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, August 9, 1996

Microsoft takes the lead on PC graphics technology

OEMs give boost to ISDN

Temic shows combo cell-phone/modem PC card

NEC readies system-level emulation tool

'Hidden order' revealed in genetic programming

Thursday, August 8, 1996

Cisco acquires token-ring company expertise with purchase of Nashoba

Malaysia to build high-tech corridor

Typhoon spares Taiwan's tech industry

Singapore startup TriTech expands

Analog Devices plunges into power control

Wednesday, August 7, 1996

Dose of VR prescribed for medical data

Breakthroughs boost extreme UV lithography

PPT takes its pager software to the Web

VHDL tools target FPGAs

Circuitry evolves for FPGA chips

Tuesday, August 6, 1996

OS-9 aims for portables

A/D converters target communications needs

Oki revamps 0.5-ý process

Op amp optimized to handle rough duty

AMI gives 1-Mbit ROM 45-ns access for embedded

Monday, August 5, 1996

Programming accord pushes HDTV forward

Trio trims opto-laser packaging

Pentagon program fuels EDA startups

Xilinx nixes its antifue arrays

Internet is ýgameý for real-tims 3-D

U.S. and Japan reach semiconductor trade agreement.

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, August 9, 1996

Microsoft takes the lead on PC graphics technology

NEW ORLEANS -- With a barrage of 10 technical papers, Microsoft Corp. tipped both its Talisman graphics architecture and its intent to be taken seriously as a graphics-technology source at the SIGGraph conference here this week. Depa rting completely from its traditional role of technology follower, the Redmond, Wash., giant has pulled together at least six IC-design and manufacturing powers to bring simulator-quality 3-D graphics to the PC.

In the Talisman architecture, Microsoft attempts to simultaneously provide a cost-effective hardware platform for all the media types in a multimedia PC: two- and three-dimensional graphics, MPEG video and audio. For the first time, they all come together in a synchronized environment under a Microsoft-written real-time kernel. Processing is flexibly partitioned between the host CPU, a multitask media-processor chip and a set of specialized rendering and presentation chips. As in past Microsoft architectures, any or all of the processing can move to the host CPU, at some cost in performance.

The most dramatic departure for Microsoft is in handling of 3-D. Talisman abandons the 3-D pipeline as it has been implemented in previous PC chips and chip sets. Instead, the architecture in effect pr eserves the object-based structure of the company's Direct3D software all the way to the RAMDAC.

In Talisman, 3-D processing -- such as MPEG decode, SVGA emulation, audio decode and modem processing -- starts in a multipurpose signal-processing chip. For the initial hardware design, this chip will be Samsung's newly announced MSP-1 Media Signal Processor. The architecture has reportedly also been designed to work with Philips Semiconductors' TriMedia processor.

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OEMs give boost to ISDN

ROCHESTER, N.H. -- As local exchange carriers continue to take uncertain steps toward providing basic-rate ISDN for a residential market, OEMs are pulling out all stops to craft ISDN cards, modems and even routers for the small office/home office (SOHO) market. In the last two weeks, Cabletron Systems, Bay Networks and Motorola have all introduced new products to ease low-end use of the Integrated Services Digital Network.

Since ISDN already is maturing in Europe and the Pacific Rim, system manufacturers hate to declare an early defeat in marketing the technology in North America, even though some carriers seem to be more interested in offering Digital Subscriber Line services.

In order to widen market acceptance, Motorola Inc.'s transmission products group (Huntsville, Ala.) is packing ISDN and analog phone-line functionality into an ISA PC add-in card. Motorola and Bay Networks Inc. (Billerica, Mass.), in a series of new routers, put special emphasis on the "EZ-ISDN" voice and data-provisioning standards adopted by the National ISDN Users Forum.

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Temic shows combo cell-phone/modem PC card

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Temic Microsystems has developed a Type III PCMCIA card that integrates both an anal og AMPS cellular phone and a fax/data modem. This is the first implementation to put a cell phone and a fax/data modem together in a single PC-card form factor, claimed director of marketing Michael Watson.

When connected to a portable computer's PC-card slot, the card offers four default-operation modes: transmissions of cellular data, cellular voice, land-line data or land-line voice. In automatic-operation mode, it can switch among those options by selecting connected accessories.

The card provides an earphone/microphone jack for hands-free voice operation. A combination earpiece speaker and bone-conductive microphone, such as the EarPhone designed by Jabra Corp., can be used for such applications. A connector on the Temic product allows conversion to land-line data-access operation.

Temic, a microelectronics enterprise of Germany's Daimler-Benz, hopes to sell the card to notebook-PC manufacturers who could bundle it as an accessory, to cellular-phone carriers to use as part of their s ervice package and to known-brand OEMs to market as a retail product.

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NEC readies system-level emulation tool

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- NEC Electronics Inc. and Microsystem Synthesis Inc. (Westboro, Mass.) have stepped into the hardware/software development-tool ring with the K0-integrated development environment (K0-IDE). Aimed at users of NEC's K0 ASIC cores and off-the-shelf K0 chips, this "system-level emulation" tool combines in-circuit emulation and logic emulation.

The new development environment provides a way to develop and debug software for a piece of a chip that doesn't yet physically exist. It also allows hardware designers to run actual applications code on an ASIC prototype before committing to production.

The K0-IDE is a PC-hosted box containing an 8-bit K0 microprocessor, peripherals, a 256-bit x 64K-frame analyzer-m emory array, and four Lattice Semiconductor ispLSI3256 CPLDs. Users load an OrCAD or HDL net-list for their custom logic into the CPLDs and use the built-in logic analysis or in-circuit emulation capabilities provided by the K0-IDE.

"When we started looking into this, we found there was a huge wall between the microcontroller world and the ASIC world," said James Goodheart, NEC marketing manager for 4- and 8-bit applications. "There was no way of crossing the two worlds. That's what drove us to coming up with this system."

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'Hidden order' revealed in genetic programming

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The inventor of the genetic algorithm, University of Michigan professor John Holland, has posited seven "hidden orders" within complex systems that he believes will be unraveled by the engineering models of the future. Holland ai red his ideas here at the inaugural Genetic Programming Conference (GP '96).

Hidden order in complex systems underlies the systems' most important behaviors -- the sort that engineers have struggled to model, with limited success.

Holland's newest book, Hidden Order, details the seven elements that underlie complex systems. Several of those elements are already the subject of study in specialized fields, he noted.

For instance, the "non-linearity" property makes biological systems greater than the sum of their parts. Neural-network researchers are modeling that property as it applies to brain behavior; in the brain, each individual neuron contributes only a small "vote," but those votes, when tallied together, form the basis of intelligent behavior.

"Flows" are another hidden order already recognized in a specialized field -- in this case, economics, which calls the property the multiplier effect. That economic principle states that beneficial investment s made at a lower level in a hierarchy multiply their effect at each successively higher level, chain-letter style.

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Thursday, August 8, 1996

Cisco acquires token-ring company expertise with purchase of Nashoba

LITTLETON, Mass. -- Startup Nashoba Networks Inc. is the latest acquisition target of the busy Cisco Systems Inc. The San Jose, Calif., networking-equipment giant will offer a sliding number of shares, worth approximately $100 million, for all Nashoba outstanding shares, based on Cisco share prices at the time of the merger -- a range of 1.54 million to 2.32 million shares.

Nashoba is an expert in token-ring switching, a realm Cisco "had not focused on as much as switched Ethernet," said Randall Campbell, Cisco's token-ring product manager, "but that's of little surprise given comparative market sizes."

Nash oba completed a second round of financing for $4 million last March. The Littleton company had revenues of approximately $5 million in the fiscal year that ended in June, the first year in which it shipped products. Instead of managing the Nashoba operation from Cisco's center of LAN-switching expertise in San Jose, the work-group business unit, Cisco will do it from the Interworks Business Unit in Research Triangle Park, N.C. The aim is to keep the operation tightly linked to all of Cisco's IBM-centric operations, including its Systems Network Architecture and Data Link Switching Plus software groups.

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Malaysia to build high-tech corridor

Bill Gates, who will sit on the advisory panel for the high-tech park, said the project played a part in Microsoft's decision to set up its Southeast Asian headquarters in Malaysia. Oracle Corp. has also expressed interest in the project. Nippon Telephone and Telegraph will work with Telekom Malaysia to lace the area with a 10-Gbyte fiber-optic network, at a cost of $200 million. A further $400 million is being allocated for a high-speed rail and expressway links. At least three "intelligent cities" will be built around the technology parks. Homes in the park will be linked to the fiber-optic network.

Malaysia is offering a variety of incentives to attract business. A 10-year tax holiday will be available, and foreign workers will be granted unrestricted entry. The government will similarly abolish restrictions on foreign ownership for companies in the corri dor and will exempt the area from Malaysia's censorship restrictions. Laws are expected to pass this year that will protect intellectual property in the corridor.

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Typhoon spares Taiwan's tech industry

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Typhoon Herb struck Taiwan earlier this week, killing 19 people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Taiwan's technology industry suffered little or no damage, however. Most of Taiwan's businesses were closed for two days during the typhoon.

PC companies Acer Inc. and First International Computer Inc. (FIC) both closed their administrative and manufacturing operations during the typhoon, and neither suffered any damage to their facilities. FIC had about 20 employees in upper management give a sales presentation to a major OEM customer on the first day of the typhoon. They held it in the client's hotel suite as r ain flooded Taipei and winds of up to 145 miles per hour howled by.

Taiwan's wafer-fabrication operations remained open during the typhoon. A spokesman at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. said that the evening shift on Wednesday and the morning. shift on Thursday were scaled back but that production did not suffer. United Microelectronics Corp. and Vanguard Semiconductor International both had their normal fab operations going during the typhoon. None of the fabs reported any loss of electricity or water during the storm.

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Singapore startup TriTech expands

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Hoping to blossom from a cloistered Singapore business into a global player, design house TriTech Microelectronics International Pte. Ltd. this week launches its own mixed-signal semiconductors.

TriTech is part of Singapore Technologies, the conglomerate that owns Chartered Semiconductor. Its business of designing ICs and manufacturing PC add-in cards has grown to revenues of $60 million a year, but its customer list doesn't extend beyond a handful of Asian companies.

To expand the company, Singapore Technologies executives decided to extend TriTech's reach beyond Asian borders, developing application-specific standard products for the global chip market.

TriTech is like a startup in reverse. Instead of hunting for cash, the company can pull from its revenues -- and the deep pockets of its parent. And while most startups concentrate on building a business plan and a sales force, TriTech has put both on the "to-do" list, choosing instead to release products immediately (three came out the week of August 5) and at least seven more are planned for release over the next eight months.

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Analog Devices plunges into power contr ol

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Analog Devices Inc. is preparing to take the wraps off its power-management division, with more than 60 products set for release by the end of this year.

Based here, the division was christened two years ago as ADI's first push into the burgeoning market for parts such as low-dropout regulators and battery chargers.

Details are scarce, as ADI isn't revealing the division's size or revenue goals. But the company is convinced it can become a major player in power management, alongside contenders including National Semiconductor Corp. and SGS-Thomson. Its first products -- regulated charge pumps -- are out now. Others are due for release later in the year.

"They were kind of focusing on data conversion, but power is one of the fastest-growing areas in analog ICs," said Gary Grandbois, an analyst with Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). "It makes a lot of sense for them to be getting into it."

Although it barely existed five years ago, power management is becoming a must-have for every linear and mixed-signal company, with new applications appearing as battery-powered electronics become prevalent in telephones, computers and even cars.

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Wednesday, August 7, 1996

Dose of VR prescribed for medical data

SEATTLE -- While virtual reality (VR) has captured the imagination of the public as a new form of entertainment, the technology could also find serious applications as a route to integrating diverse information in real-time environments. One prime target is medical applications, where complex, interrelated forms of information need to be accessed by teams of specialists, often in a time-critical situation. Experts working with the new approach are finding that VR offers a unique opportunity to integrate activity and information in a surgical theater or emergency room to aid physicians in split-second decisions.

The move is toward using modern electronics to model virtual environments, which can be accessed over networks such as the World Wide Web while immersing specialists in a data environment relevant to a problem. To date, the most ambitious design is being put together at the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory here. A prototype system, modeled on the emergency room at a local hospital, is allowing medical students to get "hands on" experience without leaving the classroom. The emergency room itself was modeled by taking an extensive set of photographs and merging them onto a cylindrical virtual surface.

For example, instead of clipping X-rays on a wall-mounted light table, a physician moves an X-ray window over the patient's body that displays any X-ray data available for that area. Other data sources such as EEG charts, or CAT scans can be positioned as virtual objects that float in space in f ront of the user. The data elements can be moved around and positioned like objects, so that participants in the virtual operating theater have instant access to relevant data, which they can share and confer over in a natural setting.

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Breakthroughs boost extreme UV lithography

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Major breakthroughs in two areas impeding the development of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography -- mask defects and measurement accuracy -- could open the door for silicon fabs to build components 10 times faster with 1,000 times more memory than today's most powerful chips.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory here have designed an ion-beam deposition system that slashes defects in the multilayer coated reflective masks used to transfer circuit patterns onto silicon chips an astonishing 300,000 times. In addition, they have de vised an interferometer that measures the surface shapes of optical components with 20 to 50 times more accuracy than current instruments.

If commercialized, the results may allow chip makers to work with EUV lithography, which offers light wavelengths 20 times shorter than current technology and patterns features more accurately. The breakthroughs address two major drawbacks in using EUV: the need for defect-free reticules and precision optics fabrication.

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PPT takes its pager software to the Web

LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif. -- Personal Productivity Tools Inc. (PPT), the paging software startup formed by Vantage Analysis Systems founder Dave Coelho, is taking its pager links from its original e-mail base and extending them to Web browsers for intranet applications.

This week, PPT introduces a technology called EtherWeb, allowing links to be develop ed from Web pages to user pagers, using simple CGI scripts to create pager hot links.

Coelho said that the user interface technology his company licenses to Web-server developers could be complementary with future two-way paging networks, as well as with special extensions to HTML, such as Unwired Planet Inc.'s Handheld Devices Markup Language.

In the core architecture, initially developed for PPT's EtherPage product line, clients communicate with server daemons using standard TCP/IP Sockets nomenclature. The server daemons queue up pager messages for a modem, and establish the calls to the paging service from the central server.

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VHDL tools target FPGAs

ALAMEDA, Calif. -- New offerings aimed at bringing VHDL design to FPGA users come from Exemplar Logic and Accolade Design Automation (Redmond, Wash.). Both companies hope to ride the "se cond wave" of designers who are expected to make the move to hardware-description languages over the next few years.

Exemplar's VHDL Discovery Kit is a low-cost synthesis offering that includes a multimedia VHDL tutorial. Accolade's PeakEdit is a language-sensitive VHDL source-file editor that works with that company's VHDL simulation and synthesis tools.

For Exemplar, the Discovery Kit creates a three-tiered strategy with the hierarchical Leonardo system at the high end, the Galileo synthesis offering in the middle and Discovery Kit at the low end.

Barker said Exemplar worked hard to avoid compromising the product's feature set. Thus, Discovery Kit includes the full Galileo synthesis engine, including the VHDL language parser, optimization routines and module generators. There are no restrictions on lines of code or design size.

The Discovery Kit accepts register-transfer-level VHDL as input and offers synthesis and optimization for a single field-programmable gate-array library , which the user chooses from among 10 libraries from Actel, Altera, Lucent or Xilinx.

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Circuitry evolves for FPGA chips

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The first reported hardware evolution of a usable circuit was described here recently at the inaugural Genetic Programming conference. Adrian Thompson, a member of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group at the University of Sussex (Brighton, England), described a field-programmable-gate-array implementation of a carrier detector for two widely separate frequencies.

Evolution, Thompson found out, does not follow the rules laid down in the digital designer's configuration guide for FPGAs. "Once evolution begins instantiating individuals in the real physical electronics of the FPGA, [the array] is transformed from a Boolean processor into a continuous-time, analog dynamic circuit with a primordi al soup of on-chip resources," Thompson told GP '96 attendees.

Artificial evolution rewired the physical circuits in real-time to try out thousands of possible evolutionary progressions. Thompson observed that evolution ignores the simplifying constraints of digital logic, instead using all the available analog characteristics of the silicon.

One trend that emerged from Thompson's experiments was a preference for pulse-coded representations that take advantage of such analog phenomena as the "beating" between two closely tuned oscillators.

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Tuesday, August 6, 1996

OS-9 aims for portables

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Microware Systems Corp. is quietly pushing the company's flagship real-time operating system (RTOS), OS-9, as the RTOS of choice for a new generation of smart phones, paging, portable communications devices and embedded Internet appliances.

Behind Microware's latest efforts to refocus the OS-9's target from the digital interactive TV set-top market to the wireless communications device market, is the company's close collaborations with Motorola (Schaumburg, Ill.) for joint software development, as well as its partnerships with a host of hardware vendors committed to the OS-9 for use in their smart phones and Internet appliances.

A flurry of announcements detailing partnerships and product plans is expected over the next several weeks. Microware late last month added another key element to its new strategy when it announced a strategic partnership with SystemSoft Corp. (Natick, Mass.), a leading developer of PCMCIA-based PC-card software technologies. By embedding PC Card software support into the OS-9's operating system itself, "we can offer OEMs one-stop shopping both for real-time operating system and a complete software package for PC-card slots," said Mike Burgher, executive vice preside nt at Microware.

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A/D converters target communications needs

NORWOOD, Mass. -- The intrusion of digital techniques into communications front ends has brought with it the need for good, fast and inexpensive analog-to-digital converters.

Last month two companies took different cuts at the problem, with two slightly different design points. Both vendors aimed to field parts in the $10 range with sufficient speed for a variety of communications, measurement and industrial applications. But Analog Devices Inc. shot for higher sample rates and moderate resolution to serve video-and image-processing applications, while Linear Technology Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.) targeted higher resolution but less-than-video speeds.

Analog Devices' AD9040 is intended to fit the video-speed conversion niche in which 8-bit resolution isn't quite enough but in which the custo mer doesn't want to pay big bucks for a 10-bit converter. Such applications include professional video production, medical-image processing and 10-MHz-range communications.

Linear's LTC1400 takes a slightly different approach to the problem. Forgoing video applications, the part concentrates on very good performance at higher resolution -- namely 12 bits at 400 ksamples/s.

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Oki revamps 0.5-ý process

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Most leading ASIC vendors have been pushing as fast as possible into 0.35-micron (drawn) processes, but the scramble for high-end position shouldn't obscure the importance of the bread-and-butter ASIC business.

Much of the design activity and most of the shipments are still coming from less aggressive geometries. That point will be emphasized in two weeks when Oki Semiconductor unveils a version of its workhorse 0.5-micron CMOS ASI C process. The MSM30R/32R/92R will stand beside Oki's original MSM13R process but will offer substantial increases in usable gates for pad-limited designs, as well as greater flexibility in handling mixed-voltage systems.

The three-layer-metal version is offered as either a sea-of-gates array family or a cell-based family. Oki says improved packing will result in up to 60 percent more usable gates for a given pad ring than was achievable with the previous 0.5-micron formula.

A cost-reduction option for pad-limited gate-array designs is the MSM32R family, which uses only two metal layers. Given the increased density, designs that required all three metal layers in the old process may get by with two now.

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Op amp optimized to handle rough duty

MILPITAS, Calif. -- There are lots of different ways to optimize an op-amp. You can go for high bandwidth, or high gain, or low offset, or low noise, or whatever. You can emphasize cost or precision.

But most of these optimizations seem to create rather delicate parts that must live in a carefully controlled environment. That's a real pain in an industrial environment, where noise is not easily controlled, and it becomes unacceptable in battery-based systems, where supply voltages droop, batteries get hot-inserted -- sometimes backward -- and other indignities affront the circuitry.

Often, these problems have to be handled with external protection circuits. But Linear Technology Corp. (LTC) has a better idea -- op-amps designed for use in difficult environments.

The LT1490 (dual) and LT1491 (quad) are 200-kHz general-purpose op-amps with a difference. With 1,500-V/mV voltage gain and 98-dB common-mode rejection. The most obvious unusual characteristic of the devices is that they are nearly rail-to-rail op-amps. Outputs swing to within 25 mV of the rails under light load, and with 330 mV of rail at 10 mA out. Each amplifier can source or sink 20 mA, by the way, and the circuitry is stable at up to a 5-nF load, so the parts can serve as power amps in some applications.

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AMI gives 1-Mbit ROM 45-ns access for embedded

Unfortunately, those fast engines want their code in a hurry. Typical embedded-system program memories are too small for that kind of structure and often need to be in ROM.

But it would do no good to have a processor capable of 50-MHz operation if its instruction stream limited it to 15 MHz. What the industry needed was a RO M with a speed close to that of page-mode DRAM.

Perhaps it's not there yet, but American Microsystems Inc. (AMI) has come a step closer to solving the problem. The company recently announced a pair of 1-Mbit masked ROMs with 45-ns speed. These are not trick parts using some sort of caching scheme to reduce the apparent access time, but, rather, standard ROMs that happen to be very fast.

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Monday, August 5, 1996

Programming accord pushes HDTV forward

Washington ý Action in separate regulatory fronts may have enhanced prospects for adoption of a long-sought government mandate of the proposed U.S. HDTV standard.

On the heels of a Federal Communications Commission channel-allotment plan, broadcasters last week struck a deal with the White House to air at least three hours of childrenýs TV weekly. HDTV Grand Alliance members have viewed broadcaster acceptance of the programming planýbrainchild of FCC chairman Reed Hundtýas a quid pro quo for obtaining a second 6-MHz channel for digital broadcasting and mandating the Advanced Television Systems Committeeýs (ATSC) transmission standard.

Though FCC officials said the two issues are not linked, they nevertheless pointed out that broadcasters could devote part of the new second channel to additional childrenýs programming.

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Trio trims opto-laser packaging

Brisbane, Calif. ý A three-way alliance of Northern Telecom (Nortel), Hitachi America and Lucent Technologies is promoting a new packaging standard that the trio hopes will slash the cost of surface-mount lasers used in optoelectronics communication applications. The eight-pin package is a step ahead of older designs, but some skeptics wonder if it ignores the shift many OEMs hav e made to coaxial-interface lasers.

The concept, promoted initially by Nortelýs Optoelectronics Division, would find its greatest application in short-haul public-network designsýthose dominated by single-mode fiber, rather than the multimode fiber used for data communications in the LAN. The ýmini-DILý (dual-in-line) package, a subset of popular 14-pin optocomponent standards, should be capable of implementing both distributed-feedback lasers and multiple-quantum-well (MQW) Fabry-Perot lasers.

The surface-mount package measures 13.2 x 7.6 mm and uses silicon submount packaging to achieve a virtually flat profile. The mini-DIL does not require lead bending or the use of external heat sinks. The components should drive down the size of customer-premises and central office equipment in a variety of telecom and cable-TV applications, as well as longer-haul LANs and campus backbones.

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Pentagon program fuels EDA startups

Washington ý Now in its fourth and final year, a Darpa program called the Rapid prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) is having a quiet but dramatic effect across the entire EDA industry. Armed with a $150 million war chest, RASSP has seeded EDA companies and commercial products and soon will give birth to an Internet-focused startup.

Originally aimed at easing military procurement of DSPs, RASSP is building an EDA track record by: fostering new capabilities in hardware/software codesign, performance modeling, and distributed process management; building an integrated, multivendor design system from commercial EDA tools; helping to launch startups like Logic Vision and Berkeley Design Tools; and investigating pay-per-use distribution schemes for EDA tools.

Taking an unusual twist for a defense-related project, RASSP not only encourages commercialization but also requires it for the 20 or so EDA vendors develo ping products and interfaces under the program. And some of its process-management work will be commercialized by Internet Design Co. (IDC), a Silicon Valley startup headed by EDA veteran Dave Coelho.

ýThereýs a DSP focus or emphasis because thatýs a military need, but a lot of the work being done can be applied to more than that focus area,ý said Randy Harr, RASSP program manager. The programýs main impact will be felt early in the design cycle, with new capabilities in areas like performance modeling and requirements capture, he said.

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Xilinx nixes its antifuse arrays

San Jose, Calif. ý Walking away from five years of R&D and taking an estimated $5 million write-off, Xilinx Inc. disclosed last week that it is abandoning its antifuse-based XC8100 field-programmable-gate-array product line.

ýWe believe that antifuse FPGAs are dead,ý said Xilinx vice presi dent of marketing Chuck Fox. ýThere is no way the technology can keep up with the rapid advances in SRAM-based FPGA processes.ý

But Actel Corp. and QuickLogic Corp.ýboth of which posted higher growth than Xilinx in the last quarterýchallenged that assessment. ýMaybe Xilinx just took the wrong path with their architecture,ý said QuickLogic corporate marketing director Ed Smith.

Xilinx argues that antifuse technology cannot pace SRAM-based alternatives in delivering the process-geometry shrinks required for next-generation devices. Its antifuse competitors, pointing to their own process-migration plans, dispute that assertion and claim that antifuse technologyýs far smaller programming elements are central to achieving high gate utilization and performance at high densities.

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Internet is ýgameý for real-time 3-D

New Orleans ý Internet-aware entertainment will toss the gauntlet to the game-console companies this week. At Siggraph, a show-floor demo will feature Bayou Sauvage, a distributed three-dimensional game in which players race to discover the landing point of a unidentified flying object in a Louisiana swamp. Play will proceed here among some 20 vendor booths, linked via 10-Mbit/second Ethernet, and will be able to support as man
y as 1,000 players simultaneously.

: However, donýt expect Bayou Sauvageýs aliens to invade the Internet anytime soon. Real-time, distributed 3-D applications will not be available until communications protocols that can handle the applications are standardized. A handful are available today; but because the companies that hope to use the protocols have often-conflicting requirements, market chaos seems inevitable. Early users might need different 3-D browsers for different apps hosted on servers that support a subset of protocolsýin some cases, a subset of one.

The game demo involves hardware from Silicon Graphics Inc ., Digital Equipment Corp. and Intergraph, and software from Lockheed Martin, MýK Technologies, Real 3D MultiGen, Sense8, 3DFX and others. For Lockheed Martin, E&S, and MýKýall strong in the military simulation marketýa successful demo could be a pathway into a potentially lucrative commercial market. And such software participants as Intervista Software, Template Graphics Software, Sense8 and Viewpoint Datalabs are looking to the demo to give the nascent 3-D/virtual reality market needed impetus.

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