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

Friday, June 7, 1996

DVD briefing: developers told all is well. . .almost

Consumer electronics going increasingly digital

Texas Instruments acquires Silicon Systems

Japan lags on Internet, but is poised to catch up

Matsushita, Motorola, tip plans about ferro IC card

Thursday, June 6, 1996

EE Times poll results: Internet is integral part of work week

EDA can't live by tools alone

EDA executives sound off on business

Alta Group pushes application-specific tools

DAC keynoter urges dual path for R &D

Dataquest projects $3.6 billion EDA Market by 2000

Wednesday, June 5, 1996

IBM designers gear for mega-gate-plus ASICs

Digital to phase out PDP-11

New silica looks to thin-film designs

Wafer-scale sensor has 66M pixels

Neural spikes speed calculations

Tuesday, June 4, 1996

Startup targets data paths

Alaris takes aim at compression market

Zilog debuts TV controller that includes V-chip technology

ADI video-compression IC ignores MPEG

Miniature Card alliance rallies supporters

Monday, June 3, 1996

NRC report on cryptography may sink Clipper chip

Microsoft readies 'Pegasus' OS

Digital still cameras are making a move

Samsung gives in to DRAM drop, will cut production

TI remembers Junkins for 'quiet revolution'

Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times . Previous editions from 1994 , 1995 , and 1996 are in the News Archive on the News page .

Other news sources on Techweb .

Friday, June 7, 1996

DVD briefing: developers told all is well. . .almost

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Digital-video-disk (DVD) system developers have reached the point of no return. Despite lingering uncertainty over some product specifications that could lead to costly detours, developers continue to march optimistically toward the launch of systems.

But good news emerged from the DVD Briefing industry conference held here last week:

• Vendors assured attendees that a promised fall 1996 launch of DVD systems will be on time.
• Sixty computer, consumer electronics and movie executives are meeting every week, committed to resolving disputes over DVD copyright protection.
• The DVD Consortium -- composed of 10 companies that originally proposed the DVD format -- agreed to establish a one-stop shopping agency for licensing. DVD licensing terms will be unveiled by early July.
• The DVD specification book version 0.9 is available today for $5,000 to anyone who signs a non-disclosure agreement.

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Consumer electronics going increasingly digital

CHICAGO -- The keynote speaker at last week's International Consumer Electronics Conference here told the chip-design community to be prepared for an acceleration of the digital revolution through the rest of the decade, as home electronics turns increasingly to digital technology.

Joseph P. Clayton, Thomson Consumer Electronics' executive vice president of marketing and sales in the Americas and Asia, described aspects of the revolution to conference attendees. "DVDs [digital video disks] will soon play full-length movies with digital-quality video and theater-caliber sound," Clayton said. "But that's really just the beginning. Within a few yea rs there will be recordable disks. And in the near term, DVD-ROMs with 12 times the storage capacity of CD-ROMs will be available for computer users."

The transformation of home electronics is opening new opportunities for chip designers, but also presents new design challenges for the semiconductor industry. The digitalization of television receivers, VCRs and camcorders, plus the arrival of the digital video disk (DVD), mini-dish digital satellite systems and set-top boxes are accelerating an already-present trend.

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Texas Instruments acquires Silicon Systems

IRVING, Texas -- Bolstering its position in disk drives, Texas Instruments Inc. has agreed to acquired Silicon Systems Inc. (SSI) from its parent, TDK Corp. of Japan, in a deal valued at $575 million.

SSI's mixed-signal and analog ICs, which are sold mainly to disk-drive makers, w ill complement TI's presence in DSPs. Tustin, Calif.-based SSI -- which has lost market share because it has not been able to produce enough of some of its chips -- gains access to TI's manufacturing capacity.

"One of the things we bring is the opportunity to use TI's manufacturing capabilities," said Joe O'Hare, hard-disk-drive business unit manager at TI. "SSI has been dealing with a situation where they had good demand for their products, but they were capacity-constrained."

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Japan lags on Internet, but is poised to catch up

WASHINGTON -- The Japanese market is well behind the United States in deployment of the Internet, and American officials are gloating.

Technical and regulatory barriers, along with cultural differences centering on language, are forcing Japan's infrastructure to play catch-up on Internet technolog y, even as Net surfing catches on like American fast food. But experts at a CyberJapan symposium at the Library of Congress last month warned that Japan's standing vis-a-vis the Internet hasn't been determined.

Japan has "gone back to the drawing board" on the software, networking and other key technologies the Japanese market needs to be a player on the global infobahn, said Marie Anchordoguy, a Japan specialist at the University of Washington (Seattle). "It's easy for the U.S. to gloat, [but] Japan's doing pretty well. It's well positioned for the future," she said.

As U.S. providers of Internet software and services bask in their global Internet lead, analysts said their Japanese counterparts acknowledge past failures and weaknesses in such areas as multimedia software. At the same time, they are plowing research funds into object-oriented technology and other long-term, high-risk disciplines that will be critical to advancing Net technology.

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Matsushita , Motorola, tip plans about ferro IC card

TOKYO -- Matsushita Electronics Corp. and a subsidiary of Motorola Inc., Indora Corp., have jointly developed a radio-frequency-identification card (RFID) system based on the Y-1 ferroelectric technology developed at Colorado University and Symetrix Corp. (Colorado Springs, Colo.). Matsushita is expected to come out with the first product in October.

Ferroelectric memory -- a nonvolatile technology with high speed and low power consumption, and which some call a potential DRAM replacement -- will go into IC cards now that the memory's endurance level has been improved. With its layered Perovskite structure, Y-1 is almost "fatigue- free." Symetrix chairman Carlos A. Paz de Araujo said, "It does not degrade even after 10 trillion erase/write operations."

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Thursday, June 6, 1996

EE Times poll results: Internet is integral part of work week

The most valuable gems they find on the Web, users said, are:

• data sheets (185 responses);
• software downloads (160 responses);
• distributors' reference designs (137 responses); and
• the free sites at EE Times Online (120) and other publications (130).

Only one person out of 240 ever "purchased products such as components or EDA software over the Web." But it's not too early, our users told us, to start posting component- subsystem pricing or order entry, or both, on the Web. More than half, 121 responses, ranked price/order information highest on the "wish lists."

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EDA can't live by tools alone

LAS VEGAS -- The biggest obstacle to the EDA industry's continued growth is its fixation on "design" as the locus of its self-definition. That's the view of respected electronics-industry consultant and venture capitalist Andy Rappaport, who addressed EDA leaders here this week at DAC.

Rappaport sought to explain why traditional EDA tools are not valued by the semiconductor industry as much as they were in the 1980s.

Annual EDA sales have moved from about 2 percent of annual semiconductor sales to 1 percent in about five years, leading to the unpalatable conclusion that, in general, software is no longer on the critical path in chip and systems de velopment.

"The things that create lasting value in electronics are no longer actually influenced that much by the [design] software," he said. "It used to be most important to have the smallest die size. Now it is things like creating a brand name or an industry architecture, or developing an algorithm."

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EDA executives sound off on business

LAS VEGAS -- Chief executives from top design-automation companies faced off this week during an unusually placid panel session on EDA business issues. Panelists Mike Bosworth of OrCAD, Joe Costello of Cadence Design, Aart de Geus of Synopsys, Wally Rhines of Mentor Graphics and Alain Hanover of Viewlogic fielded questions on topics ranging from tool quality to service issues.

Hanover joined other CEOs in defending their tools saying, "If tools aren't pushing corners of the envelope, then they won't have any bugs. We're pushing the corners of the envelopes."

Hanover was responding to general user sentiment as well as a tongue-in-cheek thank you from Ameesh Oza, an engineer with Teradyne.

"By making your tools difficult to use, poorly integrated and full of bugs, you have provided jobs for thousands of people like me to support CAD tools within companies that buy them," Oza said. "Thank you very much." On the topic of whether Windows or Unix will prevail as the design-engineering platform, executives agreed that both will co-exist, at least in the short-term.

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Alta Group pushes application-specific tools

The suite is part of Cadence's pan-corporate effort to get its arms -- as well as its customers' -- around system-level design issues.

"Interest in this finally started to take off in 1995, and it's ramping very fast," said Alta head Douglas Fairbairn.

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DAC keynoter urges dual path for R&D

LAS VEGAS -- Arati Prabhakar, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), called this week for continued support of traditional investment and research activities as well as experimentati on in public/private partnerships.

Both approaches are necessary if the United States is to continue to evolve a national technical infrastructure, she said. "While all these changes are going on . . . we need to not lose sight of the fundamentals," said Prabhakar, a PhD in applied physics. "Universities have a unique responsibility that no one else can fulfill: education. As they do wonderful research, they can't lose sight of that responsibility."

Prabhakar also urged more experimentation in public/private alliances in which investment dollars can be leveraged to focus on applied, rather than theoretical, applications.

"We're learning that partnership and entrepreneurship can coexist," she told an audience of more than 500. "There is a better attempt to link that public dollar to the private investment that goes on, recognizing we don't have the luxury of putting technology on the shelf to let it age" until someone figures out how to commercialize it, Prabhakar added.

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Dataquest projects $3.6 billion EDA Market by 2000

While a "design gap" still exists between silicon technology and EDA capability, Smith said, EDA vendors are doing a "super job" to help close it. Smith's generally upbeat presentation forecast 1996 EDA software revenues of $1.89 billion, growing to $3.63 billion by 2000. Looking more closely at platforms, he predicted a 12.9-percent compound annual growth rate for Unix and a healthy 101-percent compound annual growth rate for Windows NT.

In discussing various "drivers" for the EDA marketplace, Smith said that register-transfer level (RTL) virtual prototyping is "obviously the most important issue." This new methodology will include such elements as design planning and hardware/software co-design, and will completely change the organization of design teams as well as the competitive structure of the EDA industry, he said.

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Wednesday, June 5, 1996

IBM designers gear for mega-gate-plus ASICs

ESSEX JUNCTION, Vt. -- ASICs with over a million gates offer new system-level opportunities while posing unique design, test and fabrication problems that must be solved by foundries attempting to leap the new density barrier.

A detailed analysis of the problems facing custom design at ever-shrinking geometries was presented by a team from IBM Corp.'s Microelectronic s Center (Essex Junction). Virtually every aspect of custom design had to be reworked to achieve a practical approach.

The IBM team was able to build an effective methodology using existing design tools from Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) and Synopsis Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.), supplemented with some custom tools built specifically for the project.

The problem of wire delay emerged as a major issue in high-density-ASIC design. At 0.5 micron, the traditional gate-delay factor to which existing tools are geared is overshadowed by wire delay and capacitance. The difference between short-wire and long-wire delay also tripped up designs by making it difficult to simplify wire congestion while simultaneously meeting timing constraints.

While existing simulation and layout tools provide efficient methods based solely on gate-level simulation, the dominance of wire delays forced the researchers to develop a new approach based on an edge-triggered model.

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Digital to phase out PDP-11

MARLBORO, Mass. -- In a move that underscores the longevity of embedded environments, Digital Equipment Corp. has announced that it will ship the last PDP-11 at the end of 1997. The venerable system, which typified both the growing and waning era of the minicomputer, is being phased out after more than a quarter of a century of continued sales.

Digital unveiled the PDP-11 in 1970, taking the leap into the 16-bit market. The product's life story reflects the dramatic changes wrought by the advent of the personal computer.

"We believe it had the longest life of any computer architecture," said Digital Embedded and Real Time Group manager John Pryke, who worked for a PDP-11 customer before joining Digital in 1980 to market the architecture. "During the course of the PDP-11's lifetime, Digital built about 600,000 machines Th at was an astronomical figure, though it pales in comparison to today's PCs."

Pryke estimates that 300,000 to 400,000 PDP-11s "are still in operation today."

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New silica looks to thin-film designs

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- A recently developed artificial material may play a role in improving the material characteristics of electronic components.

By manipulating a silicon compound, SiO2, researchers here at Michigan State University have developed a new form of the silica with a layered structure of concentric shells which closely resemble the insides of an onion. Called vesicles or vesicular particles, the spherical-shaped layers measure between one-millionth and one-billionth of a meter thick and offer extremely porous characteristics that may find potential application in thin-film technology for fabricating sensors and nanoscale de vices.

The new vesicles, which come in groups or clusters, are reported to offer exceptional thermal stability, high specific surface area and pore volume, and a high degree of cross-linking. The unique structures add to a lengthening list of nanoscale systems that are engineered via physical, chemical or biological processes. The material is based on a biomimetic templating process that takes place in a system consisting of alternating layers of water and a surfactant called diamine.

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Wafer-scale sensor has 66M pixels

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands -- Research here into the application of gate-array-fabrication techniques to image sensors has yielded what is claimed to be the world's largest IC: a wafer-scale sensor containing more than 66 million CCD pixels and measuring 3.39 x 4.33 inches.

Built at Philips Imaging Technology, part of Philips Research Laboratories, the giant sensor fills an entire 6-inch wafer. The primary object of the research was the development of a modular CCD-fabrication approach that would repeatedly apply a single building block across the wafer to construct a sensor. As in the gate-array model, use of the same basic mask set for different sensor designs reduces development time and costs.

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Neural spikes speed calculations

GRAZ, Austria -- An Austrian scientist here claims a theoretical breakthrough in explaining how the relatively slow-acting chemicals of the brain process information efficiently. Wolfgang Maass of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at the Technical University here targets the timing of individual neural "spikes," rather than the slower, average neural firing rate, as the principal code for biological information processing.

Maass claims that his model of spiking neural networks not only is biologically plausible but is applicable to VLSI neural-network implementations.

Maass' model is able to explain some aspects of brain operation that have been difficult to explain with conventional theory, which looks at firing-rate averages as the means by which analog values are represented in the brain. The Maass model shows, for example, that even in the presence of noise, spikes recognize a pattern in less than 100 ms.

"I'm not claiming we have a 'blueprint' for the organization of fast analog computations in biological neural systems," said Maass. "But our noisy spiking neurons are the first theoretical model that is able to explain the fast analog computations we observe in real biological systems."

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Tuesday June 4, 1996

Startup targets data paths

LOS ALTOS, Calif. -- Despite the rapid adoption of synthesis tools, data-path design and optimization continue to challenge designers. A new company, Arcadia Design Systems, is meeting that challenge with a data-path compiler that takes in gate-level net-lists and performs an automatic placement.

Exhibiting for the first time at this week's Design Automation Conference, Arcadia was founded in late 1995 by president Wei-Kong Chia and four other EDA researchers.

Chia started Arcadia to address some of the problems he encountered at Hitachi, where he was using such tools as the GDT module generators from Mentor Graphics. "My motivation was to provide something not available today," he said. "For data-path people are using full-custom generators or compilers, but none provide very quick turnaround times and high performance."

Arcadia's Mustang is a highly automated tool that takes in Verilog or EDIF net-lists and generates placement files for one of several C AD systems. Cell3 and Gate Ensemble from Cadence, and ArcCell and ArcCell-XO from Avant! are supported.

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Alaris takes aim at compression market

FREMONT, Calif. -- Five-year-old PC-motherboard maker Alaris Inc. is making a dramatic shift in its business focus in a bid to become a leading audio/video-compression product company.

While continuing its traditional computer system business, the company aspires to provide "one-stop-shopping for audio/video communications technologies," ranging from video e-mail and Internet broadcasting to videoconferencing, said Alaris director of business development Clement Lam.

Crown jewel of the re-invented Alaris is an efficient, non-standard compression algorithm that uses variations of a DCT-based algorithm developed by its team of Russian engineers, based here.

The company recently released a video e-mail package, called Videogram. By using its compression algorithm, 30 seconds of motion video can be compressed to a 0.5-Mbyte file. In other words, 60 seconds of video can easily fit into a 3.5-inch floppy disk (1.44 Mbytes). Because a Videogram-compressed file is attached with a 150-kbyte decoder algorithm, which self-extracts and self-executes when a video e-mail is opened, there is no need for those who received a Videogram file to download a Videogram player from the Web, or to go out and buy a PC with Videogram-decoding hardware or software.

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Zilog debuts TV controller that includes V-chip technology

Starting in 1998, the violence-blocking feature will be mandated by law. Zilog's Z86129 line includes an implementation solution f or compliance with U.S. requirements. The device includes on-screen display and automatic data-extraction capabilities for blocking violent programming and closed-captioning. Additional members of the line are available without the closed-caption and on-screen display controller, or without the V-chip capability.

Besides the chip that monitors the main TV channel, a separate chip is required to block or monitor information viewed in the picture-in-picture (PIP) window.

Zilog said that its microcontroller is an add-on solution for TV makers that require violence blocking for full-screen or PIP box and TV and VCR clock-setting. A peripheral chip is dedicated to extracting time-of-day information for TVs, VCRs and set-top boxes.

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ADI video-compression IC ignores MPEG

NORWOOD, Mass. -- Analog Devices Inc. (ADI), a late entrant to the video-compressi on IC market, deliberately chose not to go after an already crowded video-decoder IC business using the international standards-based MPEG. Instead, the company decided to pursue a PC video-capture and editing market with a compression chip optimized for non-standard, wavelet-based compression technology.

Today, more than 20 companies are competing in the growing MPEG-based video-decoder market, vying for design-wins in a variety of consumer electronics products such as PCs, video CD players, digital satellite decoder set-tops and digital-video-disk systems.

ADI's dedicated silicon, designated ADV601, implements an exotic wavelet-based video-compression algorithm. The video codec offers virtually lossless to 350:1 real-time compression and decompression of CCIR-601 digital video, Smith said. Priced at $35.95, the chip offers both real-time video encode and decode. ADI has begun sampling the IC.

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Miniature Card alliance rallies supporters

TOKYO -- The Miniature Card alliance, led by AMD, Fujitsu, Intel and Sharp, signed up 18 new companies to support the consumer-use memory card, as competition with the Solid State Floppy Disk Card (SSFDC) alliance led by Toshiba Corp. reached a higher level of intensity.

A few weeks ago, Toshiba and 36 other Japanese companies, notably Fuji Photo Film, Samsung Electronics and Sega Corp., put on a luncheon "forum" for supporters of its SSFDC .

The 38-member-strong Miniature Card group quickly stepped up its efforts and filled a hotel banquet room with engineers from 52 Japanese companies seeking to learn about the merits of the Mini Card, a smaller-than-PCMCIA memory card aimed at consumer applications such as digital cameras, voice recorders, advanced pagers, cellular phones and handheld computers. The Mini Card measures 38 mm wide x 33 mm long x 3.5 mm high, and can hold four chips, wh ich currently permit 64 Mbytes of flash, ROM or DRAM storage.

By contrast, the SSFDC is an overmolded, single die with 22 contacts and is only 0.7 mm thick. SSFDC supporters argue that the small size and simple packaging will result in lower costs.

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Monday June 3, 1996

Synopsys , Viewlogic target 0.25ý design

LAS VEGAS -- Bold new initiatives to tackle chip designs of 0.25 micron and below take center stage at the Design Automation Conference here this week. Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) will announce a major Sematech contract to build a logical- and physical-design system, while Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) will integrate some key point tools under its new ASIC 2000 program.

Synopsys's $6 million contract is the first awarded to a commercial EDA vendor under Sematech's 0.25-micron Chip Hierarchical Design System initiative, which seeks to bridge the "productivity gap" between design tools and silicon technology.

The contract calls for a team from Synopsys, IBM Corp. and Cooper & Chyan Technologies (CCT) to develop an integrated, timing-driven design system from high-level synthesis through placement and routing.

Viewlogic's ASIC 2000 initiative represents that company's first attempt to put together a coherent deep-submicron ASIC strategy following its acquisitions of Chronologic, Quad Design, Silerity and Sunrise. Viewlogic has packaged point tools from these companies into integrated solutions for data-path design, static sign-off and design for test.

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Flexible 32-bit RISC core called Arc offered for embedded applications

LONDON -- Technical Data Freeway Inc. (TDF) and Britain's Argonaut Technologies Ltd. this week will announce details o f a 32-bit RISC microprocessor core that they say elevates the concept of licensable, synthesizable cores to a new level. The Argonaut RISC core (ARC) requires less than 16,000 logic gates to implement, but its instruction set can be extended by its licensees and supporting hardware added to the design.

That, the companies claim, will allow the ARC to be tailored for a variety of embedded applications, including color-printer control, asynchronous-transfer-mode switch control, MPEG data-stream processing and 3-D graphics rendering. The CPU, which will debut at the Design Automation Conference, will be available to customers as a VHDL script at the register transfer level. The design is ready for synthesis using Synopsys Inc. software.

ASIC designers have long been able to license and integrate a wide variety of functional blocks, ranging from timers and counters to 8-bit microcontrollers and communications modules. TDF (Concord, Mass.) alone provides about 90 such modules.

The ability to re use predesigned VHDL modules can greatly speed the process of system-level ASIC design. Chip designers can assemble a VLSI device much the way they would design a circuit board, picking standard parts from a data book and wiring them together.

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NRC report on cryptography may sink Clipper chip

WASHINGTON -- In a move that could sound the death knell for the controversial Clipper chip, a long-awaited report to Congress last week endorsed widespread commercial use of encryption technology and rejected key facets of the Clinton administration's key-escrow scheme.

The report by a panel of experts convened by the National Research Council (NRC) endorses relaxation of export controls on cryptography technology from the current 40-bit-level keys to the 56-bit Digital Encryption Standard (DES), the U.S. government algorithm, and proposes restricting key -escrow encryption to government use, at least for now.

The panel said the government should explore escrowed encryption on its own and not impose the technology on industry. That, along with similar proposals in Congress, could signal the death of the proposed Clipper standard and its recent variants, observers said.

Industry is likely to have problems with the 56-bit key length, since 80-bit keys are becoming the norm.

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Microsoft readies 'Pegasus' OS

The hardware platforms reportedly include a Hewlett-Packard device under development that's based on a highly integrated Hitachi SH-3 mini-RISC CPU. Casio of Japan is also reportedly building an SH-based unit, an extension of that company's family of pen-based organizers in Japan.

Two other vendors, NEC Corp. and Korea's Lucky Goldstar, are also reportedly doing palmtops for the announcement. Both are believed to be using CPUs other than the SH.

All four platforms will follow a reference design from Microsoft that specifies a CPU, a monochrome half-EGA screen, and high-speed serial communications. The latter feature is used for automatic file synchronization with a Windows 95-based desktop. The OS is tuned for ROM-based applications, which will include subset versions of Word and Excel.

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Digital still cameras are making a move

Sony Corp., Canon Inc., Ricoh, Seiko Epson and Fuji Photo Film Co. are launching new digital still cameras almost simultaneously. The offerings took center stage at the recent Business Show '96 here, as pundits predicted that sales of digital still cameras will exceed 1 million units this year.

The newest digital cameras require computational power and intelligence to capture, process, enhance and compress PC-ready image files on a non-PC platform. In pursuit of lower cost and higher performance, system manufacturers today are testing prototypes employing various JPEG codecs as well as RISC-based ASICs integrating such elements as an A/D converter, timing generator, sync generator and signal-conditioning and buffer circuitry. A heated race to achieve optimal silicon has emerged among leading JPEG-codec vendors, suc h as Zoran Corp., and the Japanese consumer companies' own chip divisions.

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Samsung gives in to DRAM drop, will cut production

Samsung, which has been running its factories around the clock, will shut down for two days a month and give its workers additional summer holidays in order to reduce monthly output to 12 million units, according to a spokesman.

However, the other two major South Korean producers vowed to increase production of 16-Mbit DRAMs. Hyundai Electronics said it will boost monthly output from 8 million to 14 m illion units by year's end, and LG Semicon pledged to boost capital investments for 0.35-micron lines capable of 64-Mbit DRAM production.

All the major DRAM makers were mulling their options last week as the spot markets in Japan, Taiwan and the United States underwent unprecedented gyrations, dropping the 16-Mbit tag to $12 and lower. DRAM prices have been under heavy pressure all year, but the slide was particularly acute in May.

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TI remembers Junkins for 'quiet revolution'

DALLAS -- Jerry R. Junkins, chairman, president and chief executive of Texas Instruments Inc., died Wednesday of cardiac arrest during a trip to Europe.

A 37-year veteran of TI, Junkins began his career as a manufacturing engineer in TI's defense division and later moved up through the management ranks. He became president and chief executive in 1985 and was name d TI's chairman in 1988. With Junkins at the helm, TI steered away from the dwindling defense business to concentrate on proprietary semiconductor products. For the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, the company logged $1.1 billion in profit on revenue of $13.1 billion, compared with 1994 profit of $691 million on revenue of $10.3 billion.

William P. (Pat) Weber, a TI vice chairman, has been named acting president and chief executive of the company. Bill Mitchell continues to serve on TI's board as vice chairman. Weber and Mitchell had advised Junkins as members of the "office of the chief executive," an entity Junkins created in 1993.

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