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 16, 1996

VDOnet improves its Internet video technology

Media Vision successor tackles 3-D audio

Seagate is first to chop the price of 3.25-inch drives

Philips closes 'Paradise' graphics-boards unit

Sensory Circuits adds speech chip

Thursday, August 15, 1996

Quantum computing leaps forward

Kinetic forms Platoon of 11-oz. gorillas

X86 emulation: IBM drops it , Digital ramps it

Motorola makes a VME home for 64-bit PCI

EDA icon launches virtual reality dinner theater

Expert advice for AI: reduce, reuse, recycle

Tuesday, August 13, 1996

TI reported to join Toyota IC venture

Dataquest cuts forecast for Win95 growth

Antares debuts design-entry tool

New bus architecture aims to 'SPICE' up Java

Flex circuits branch out

Monday, August 12, 1996

Web-TV browsers to challenge PCs

ITC ruling in patent flap favors Quickturn

Intel will postpone P55C with MMX

Smart weapons: whimper or bang?

Cadence slaps CCT with suit

Wintel and Unix camps face off at Siggraph

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 16, 1996

Media Vision successor tackles 3-D audio

FREMONT, Calif. ‹ Media Vision Technologies Inc., whose 1994 collapse announced the crash of the multimedia hardware business, has morphed itself into a specialist in three-dimensional audio for personal computers. Under the name Aureal Semiconductor Inc., the 60-employee company has acquired Crystal River Engineering, formerly of Palo Alto, Calif., to provide the technology for its rebirth.

Crystal River's technology creates 3-D sounds‹also called positional audio‹using conventional stereo speakers. The listener perceives the sound coming from above, behind or around him based on phase-shift changes that fool the ears.

Aureal has begun volume production on its first product, the ASP301 sound accelerator designed to work with the Windows 95 Direct Sound environment.

Games are an obvious application for 3-D sound, especially on the Internet. Aureal is calling its technology "interactive audio," because during game play, the sound can change direction to match the user's point of view. If the player turns around, for example, the sound effects will be rotated accordingly.

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VDOnet improves its Internet video technology

PALO ALTO, Calif. ‹ Hoping to cash in on the insatiable desire of broadcasters, Web media developers, and corporations to broadcast better motion video on the Internet, VDOnet Corp. has launched a new generation of its VDOLive Internet video-broadcasting software products.

The company's VDOLive 2.0 will provide much-higher-quality video and offer a range of new features for video servers and video players. VDOnet has focused all of its business and engineering efforts on the design of low-bit-rate, higher-frame-rate audio/video compression and network-protocol technologies. The VDOLive video-broadcasting technology, which was designed from the ground up for the Internet market and based on regular analog phone lines, sharply differs from competing products inasmuch as it allows the quality, i.e., the frame rates and resolution, of decoded images to flexibly scale, on the fly, in accordance with the available bandwidth of a network at a time of delivery, and with the speed of the modem available on the client's side.

VDOLive 2.0 provides an improvement in both frame rates and resolutions by at least 20 to 40 percent in a subjective comparison with version 1.0. Using a 28.8-Mbits/second modem over POTS lines, the VDOLive can offer an average of 5 to 15 frames p er second of motion video with 320 x 240 resolution on a 32-bit video player on a Windows 95 or Mac-based personal computer. When compressing video images with less motion, such as talking heads, the VDOLive 2.0's frame rate goes much faster.

In addition, VDOnet has significantly reduced the delay between a client and server by improving the protocols for a client and server session, and by developing a better packet loss-recovery algorithm.

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Seagate is first to chop the price of 3.25-inch drives

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. ‹ Seagate Technology Inc. has leapfrogged competing hard-disk-drive manufacturers in the race to cut the cost of mainstream 3.5-inch drives through silicon integration.

Seagate reduced the electronics circuitry from five devices to a single ASIC by combining a Texas Instruments (Houston) digital-signal-processor co re with roughly 48 kwords of flash memory and dedicated disk-drive logic. TI's 320C2xLP DSP core serves as the sole processing element in Seagate's new 2.5-Gbyte SC52520A. The 5-V device is processed using 0.5-micron CMOS.

The drive is among the first mainstream 3.5-inch disk drives to adopt a uniprocessor design architecture based on a customizable DSP core. Earlier-generation drives have typically used a DSP for servo control and a microcontroller chip for most other drive functions.

With the new design, however, the DSP core controls both the servo mechanism and handles host-interface software. "This is a very important step for us to build on as we go forward" into the cost-sensitive high-volume desktop PC market, said Ed Caragliano, vice president of VLSI development at Seagate, here.

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Philips closes 'Paradise' graphics-boards unit

SUNNYVALE, Calif. ‹ Philips Semiconductors is shutting down the Paradise graphics-boards business unit that it acquired from Western Digital Corp. about 10 months ago.

As of Aug. 9, the company has been quietly letting go the unit's 40-odd employees. A spokesman said, however, that Philips would keep Western Digital's graphics-IC business and its intellectual properties that came with the Paradise board-unit acquisition.

The Sunnyvale chip maker initially tried to sell the board business internally to the parent company's end-user system units, but there were no takers within Philips. Philips Semiconductors then tried to find an outside buyer, but that effort didn't pan out either.

Hence, the company had no choice but to shut down the graphics-board business unit, the spokesman said. He added that the Paradise operation has never been a critical core to Philips Semiconductors' business.

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Sensory Circuits adds speech chip

SAN JOSE, Calif. ‹ Sensory Circuits Inc. has expanded its interactive speech chip lineup by announcing a new ASIC for speaker-dependent speech recognition as well as a newly completed development kit that will let OEMs develop custom program speech products using Sensory's 8-bit general-purpose microcontroller.

Called Voice Direct, the new ASIC‹requiring no custom programming‹will recognize and respond to sets of one to 64 words with an accuracy of 95 percent, said Keith Kitani, director of marketing for Sensory. Sensory, a supplier of key low-cost speech technologies for mass consumer products, has already developed a host of advanced algorithms for speaker-independent and speaker- dependent speech recognition, speaker verification, and speech and music synthesis.

While the company continues to supply all these speech algorithms on the company's 8-bit general-purpose microcontrollers, the RSC-164 an d the RSC-164i, Sensory is hoping to expand its markets through a new two-pronged strategy. The first part is to spin out off-the-shelf, easy-to-use ASICs for low-cost applications, pre-selecting the company's various speech technologies. The second is to introduce a development kit, based on the company's 8-bit microcontrollers, that will allow system designers to create their own products by mixing and matching Sensory's latest speech technology, including recognition, synthesis and speaker verification.

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Thursday, August 15, 1996

Quantum computing leaps forward

MURRAY HILL, N.J. -- A flurry of research activity that targets error-correction solutions for quantum computers may prove to be a significant step toward opening up the frontier of a new computing technology.

Research projects under way at AT&T Bell Labs, here, and at IBM Corp. (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory are tackling a major hurdle in the design of computers based on the transmission of quantum states, such as electron spins. The new techniques zero in on the volatile nature of the quantum states used to represent and process information.

Error correction could make or break quantum computers, said Raymond Laflamme, an Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, N.M.). "We have made some assumptions that the quantum computer is going to behave in certain ways with the code," he said. "It should be interesting to see if it works or not. If it doesn't, then there is little hope for quantum computers."

To date, factoring large numbers for applications such as cryptography and quantum mechanical computation are expected to be the most feasible short-term applications areas for quantum computers.

"The biggest numbers factored on classical computers have about 130 digits," said Lafl amme. "Even with today's most powerful computers, this takes between one to two months. But with a perfect quantum computer it could take less than a fraction of a second."

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Kinetic forms Platoon of 11-oz. gorillas

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- One approach to handling the increasing complexity of an application is to put some heavier-weighted gorilla -- a faster or wider CPU -- to work.

But Kinetic Computer Corp. is taking an entirely different tack. In a distributing-processing PC platform the company will announce probably in September, up to 100 independent little gorillas are drafted into service inside a seven-foot rack to solve a very particular problem.

The Kinetic system, dubbed PC/Platoon, was developed as a platform on which a Kinetic communications customer can build a test system for the T1-to-LAN products it sells to Inter net service providers. The 100 PCs in the PC/Platoon will be used to simulate 100 people calling into a service provider to go on-line.

The failures of software simulation to accurately predict the performance of Internet equipment under real-world conditions has been a problem. According to Vinit Nijhawan, founder and president of Kinetic, "Most people in the industry use software to simulate all those links, but software is not very representative of what actually happens with a real application. The experience has been that the service providers buy equipment and when they start using it, they hit bottlenecks."

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X86 emulation: IBM drops it , Digital ramps it

ESSEX JUNCTION, Vt. -- Two superpowers of RISC have taken major steps in X86 emulation in recent weeks -- one toward it and the other away from it. As Digital Equipment Corp. nears releas e of a software-based approach, IBM Microelectronics is closing the book on a broad emulation effort that had looked to hardware techniques.

Both Digital and IBM Microelectronics are aiming major parts of their RISC CPU effort at the desktop-personal computer market, and both had been pursuing X86-emulation technology as a way to gain access to the huge Windows application base for their RISC platforms. Digital, having gone the software route, is wrapping up work on a compatibility package called FX32. But IBM Microelectronics product-line-marketing manager David Ryan stated flatly this week that its hardware-based emulation effort has ended.

"We had multiple technical efforts looking at ways to boost performance on X86 code," Ryan said. "These projects were competing against each other. Anytime a bit of information leaked out from one of them, the press would latch onto it and call it a description of the 615."

Now, Ryan said, IBM has "decided that none of the proje cts will be completed. Three major changes in our marketplace have made hardware-assisted emulation unnecessary."

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Motorola makes a VME home for 64-bit PCI

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Mips plus I/Os equals performance, and computer performance seems to evolve in two distinct stages. First, a new generation of monster processors appears to clear the bottlenecks in CPU-bound applications. Next, a new generation of I/O structures appears to turn Mips into useful work by keeping the monsters fed.

Next week, VMEbus market leader Motorola Computer Group (MCG) will announce a new flagship design for its PowerPC CPU boards, to include a monster memory bus and what's said to be the first implementation of 64-bit PCI.

MCG's PowerPlus architecture attacks I/O bottlenecks with a brigade of buses: from the 128-bit memory bus with ECC to the humble 8-bit IS A bus, with heavy reliance on 64-bit structures everywhere else.

The latest generation of processors has outstripped the last generation of I/O, said Jerry Gipper, director of marketing for embedded technologies at MCG, citing the limitations of insufficient bandwidth between DRAM and processors such as the PowerPC 603 and 604. The new Motorola memory controller designed for the new architecture ups the ante over previous PowerPC memory buses by about three times, claimed Gipper, in part by "taking full advantage of the PowerPC microprocessor address pipelining."

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EDA icon launches virtual reality dinner theater

Solomon described the Xulu concept as a "virtual reality dinner theater." Xulu plans to set up an entertainment facility, probably in Silicon Valley, where people can go and relax, meet friends, and order food.

What will set this place apart from other restaurants or nightclubs is the availability of virtual reality experiences, made possible by Windows NT machines with fast 3-D graphics cards.

"There will be a whole variety of experiences," Solomon said. "It'll be like an adventurer's club." He said that Xulu is creating an authoring environment that will allow graphic artists to develop a new adventure or "world scene" within a few days. Underlying all this is the real-time animation made possible by recent developments in high-speed graphics accelerators.

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Expert advice for AI: reduce, reuse, recycle

PORTLAND, Ore. -- What have been AI's successes, and where has it come up short? The annual American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference (AAAI-'96) and two joint conferences commissioned AI expert Frederick Hayes-Roth, chief executive officer of Teknowledge, to determine the answers to those questions and offer recommendations for the technology's future.

In describing his blueprint for tomorrow's AI systems, Hayes-Roth voiced a theme that is increasingly common throughout industry: reuse of proven elements to yield predictable, reliable, cost-effective implementations. "For some of the things that go well in AI, we don't even know why they work as well as they do," he said in an overview of the issue. "We need to make these [successful implementations] into reusable components."

He noted that some quarters have all but written off the technology. "AI is a real challenge to apply to anything. There are many problems that people expected us to have solved already, like beating a grand master at chess. Some people even jest about what a failure AI 'was.' But I don't think that is true, although there is a germ of truth in it."

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Tuesday, August 13, 1996

TI reported to join Toyota IC venture

Texas Instruments declined comment on the report, other than to say the company is talking with various companies about various ventures.

The published report said the Toyota affiliate, Toyoda Automatic Loom Works Ltd., will work with TI to product 256-Mbit DRAMs and other ICs at a factory that probably will be located in the central Japan ese prefecture of Aichi.

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Dataquest cuts forecast for Win95 growth

Windows 95 will be the best-selling operating system for personal computers this year, but its sales are hampered by corporate buyers still waiting for the release of Windows NT 4.0 later this year, the firm said.

Dataquest analyst Chris Le Tocq said many corporate buyers are sticking with Windows 3.1 because they perceive Windows 95 as "a stepping-stone to Windows NT."

Overall, Dataquest predicts 45.7 million copies of Windows 95 will go out to end users this year, compared with 20.9 million copies of Windows 3.1 and 5.4 million copies of the Mac OS from Apple Computer Inc.

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Antares debuts design-entry tool

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Representing the first product sold directly under its own name, Antares Corp.'s Antares Environment/Graphical Editor (AE/GE) graphical design-entry tool is priced below high-end electronic system design-automation (ESDA) tools.

The Windows and Unix-based AE/GE is an OEM offering created by the Netherlands-based Translogic BV, and sold in Europe by that company under the Ease label. It offers a block-diagram editor, state-machine editor and project navigator, and it automatically generates synthesizable VHDL code from state-machine diagrams.

The graphical editor is the first product picked up by Antares since it was formed last year out of two Mentor Graphics Corp. subsidiaries, Model Technology and Exemplar Logic. As such, it represents a move toward a more complete product line.

"The beauty of this product is that it's simple," sai d Farrokh Irani, Antares' director of marketing. "It's got the key functionality engineers have told us they're looking for. It does 80 percent of the tasks that high-end ESDA tools do, for a fraction of the price."

AE/GE is available now for $3,095 with PC node-locked licenses or $7,495 for Unix floating licenses, placing it below the price range of tools sold by parent company Mentor Graphics.

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New bus architecture aims to 'SPICE' up Java

Virtual Resources Communications Inc. hopes the Scalable Parallel-processing Integrated Communications Engine will find a home in distributed Java applet and "servlet" processing, next-generation remot e routers, and modem-bank distribution points for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line services.

The 15-MHz bus is derived from Peripheral Component Interconnect designs, and serves as the link between embedded communications controllers and 4 to 32 Mbytes of shared RAM.

The host processor's link to RAM is logically isolated across a separate EISA bus. The smart memory serves as the bus master and arbiter.

The first instantiation of SPICE by VRC uses the Motorola 68302 in a series of modules VRC calls Versatile Coprocessors. Boards for basic-rate ISDN, primary-rate ISDN, and asynchronous interfaces already have been completed. The modules use three coprocessing 68302s, but as many as 15 processors can be linked across the smart memory bus.

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Flex circuits branch out

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Cellular phones, compact consumer electronics and other equipment seeking lighter, smaller, thinner and conformable interconnections are fueling growth in flexible circuits. The latest developments in flex circuits for advanced microelectronics will be highlighted at Flexcon'96, the third international conference on the subject, to be held Oct. 23-25 at the Sunnyvale Hilton.

As manufacturing activity surges around the world, flexible circuits are making cost and performance strides and gaining acceptance in myriad electronic products. Besides cell phones and consumer devices, those include personal computers and peripherals, flat-panel displays, office equipment and automotive electronics.

A paper by packaging-technology consultants TechSearch International (Austin, Texas) shows expanding markets and solid revenue growth. From under $2 billion last year, the flex-circuit market is projected to climb to more than $5 billion worldwide by 2000, according to TechSearch.

The paper identifies Japan as the major producer of flex circuits, with 60 per cent share of the worldwide production in 1995. The United States and Europe together accounted for 30 percent of production in 1995, with such Asian countries as Korea, Taiwan and Singapore making up the remaining 10 percent, TechSearch said.

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Monday, August 12, 1996

Web-TV browsers to challenge PCs

TOKYO -- Brandishing non-PC-based Web browsers and real-time operating environments, major Japanese TV makers and U.S. startups are scrambling to establish share in the uncharted market for Web-enabled television. At stake is a potentially huge business that could challenge the personal computer's role as the vehicle of choice for Internet navigation.

So far, three major companies are jockeying for the lead position as key technology provider: Tokyo-based R&D venture Access Co. Ltd.; Diba Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.), a developer of software, networking and hardware technology for information appliances; and WebTV Networks (Palo Alto, Calif.). Their activities have been fast and furious.

Diba Inc. last week joined with NEC Corp. to market Internet-based appliances using Diba's operating environment and NEC's 32-bit RISC V830 microprocessor. Also last week, in the United States, Philips Consumer Electronics unveiled its first set-top system that connects through a TV to the Internet; its price, $329.

The device was designed by startup WebTV Networks, which has also licensed its technology to Sony Corp. in the United States.

Mitsubishi, meanwhile, teamed up with Access two weeks ago to bring a new TV-based Web browser to its Internet TV.

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ITC ruling in patent flap favors Quickturn

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Quickturn Design Systems chalked up a small victory last week in its pate nt-infringement war with Mentor Graphics Corp. when the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Mentor must post a 43 percent bond to bring its SimExpress emulators into the United States.

But Mentor (Wilsonville, Ore.) declared its intent to continue importing the emulator and to move toward domestic manufacturing.

The ITC ruling, which confirmed a preliminary determination made last month, resulted from Quickturn's claims that SimExpress violates two of its patents. The emulator was developed by Meta Systems, a French company that Mentor acquired last year to springboard into the rapidly growing IC-emulation business.

While the ITC has so far issued a "temporary exclusion order" against the importation of the emulators and a "cease and desist" order against their sale, the real action lies ahead as Quickturn pursues a permanent injunction by the trade body. Separately, Quickturn and Mentor are both pursuing U.S. District court lawsuits that will either affirm or deny Quickturn's claim that its patents are being violated.

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Intel will postpone P55C with MMX

The reason for the delay, according to an Intel spokesman, was a projected shortage of 200-MHz P55C chips. The spokesman said customers have preferred a faster speed grade, but Intel's production plan had called for just a small number of 200-MHz parts to be run. The plan had instead called for higher production of 166-MHz parts. Intel decided to push back the P55C introduction until it had a l arger number of 200-MHz parts, the spokesman said.

The later introduction date would mean a greater availability of software that uses the MMX instructions, the Intel spokesman said.

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System makers face DVD licensing limbo

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- If you're not a DVD Consortium member but still hope to tap the market for DVD-Video or DVD-ROM with a standards-compliant product, don't count on turning it around in time to compete with the equipment scheduled for fall launch by the club's current roster.

No consortium-sanctioned, formal mechanism yet exists to help you become a DVD-technology licensee. No information is available on the standard royalties you will be charged per player or disk made in your factory. And no procedures are in place, or oversight body appointed, to test your hardware and softwareýdesign for compliance to the DVD specs.

And while the DVD Consortium has said the DVD logo will available for industry use at no charge, it's unclear whether anyone outside the consortium needs to get approval to affix the logo to aýproduct -- and, if so, from whom.

The lack of licensing information is fomenting talk of antitrust violations among some market observers and would-be market participants. Hoping to forestall such complaints, Sony Corp. and Philips Electronics N.V. have taking the initiative among the consortium members in announcing that they will license their patented DVD-player and DVD-disk technologies.

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Smart weapons: whimper or bang?

The fog of war has descended on the U.S. arsenal of smart weapons with the outbreak of a bureaucratic dogfight about their performance in the Persian Gulf War.

A Congressional audit concluded that laser-guided bom bs and other smart weapons did not perform as advertised. Angry Pentagon officials insist that they did.

Defense Department planners are busily preparing a detailed response to a U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report released in July. The controversial report found U.S. smart weapons such as the F-117 stealth fighter and precision guided munitions wanting. GAO recommended that the Pentagon improve sensor capabilities "to effectively locate, discriminate and acquire targets in varying weather conditions and at different altitudes." Pentagon planners and defense firms counter they are doing exactly that.

The report, which was leaked in unclassified form to several newspapers, has touched off a debate among military strategists, budget officials and engineers about the proper mix of smart weapons -- that is, weapons that use sophisticated infrared, electro-optical and RF sensors to adjust their course to a target in mid-flight -- and so-called "dumb" bombs.

GAO co ncluded that the U.S. military should scale back its $58 billion investment in smart weapons. Weaponeers said they will continue to emphasize precision, while trying to drive down unit costs through competition, technology development and acquisition reforms that stress open architectures and cost/performance tradeoffs.

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Cadence slaps CCT with suit

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- The increasingly litigious EDA industry has been hit with yet another lawsuit. Cooper and Chyan Technology (CCT) last week revealed it was being sued by Cadence Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.) for selling an allegedly unauthorized translator.

The lawsuit calls into question how much cooperation point-tool vendors need to hook up to large EDA suppliers. At issue is an interface between the IC Craftsman router of CCT and the Virtuoso IC layout tools sold by Cadence. The interfac e was developed by STX Cadware (Dallas), a two-person software firm, and has been marketed for the past 11 months by CCT.

Cadence has sued both companies, claiming the interface violates the terms of its Connections program, and is seeking a preliminary injunction against its continued sale.

CCT views the lawsuit as a "predatory" attempt to shut out competition, and an attorney for STX has accused Cadence of using "strongarm tactics" to compel his client to sign a statement admitting guilt. Although Cadence filed the lawsuit under seal July 29 in an apparent attempt to keep it secret, CCT went to court and got the seal removed last week.

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Wintel and Unix camps face off at Siggraph

NEW ORLEANS -- Armed with plans for faster processors, hotter graphics accelerators and improved operating systems, the engineering pacesetter s of the PC and workstation worlds faced off here last week at the Siggraph '96 conference. The two camps pledged innovations that could intensify the competition -- and widen the architectural gulf -- between X86-based computers running Microsoft's new Windows NT 4.0 and RISC-based workstations equipped with Unix.

In the PC camp, Intel officials tipped plans for graphics enhancements. "We are going to increase 3-D graphics performance 10 times over the next three years," said Albert Yu, general manager of Intel's microprocessor products group. Yu ticked off yet another item on the agenda: "We're working with a number of companies to open up the memory bandwidth to the processor. Noting that the PCI bus now runs at 66 MHz, he predicted, "We're going to go to 100 MHz and higher."

Digital Equipment Corp. took advantage of the conference hoopla surrounding Windows NT 4.0 to emphasize its position as the maker of the only full-fledged RISC workstations running Windows NT.

Indeed, Digital officials are betting big that NT will transform Alpha into a PC sales demon. "We're going to position Alpha into the high end of the PC market," said Tim Miller, Alpha marketing manager.

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