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, July 26, 1996

Broadcast, computer industries to tackle HDTV data-broadcast specs

LSI spins MPEG-2 reference design for PC

Taiwan shuffles fab plans

Study: Asia's building steam

Thursday, July 25, 1996

$500 Win95 PC on the way

Hot market seen for drives, outpacing growth in PCs

Certicom < in encryption push

Cisco acquires Telebit

Wednesday, July 24, 1996

IEEE calls for national plan for training, deploying engineers

Salaries increase apace, despite shortages

Algorithm lets FPGAs do signal processing

New method grows semiconductors from the ground up

FET channels one electron at a time

Tuesday, July 23, 1996

FCC decision will launch "two new broadband industries"

Talks on renewing U.S.-Japan IC trade pact reach an impasse

Zoran chip can turn a PC into a video editing station

High Level Design and OEA target RC extraction

Projection displays get flexible

Hitachi creates LAN unit

Monday, July 22, 1996

Clinton moves to stop cyber threats

Motorola MCU breaks the 1-V barrier

IC makers struggle with equipment in rush to 0.35 micron features

Phoenix buys Virtual Chips, raises PC-design ante

Ultra2 SCSI ups bus speed to 80 Mbytes/s

Eight magneto-optical drive vendors eye new 5-inch format

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, July 26, 1996

Broadcast , computer industries to tackle HDTV data-broadcast specs

WASHINGTON -- A cross-industry group meets here next Tuesday to begin developing technical standards for data broadcasting using the proposed U.S. digital TV standard.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC)-sponsored meeting represents a respite from the noisy debate over whether regulators should mandate the recommended U.S. digital TV standard. Conducted at the National Association of Broadcasters headquarters, the meeting will unite broadcasters, TV makers and at least one computer company to help work out details of the transition from analog to digital TV. Intel Corp.'s Serge Rutman will head the new ATSC Specialist Group on Data Broadcasting.

Organizers said the new group will try to define specifications for using high-bandwidth digital TV to deliver data. Specifically, it will verify protocols and syntax to transfer data files and executable code over broadcast airwaves. Both capabilities are seen as fundamental ingredients for many hybrid applications.

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LSI spins MPEG-2 reference design for PC

MILPITAS, Calif. -- LSI Logic Corp. hopes the MPEG-2 reference-design module it unveiled this week will lead to a bigger role for the company in the market for DVD and audio/video solutions at PC OEMs and add-in card makers.

In a shift, the company now hopes to expand its business in the multimedia PC market by capitalizing on its existing MPEG-2 chip, which is already in volume production for set-tops.

The company is already developing a number of MPEG-2-based audio, video and graphics solutions specifically for PCs, and has outlined a road map to introduce those over the next 18 months, said Naresh Baliga, marketing manager of the PC Business Unit at LSI Logic, based here.

LSI Logic's first PC MPEG-2 playback reference-design module, called Scenario, utilizes the company's L64002 single-chip MPEG-2 audio/video decoder, as well as Cirrus Logic Inc.'s CL-GD-5446 visual media accelerator and Zoran Corp.'s AC-3 audio chip.

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Taiwan shuffles fab plans

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The fab-building frenzy that once gripped this boomtown has come to an end. Last year's plans to build 10 new 8-inch fabrication facilities in this country -- the biggest regional runup in the world at the time -- now run the gamut from full-speed-ahead to resigned failure.

At least two of last year's fab wanna-bes have dropped out of the action altogether. Hualon Microelectronics, a subsidiary of Chia Hsin Livestock Co., has put its plans for an 8-inch fab on hold. Tatung Co., which was reported to be building a 25,000 wafer/month 8-inch wafer fab last year, now says it has no plans for such a fab, and in fact had never decided to invest in such a project.

TI-Acer Inc. has put its new $1.35 billion joint-venture DRAM facility on hold. R.T. Lo, vice president at TI-Acer, said that the venture will finish the clean room by year's end. Equipment purchases will be delayed for now, and will be evaluated every quarter at their board meetings, Lo said.

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Study : Asia's building steam

WASHINGTON -- The Asian electronics juggernaut is expected to strengthen, as high-flyers like Korea and Taiwan shed their dependence on Japanese technology and all of East Asia targets the potentially huge Chinese consumer market, a new U.S. study concludes.

"East Asia will increasingly dominate the electronics industry," predicted the government-sponsored study, which focused on Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Not only is the region seeing an acceleration in technology transfer, but Asian nations also are making huge investments in facilities and capital equipment, and crafting long-term strategies based on national planning and the ability to exploit global R&D and advanced manufacturing.

The study findi ngs were unveiled at a recent workshop here staged by the International Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a government-funded think tank based at Loyola College of Maryland (Baltimore). The study aimed to document Pacific Rim technology and manufacturing capabilities in semiconductors and electronics as well as to shed light on the interdependencies among Asian countries and companies.

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Thursday, July 25, 1996

$500 Win95 PC on the way

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- A tiny Japanese-run company, based here, is using a combination of software sleight-of-hand and an unusual approach to production to build a $500 Windows 95 PC that it will sell in Japanese grocery stores as well as over the Internet.

With a manufacturing force consisting mostly of Salinas, Calif., farm workers more accustomed to strawberries and artichokes than silicon chips, BigBa ng Technology Inc. (BBT) is building what president and CEO Tamio Saito calls "the first $500 PC made in the U.S.A."

Though the Internet-ready HummingBird uses a "non-Intel" 66-MHz 486DX2 CPU, this is no dumbed-down consumer gimmick lacking hard-disk drives and up-to-date software. Rather, the PC features a Peripheral Component Interconnect bus, extended IDE, 14.4-kbit/second fax/data voice modem and a 540-Mbyte hard drive, according to Saito. HummingBirds do not, however, come with a computer display.

"What sets our machine apart from other $500 PCs in development is that this is a fully configured PC capable of running Windows 95 on a 486-class CPU. And it already has lots of applications software preinstalled," Saito said.

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Hot market seen for drives, outpacing growth in PCs

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Despite recent pr oblems at some drive makers and the shutdown of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s disk-drive operations, the market for hard-disk drives continues to look hot for the rest of the decade, according to projections from Dataquest Inc. Shipments will grow at about 19 percent -- at a faster rate than the PC industry -- as more products use drives and PC users invest in upgrades.

"For every PC that ships, about 1.5 disk drives ship in today's market," said Phil Devin, chief analyst at Dataquest, based here. "By the year 2000, that should increase to 1.6. Most of that increase will come out of the aftermarket."

The aftermarket is a solid growth area, but OEM shipments will continue to be more important, according to Dataquest. In 2000, when worldwide drive shipments should total about 210 million units, OEM shipments will total about 175 million. This year's projection is for 114 million units, "but continued weakness in PCs could curtail that a bit," Devin said.

"Overall, we 're looking at 19 percent compound annual growth from 1995 to 2000," he said.

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Certicom in encryption push

TORONTO -- Mobius Encryption Technologies, the primary corporate backer of elliptic-curve algorithms, has changed its name to Certicom Corp. Charged with an IPO-derived cash infusion and fresh management, Certicom is poised to propel this growing class of encryption, which promises a broader, more secure application of encryption to embedded devices than common public-key algorithms.

Mobius was founded by Dr. Scott Vanstone, an expert in applying number field theories to public-key algorithms. Under its new name, the company launched an initial public offering on the Canadian Dealing Network in February. In addition, it hired Gary Hughes, former president of infrared LAN specialist Photonics Corp., as its new chief executive.

Certi com signed a cooperative R&D agreement in mid-July with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. to work on a Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI. The company will work with other companies -- including Spyrus Inc., VeriSign Inc., BBN Corp., Cylink Corp., Motorola, Nortel and AT&T Government Markets -- to develop interoperability specs for digital signature and other PKI components.

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Cisco acquires Telebit

CHELMSFORD, Mass. -- Cisco Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) gave a boost to its remote-access server products this week, announcing its $200 million acquisition of Telebit Corp., based here.

The cash deal, expected to be completed in October, continues Cisco's relentless expansion. In just 12 months, the company has made or announced seven mergers, including the $4 billion acquisition of Stratacom Inc.

Cisco's interest li es in Telebit's newly developed digital-modem software, called modem ISDN channel aggregation (Mica), which combines analog and ISDN traffic on one line.

Mica fits well into Cisco's strategy to attack the market for dial-access servers, used by corporations and Internet service providers to allow outsiders to call into a network. Mica applies to the modems on the receiving ends of these calls -- those attached to the server.

More generally, Mica supports Cisco's efforts to broaden its markets by acquiring technologies. Mergers have moved the router company into selling LAN switches, Internet software and -- through Stratacom -- broadband switching.

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Wednesday, July 24, 1996

IEEE calls for national plan for training, deploying engineers

WASHINGTON -- The United States needs a 21st-century blueprint for training and deploying the n ation's engineering work force, a leading U.S. engineering group told Congress.

Testifying before a July 18 congressional forum on employment security, Richard Backe of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) chronicled the cyclical nature of engineering layoffs in the aerospace industry after the Apollo program and the end of the Cold War.

"Should we not have a national policy to pay more attention to our greatest contemporary resource, namely the supply and training of our technological work force?" Backe asked lawmakers.

Backe, program director for Unisys Corp.'s Goddard facility, cautioned lawmakers that short-term fixes and overemphasis on corporate quarterly profits will not provide a framework for nurturing technology and the engineering profession. "Optimum growth in technology requires long-term investments in professional education, research and capital equipment," he testified. "Other nations are aware of that need."

The congressional task force on manufacturing has sponsored a series of meetings on the status of the American work force.

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Salaries increase apace, despite shortages

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- There were "no surprises" in this year's American Electronics Association (AEA) salary survey of 669 electronics, software and information-technology companies.

U.S. technology companies are providing higher salary increases than the industry in general, but despite a hiring environment that has produced so-called "shortages" of engineers in the past 12 months, 1996 budgeted increases were in line with previous years, which ranged from 4 to 5 percent.

The AEA survey shows executives and exempt (professionals) employees getting 4.7 percent increases this year, while non-exempts are slated for 4.6 perc ent. Compared with other industries, the high-tech sector pays well. Executives in other fields can expect 4.3 percent boosts in wages; professionals are slated for 4.2 percent hikes, and non-exempts are set for 4.1 percent.

AEA member corporations project higher wages for 1997 as well: about 4.9 percent for executives and exempts, and 4.7 percent for non-exempt workers.

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Algorithm lets FPGAs do signal processing

FLORRISANT, Mo. -- A novel algorithm for computing the Fourier transform has been extended to an FPGA-based architecture that will allow system designers to tackle very large signal-processing tasks with off-the-shelf components.

The new approach, which is being offered as a set of DSP software modules that run on the XC4000 Field Programmable Gate Array family from Xilinx, is an extension of a simplified Fourier transform approac h originated at Rice Electronics here. Solutions that would require custom boards and ASICs can now be implemented with a high-performance microprocessor and a few FPGAs, said Greg Rice, the algorithm's inventor.

"We have developed a method for decomposing very large FFT and convolution problems into a set of small DFTs [discrete Fourier transforms] that run on FPGAs, producing a generic tool for tackling a wide variety of large computational problems," Rice explained. Rice is marketing the solution in the form of a library of DSP algorithms called the R1000 DFT Family. The original breakthrough that Rice used to launch his company was a method for performing the Fourier transform using only addition. By eliminating most multiply and accumulate operations and the attendant data-transfer snarls, the Rice Transform offered a practical means of running the Fourier transform on FPGAs.

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New method grows semiconductors from the ground up

URBANA, Ill. -- Scientists at the University of Illinois here have developed a method for growing semiconductors that replicates the exact geometrical nanoscale features of molecular assemblies. It may eventually offer the chip-making industry a new direction as well as a rather unconventional lithographical approach -- referred to as molecular-assembly lithography -- in its quest to access nanometer-scale dimensions for device fabrication.

The ongoing work is built around a chemical system based on molecular assemblies that template a semiconductor with nanoscale features, overcoming the precision problems that have plagued material researchers in the past.

The method involves getting organic molecules to self-assemble into tubes or cylinders with diameters of a few nanometers. These tiny tubes are made up of two different types of molecular segments. At the center are molecules that repel water, while a long the periphery are molecular segments that are attracted to water.

Essentially, the chemical system grows a II-VI semiconductor, in this case cadmium sulfide, only in parts where the molecular segments are attracted to water. The semiconductor does not grow in areas where they repel water. The result is a semiconducting superlattice -- a piece of semiconductor with holes punched in the hydrophobic segmented areas.

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FET channels one electron at a time

TOKYO -- A directional etching process has allowed University of Tokyo device researchers to build a single-electron transistor that operates at room temperature. The device, called a Coulomb blockade MOSFET, uses two tiny triangular quantum wires for the channel region. A novel feature of the new process is its full compatibility with conventional silicon-device processes.

Several methods for building single-electron transistors have been devised in the past, but all require special fabrication techniques. While the new transistor only has a channel length of 10 nanometers, it can be built with electron-beam lithography equipment, since the quantum wires are defined by the silicon lattice itself during the etching process.

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Tuesday, July 23, 1996

FCC decision will launch "two new broadband industries"

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Communications Commission adopted a band-sharing plan late Friday it said could open the door to a range of new broadband, two-way video, voice and data services.

Under the plan, the new services will be provided by wireless Local Multipoint Distribution Services and satellite systems. "The effect of this decision is to launch two new broadband industries well-suited to compete in the domestic and global ma rketplace," the FCC said in adopting the plan for the 28 GHz frequency band.

A likely beneficiary of the decision, Teledesic Corp., said the plan includes a designation of spectrum for non-geostationary fixed satellite service as envisioned under Teledesic's broadband "Internet-in-the-sky" proposal. Teledesic, which is competing against other global communications satellite networks proposed by the Iridium and Globalstar consortia, predicted the regulatory move will bring it closer to FCC licensing.

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Talks on renewing U.S.-Japan IC trade pact reach an impasse

VANCOUVER -- Industry talks aimed at negotiating renewal of the U.S.-Japan semiconductor accord reached an impasse here over the weekend. Meanwhile, government negotiators are squabbling over where to meet next as a July 31 deadline looms. U.S. and Japanese industry representatives remain stuck on an American proposal to have Washington continue monitoring foreign market share in Japan. The two sides failed to discuss Japanese alternatives. Texas Instruments Vice Chairman Pat Weber, chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association's board of directors, said the "two industries failed to reach a common understanding and agreement on several key issues."

U.S. trade officials meanwhile want to continue chip talks in Vancouver. Japanese officials reportedly favor a European venue where they can draw on support there to make a new chip deal a multilateral affair.

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Zoran chip can turn a PC into a video editing station

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Zoran Corp. has introduced the ZR36057 video-editing IC to a PC market crying for solutions. Video editing is one of the theoretically attractive applications for video on a personal computer. On paper, all th e pieces exist for a professional-quality editing station built around the PCI bus. But the reality keeps falling short of the paperwork.

The problem hasn't been with video-processing silicon. There are motion JPEG codecs, broadcast-quality NTSC decoders and encoders, and audio codecs, but much of the problem has come from system integration. In a video-editing station, the user has to be able to bring in NTSC video in real-time, compress it and write it to disk, then pull two or more compressed data streams off the disk, decompress them, combine them and then write the result back to disk. Finally the data has to be taken from disk, decompressed, and delivered to the target deck.

It is necessary to funnel at least most of these real-time data streams into single PCI interface, and to provide the buffer management and latency control necessary to keep them flowing.

Zoran's target is to make it possible to assemble the hardware for a professional-quality video-editing system on a PC, at consu mer-PC prices. The ZR36057 is, in effect, a traffic cop for audio and video. It has three ports: one for video data to/from a VCR or camera; one for attaching a JPEG subsystem; and one for the PCI bus. All are designed to be as glueless as possible.

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High Level Design and OEA target RC extraction

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In a new alliance aimed at deep-submicron IC design, High Level Design Systems Inc. (HLD) has combined a 2-D field solver from OEA International Inc. (Santa Clara) with HLD Systems' HyperExtract RC extraction tool. The result is a single package that can automatically generate rules files for extraction.

Responding to the interconnect-delay problem in deep-submicron design, HLD Systems last year introduced HyperExtract, which the company portrayed as the first standalone tool to focus exclusively on RC interconnect extraction. While t he tool provides a fast alternative to full-chip, final verification products, it requires design-rule files that describe how metal structures appear on the circuit.

"One of the big issues is how to generate rules for this type of extraction tool," said Tom Quan, vice president of marketing at HLD Systems. With the 2-D field solver from OEA's Metal product, he noted, coefficients for rules can be generated automatically, instead of created manually or developed through formulas.

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Projection displays get flexible

BOSTON -- There's a downside to the liquid-crystal displays that are driving the electronic-projection market, but recent developments may change that limitation. The pixels of an LCD have a fixed spatial format defined by the intersection of electrodes, and it lacks the inherent flexibility of a CRT. Thus, most projection panels available today support just one PC graphics format, or a few at best.

But the future will be different, as indicated by two recent announcements. Proxima Corp. (San Diego) has introduced a new series of panels and projectors that accommodate formats from VGA all the way up to SXGA and any format in between. And at the recent Infocomm conference in Toronto, Texas Instruments Inc. (Dallas) demonstrated a similarly flexible projector based on its digital micromirror device (DMD) display technology. Proxima's newfound flexibility comes courtesy of embedded rendering software from Adobe called Acrobat Player, and a few clever algorithms. TI's comes courtesy of a video-scaling IC developed by Genesis Microchip (Mountain View, Calif.).

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Hitachi creates LAN unit

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Hitachi Computer Products America Inc. is entering the LAN-switc hing market next week through a new division: the Hitachi Internetworking Group. The division will resell Xylan Corp. switches as enterprise platforms and will introduce its own workgroup switch based on a combination of a merchant Ethernet switch chip set from MMC Networks Inc. and proprietary address-arbitration logic.

Hitachi Telecommunications has supplied broadband switches to telco central offices for several years. In Japan, Hitachi's network products division has been a major supplier of hubs, routers and remote-access units. But in North America, most hub markets have become too commoditized to justify a Hitachi entry, said Internetwork Group vice president Uri Rahamim.

The HiSpeed 150 (HS-150) switch can expand to up to 16 Fast Ethernet links, combined with 16 to 32 switched 10-Mbit/second links. It is one of the first OEM systems to use the MMC Networks PS1000 switching engine chip set. Rather than use the MMC architecture in standalone fashion, Hitachi saw a critical need to add a spec ial address arbitration ASIC to speed overall packet throughput over competing LAN switches.

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Monday, July 22, 1996

Clinton moves to stop cyber threats

The president's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection will focus on telecommunications networks, banking and finance, transportation and utilities. It will look for ways to guard against physical threats as well as "threats of electronic, radio-frequency or computer-based attacks on the information or communications components that control critical infrastructures," the White House said.

Members of the commission will include representatives of the departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Justice, T reasury and Transportation, FBI, CIA, the National Security Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The commission will be chaired by a non-governmental expert.

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Motorola MCU breaks the 1-V barrier

PHOENIX -- - Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector has developed a low-power 8-bit microcontroller in a 0.9-V process. The IC -- a version of the 68HC08 MCU -- will be described at the European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC) in September in Switzerland.

Though the work has been done for the Motorola paging systems group, Motorola Semiconductor gains a process technology for future battery-driven and portable applications.

"This is cooperative research between semiconductor R&D and the Motorola paging group," said Andreas Wild, manager of CAE in Motorola Semiconductors' advanced custom engineering group. "T he objective was to create a micro that could operate from a single battery cell without any voltage regulation. At the same time we developed the circuit, we also developed the process."

The process technology could become critical to Motorola. Wild agreed that the process would work for applications ranging from mobile-phone handsets to PDAs. "You could use it in just about everything that operates from a battery," he said.

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IC makers struggle with equipment in rush to 0.35 micron features

SAN FRANCISCO -- Stung by softening demand and vanishing margins, major semiconductor vendors are accelerating their move to 0.35-micron and smaller feature sizes. But that is forcing them to abandon familiar i-line wafer steppers and jump into the immature world of deep-ultraviolet lithography. The word on the floor at SemiCon West last week was that the leap is starting early and the landing won't be smooth. Process problems haven't been ironed out, and there is a shortage of both steppers and engineers capable of working with them.

Most stepper vendors said their leading customers are already moving away from mainstream i-line steppers, which use light sources with 365-nm wavelength, at most. In their place, these companies are installing excimer-laser steppers operating in the deep UV (DUV) range, starting at 248 nm. The complexity of DUV manufacturing will become a problem due to a worldwide shortage of experienced process engineers able to handle the new machines, vendors said.

Susan H. Billat, senior vice president of marketing for Ultratech Stepper Inc. (San Jose, Calf.), said "The physics and chemistry [of DUV] are not your friends."

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Phoenix buys Virtual Chips, raises PC-design ante

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In a surprise move that links two leading intellectual-property providers from different ends of the business, PC-firmware supplier Phoenix Technologies has agreed to acquire Virtual Chips, a provider of synthesizable cores for the Peripheral Component Interconnect and Universal Serial Bus.

The $20 million acquisition promises PC, workstation and peripherals makers one-stop-shopping for both hardware and software design.

Representatives of both companies say the pending acquisition will accelerate such PC interface standards as PCI, USB, IEEE 1394, and the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and will cut time-to-market for manufacturers working with those standards.

The purchase comes at a time when chip complexity is driving up demand for third-party cores. But the trend to purchase externally developed intellectual property is not limited to hardware designers; software and firmware designers are looking to make the same choice, opening up the market for a new, vertically oriented approach.

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Ultra2 SCSI ups bus speed to 80 Mbytes/s

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Chip and board makers are preparing to move users to the second generation of UltraSCSI, marking a swift advance over the 40-Mbyte/second version just now hitting volume. Symbios Logic Inc. will unveil a chip next week, and Adaptec Inc. has indicated that a board is in the offing. Both are pledging early 1997 ship dates for Ultra2 SCSI products, which will push the speed of the venerable parallel interface to 80 Mbytes/s.

"What a difference a year makes," said marketing manager Rajesh Vasist at Adaptec (Milpitas, Calif.). "This standard was barely a development program a year ago. Now we will be making a technical demonstration of Ultra2 in the fall, with products coming early in 1997."

Ultra2 SCSI not only pushes spee d but also incorporates low-voltage differential (LVD) termination, which lets engineers double the number of drives and increase the distance between them -- both crucial factors for high-performance systems. LVD pushes connectivity back up to 16 drives and 12 meters. First-generation UltraSCSI had cut drive counts to as few as four connections, at a maximum distance of 1.5 meters.

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Eight magneto-optical drive vendors eye new 5-inch format

TOKYO -- Philips NV and seven Japanese companies are proposing a 5-inch magneto-optical disk system with a capacity of 6 to 7 Gbytes in a bid to increase the market acceptance of MO technology. The eight hope the new format will prove a rival to the DVD-RAM in the rewritable-disk-drive market of the future.

But some observers question the need for a new MO-drive format that will only slightly in crease the technology's maximum storage capacity and that may not be compatible with existing MO standards.

The Japanese companies writing the specification with Philips are Fujitsu Ltd., Hitachi Ltd., Hitachi Maxell Ltd., Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., Sanyo Electric Corp., Sharp Electronics Corp. and Sony Corp. Most already have high profiles in the MO market. The eight partners intend to finalize the spec by year's end and to bring out product in 1997.

Some of the partners envision the drive as a core storage device for the computer market. Though no details have been decided yet, the MO system will focus on computer use. "We want to keep compatibility with the 3.5-inch MO system," said a Fujitsu spokeswoman.

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