the Redmond, Wash., videogame giant will be a new mass-storage medium, code-named "64DD," that industry analysts see as a part of Nintendo's Internet strategy.

The 3.75-inch, magnetic writable disk packs 64 Mbytes, 30 to 40 percent of which is designed to be writable, said execut ive vice president Peter Main. Introduction is expected early next year.

"Nintendo's strategy is to stay with its ROM cartridge to take advantage of direct memory access but to add a bulk disk for storing games and for future network connections," said Rick Sizemore, president of Total Research in Multi-Media (Scottsdale, Ariz.).

Hints about the disk were dropped as Nintendo demonstrated the Nintendo 64 in the United States at E3. Based on the R4300i RISC processor from MIPS Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), the system is packed with SGI's visualization techniques, such as the Reality Co-Processor (RCP) media engine.

Oracle sets open spec for Net box

By Ron Wilson and Craig Matsumoto

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Corp. will gather around it chip vendors, software and systems developers, and even telephone operating companies here today [Monday] to present a common spec ification for a Java-based network computer (NC). They all hope that such an open standard will ignite an explosion in Internet and intranet applications, creating a new segment in the computing market.

The profile, as Oracle calls it, defines a minimum set of standards--including the Java environment and Internet protocols--with which a machine must comply. That set of standards then can be embodied in any kind of implementation--from Oracle's $500 network computer to a full workstation. If the profile is met, the machine will work with Java-based Internet and intranet applications.

The scope of the announcement went far beyond Oracle's controversial diskless, ARM-processor-based network computer. But even this new, broader vision is being challenged by other vendors who see opportunity in the intranet concept. A week ago, Apple Computer president Gil Amelio declared the Internet a primary target for his company's recovery. The next day, Hewlett-Packard and Netscape announced a far-reaching devel opment agreement that will make intranet services integral to HP's client/server computing model. Each of those announcements, coming from a different industry, sees a different architectural solution. But each views corporate intranets as a key growth market for the next several years.

Gloom but not all doom for DRAMs

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Reports of further erosion in DRAM prices, a mounting inventory bubble, and continuing volatility in both the spot and contract memory markets did little to settle the nerves of analysts gathered here last week at Dataquest Inc.'s annual semiconductor outlook conference.

Nonetheless, the news isn't as grim as it might be. Despite intense margin pressure, many memory makers are still reporting healthy profits. And despite the price slide, long-term predictions for future growth and capital expansion have barely been dampened.

Fo r now, at least, the near-term strategy seems to be to batten down the hatches, stay the course and ride out the storm. "No one has blinked," said Richard Dyck, president of the Japan subsidiary of Boston-based tester maker Teradyne Inc., who reported that Japanese orders have remained steady despite the market turmoil.

In fact, the memory business remains "very profitable," Jim Handy, Dataquest's chief memory analyst, told the Dataquest Japanese Semiconductor Industry Conference. The largest DRAM makers garner gross profit margins of about 50 percent on 16-Mbit devices, Handy said, with the most efficient producing parts for $12.50 to $14 apiece, half the contract price.

While Dataquest stuck by its historical optimism, Japanese executives said the DRAM sector has entered another period of severe turmoil, putting strong pressure on profit margins.

Reporter's Notebook: what it's really like to grind out Java

By Alexander Wolfe

A kind of Web-era Woodstock will convene this week, when more than 5,000 Net-heads, hackers and just plain programmers head for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Developers Conference in San Francisco.

One thing that's rarely been addressed amid all the Javamania--is: "How does one actually learn the language and begin writing real-world programs?"

Studying Java in the raw shattered nearly all the notions I had formed about the language. But it also sparked a strong belief that Java will play a far more significant role in the computer industry's future than anyone has thus far let on. Java is a full-fledged programming language in its own right, and one ideally suited for use in large-scale software projects.

Writing a Java program is easy enough, and the Sun team that created Java have followed the prime dictum of good design: Less is more. They've stripped Java of the arcane pointers present in C++ and takes object-oriented computi ng out of the realm of academic gobbledygook.

That's why Java is poised to become the language of choice for the vast majority of PC-based applications. Indeed, within six months I believe Java will be well on its way toward displacing C++ as king of the Windows programming hill.

Java will also kill off Ada and Smalltalk. Let's see how long it takes for Microsoft--a Java licensee and a company quick to exploit emerging trends--to begin readying a "Visual Java" development environment.

Fingerprint systems in commercial push

By Terry Costlow

ATLANTA -- The science of biometrics--analyzing fingerprints or other biological traits to determine identity--leapt from the shadows at last week's CardTech/SecurTech conference. Specialists in the technology announced products aimed at broader commercial markets, and major companies forayed into the field.

Visa and Mastercar d announced pilot programs for fingerprint readers, and Oracle Corp. and VeriFone Inc. said they are finalizing their own test programs for the technology. Harris Corp. formally entered the verification market by unveiling a sensing technology and the support infrastructure to go with it. And Comparator Systems Corp. took the wraps off a fingerprint reader that has been the topic of industry speculation for some time.

The decreasing cost of fingerprint scanners and the hardware needed to search and compare prints have prompted predictions that fingerprint verification may soon expand beyond law-enforcement and high-security applications as supplements to or replacements for passwords and personal-identification numbers.

"We will be starting trials this year--sooner, rather than later," said a spokeswoman at Visa International (San Francisco). She acknowledged that "there are still a number of outstanding issues that have to be examined; they range from financial to social to psychological."

SIA roadmap focuses on lack of deep submicron R&D

By George Leopold

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- The Semiconductor Industry Association is weighing a proposed "focus center" model for university/industry research into deep-submicron design, interconnect and lithography issues. If approved at next month's SIA board meeting, sources said, the proposal could begin to correct what critics have called a dangerous shortfall of funding for R&D of critical fine-geometry design-automation technologies.

Larry Sumney, chairman of Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC; Research Triangle Park), said the proposed design center is the first of up to seven research initiatives focusing on future electronic fabrication. He estimated initial funding for such a design center would hit $5 million to $7 million.

The proposal would require semiconductor makers and their suppliers to ante up funding for the center. Such a funding model would strengthen the SIA's role in EDA-tool development while helping to relieve the semiconductor industry's reliance on design-automation software companies for next-generation EDA-tool development.

Progress in DVD-copyright talks disputed

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Confusion surfaced last week over the status of talks aimed at finding a compromise on software-copyright protection for digital video recordings. Though one executive claimed that a deal was imminent, others said talks were continuing, with no firm agreement in sight.

Toshiba Corp. executive vice president Taizo Nishimuro said a copy-protection deal had been struck between the computer industry's Technical Working Group and the DVD-hardware interests and that the two sides would sign an agreement during a scheduled June 3 meeting in Washington. Nishimuro said the deal would clear the way for production of DVD-ROM drives.

But U.S. industry sources said that while progress had been made in the talks among the computer, consumer-electronics and movie industries, a final deal had yet to be hammered out. Several said the only agreement thus far has been that all three--represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association and Information Technology Industry Council--would refrain from introducing copy-protection legislation before the June 3 meeting.

More delays emerge for copyright bill

WASHINGTON -- Final action on a digital-copyright bill was postponed by a House panel until this week after new concerns emerged about the legislation's anti-circumvention provision.

The House Judiciary intellectual property subcommittee had scheduled a session last week to complete work on the bill. B ut the panel's negotiations with content providers and consumer-electronics manufacturers bogged down over a provision dealing with digital-recording gear that could circumvent copy-protection technologies.

Further disputes among Hollywood studios, consumer-electronics manufacturers and on-line providers could kill the bill for this session.

Free Subscription to EE Times First Name Last Name Company Name Title Email address   Click here for your Free Subscription to EETimes Europe