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, September 13, 1996

Four ready Internet TVs for Japan market

VSI alliance eyes delivery over Internet

JavaSoft spec sparks object-oriented connections

Imaging device takes on TI's micromirror

Sharp's reflective LCD gets new spin

Thursday, September 12, 1996

Toshiba PCs push DVD

Taiwan moves to join World Semiconductor Council

Trade talks ease tension between China and Taiwan

China's PC market hits some bumps

AMP unit targets online commerce

Wednesday, September 11, 1996

Superconductors are finally ready for practical applications

Confined electrons boost semiconductors

RF, signal-processing chips from SiRF Technology advance GPS

Granulation called key to human cognition

Mentor founder throws hat in political ring

Tuesday, September 10, 1996

Motorola samples an audio chip for DVD systems

Gate-array vendors put focus on power

8-Mbit flash shows speed

Frontline accelerates cycle simulation

Compass Design rolls functional-extraction tool

Flip-chips hit production

Monday, September 9, 1996

IP alliance details plans for system-on-a-chip design

VSI spec cuts to the core of Japa n's ASIC strategy

Air Force taps image sensors to sharpen Cruise missile accuracy

Microsoft preparing a real-time OS for multimedia called Rialto

Bay Networks bids to acquire LANcity

Samsung puts DRAM onto ASIC

Friday, September 13, 1996

Mitsubishi , Sanyo, Sharp, Hitachi ready Internet TVs for Japan market

TOKYO -- Internet-capable TVs are moving into the Japanese market, with Sharp Corp. due to release a 32-inch Internet-ready set soon, Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and Sanyo Electric Corp. planning October launches for their own Internet TVs, and Hitachi Ltd. slating a November debut for a set-top box with Internet functionality. But analysts are divided on whether the consumer Internet products will move off the shelf in profitable volumes.

Sharp's 32-inch, wide-format TV will deb ut at a suggested retail price of $3,000 -- about $650 higher than the regional selling price for an equivalent set that is not Internet-equipped. "We can bring the product immediately to southeast Asia with this price, where people would pay for it," said Isao Kuwata, division deputy general manager of Sharp's TV and Video Systems Group. "But we need to think a bit longer about what kind of product to introduce in the United States."

The Sharp model's Internet capability is derived from a 28.8-kbaud modem, an Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) processor, Sharp's proprietary microkernel operating system, browser software and 2 Mbytes of flash memory.

Sharp also has paid attention to applications. Since July, Fujitsu Ltd. and Sharp have been running an experimental InterTV service, which provides home pages for such information as TV/radio-program listings and news updates. A special remote control allows access to about 20 different types of InterTV home pages for about $15 a mont h.

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VSI alliance eyes delivery over Internet

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The Internet and Sun Microsystems' Net-centric Java programming language could figure highly in the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) Alliance's emerging systems-on-a-chip standards effort.

Intellectual property, long the well-guarded keys to the industry's corporate kingdoms, could soon be encrypted and downloaded to customers over the public Internet or private intranets. (Intellectual property is a new catchphrase that refers to system-level macros, cores and megacells.)

Some experts believe downloading is the most workable solution for providing access to reusable "virtual components" that designers will need to develop next-generation ICs.

The Internet's inclusion in the VSI effort "is a marriage just waiting to march down the aisle," said Rita Glov er, president of EDA Today L.C. (Phoenix).

But those plural "networks" may, in fact, boil down to just one network. "All IP will probably end up on the Internet at some point," said Anund Naidu, president of intellectual-property provider Sand Microelectronics. (Santa Clara, Calif.)

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JavaSoft spec sparks object-oriented connections

ATLANTA -- Seeking to address limitations that could slow Java's march into real-world applications, Javasoft and its partners are planning a host of object-oriented enhancements that will make it easier for the popular new programming language to run in real-world, networked applications.

Javasoft is expected to discuss the efforts next week at two industry conferences where it will have a major presence: Networld+Interop, here, and the Embedded Systems West conference in San Jose, Calif.

To enable Java applications to run across heterogeneous networks, Javasoft has released the draft version of its Java Beans spec and is soliciting public comments. The spec comprises a set of software APIs for the Java platform. The goal is to enable developers to create reusable software components that end users can then hook together to create heavy-duty applications. More important, Java Beans will enable cross-platform portability by supporting Microsoft's ActiveX and the Apple-IBM OpenDoc standard.

Separately, Java is getting some heavy-duty software that will allow it to tie in with the Corba standards that dominate the Unix workstation arena.

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Imaging device takes on TI's micromirror

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Yet another player in flat-panel displays will emerge in two weeks as Silicon Light Machines Inc. spotlights a di gital display technology it calls the Grating Light Valve, a miniature chip-level display device.

The company hopes to challenge Texas Instruments Inc.'s digital micromirror display (DMD) for next-generation projection displays, handheld displays and instrumentation displays. Like the DMD, the GLV is a silicon-based, light-modulating device that relies on a microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) structure, but that structure's relative simplicity could cut costs significantly.

GLV is the latest in a crop of very small, very high-density display technologies that herald a new era in imaging. The new paradigm, the minidisplay, advocates say, is one in which the size of the display is decoupled from the size of its image, with a variety of optical subsystems used to cede different size images from the same basic display device -- from very small direct-view images for wearable displays, to very large projection images for electronic cinema.

The increasingly populated field includes the ferroelec tric liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) of Displaytech Inc., the active-matrix (AM) single-crystal-silicon LCDs of Kopin Corp., the AM electroluminescent displays of Planar Systems Inc., the field-emission displays of Micron Display Technology Inc., and diffraction grating displays of Micro Display Corp., as well as AM polysilicon LCDs from Sarif, Sony, Toshiba, Seiko-Epson and others.

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Sharp's reflective LCD gets new spin

Sharp might use the display in its Color Zaurus, the company's best-selling PDA; it would replace the TFT color display now used in the Zaurus. Sometime during the next fiscal year, which begins in April, the company may use the technology in the commercial PDA-display market and later offer a low-power-consumption, 10-inch-class display for the notebook market.

Sharp engineers have been researching guest host-type liquid crystals for a while, grappling with the hysteresis phenomenon, in which two levels of brightness appear at a given voltage. That made it impossible to achieve good gray-scale capability.

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Thursday, September 12, 1996

Toshiba PCs push DVD

NEW YORK -- Toshiba has launched its first home PCs, a family of systems aimed to drive the Univer sal Serial Bus and Digital Video Disks into the consumer computer market. The company also reaffirmed its commitment, despite ongoing copyright-protection issues, to bring out DVD video and DVD-ROM players for its products and the merchant market before the end of the year.

"Most top-tier PC makers have DVD-ROM prototype units from us now," said Scott Smith, marketing manager of the Disk Products Division of Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. (Tais; Irvine, Calif.). "They should have the first units with our implementation of the copyright protection toward the end of September, and we think we can start shipping those units in volume by mid-November."

Smith said he expects the process of ratifying proposals from Matsushita and Toshiba on DVD copyright protection will take up to four months. Toshiba is already working on implementing the techniques in the proposals, he said, with a view to shipping products before the formal agreement on the standard is complete.

( The copyright-protection proposals were designed to address concerns of intellectual-property right owners, typically Hollywood movie studios. This has stalled the rollout of DVD until they are convinced their DVD movies will not be easily copied by DVD-ROM players connected to VCRs.)

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Taiwan moves to join World Semiconductor Council

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- As semiconductor manufacturers here prepare to jump aboard the U.S. and Japan's World Semiconductor Council (WSC) bandwagon, Taiwan is moving belatedly to form a local liaison semiconductor industry association.

By year's end, Taiwan's semiconductor leaders predict, a Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA) will be a reality.

Taiwan is already well-poised for association with the WSC due to its current low semiconductor tariff laws. R.T. Lo, a vice president at TI-Acer, and Jinn Haw Tse ng, a manager at TSMC, said that Taiwan's current tariff for ICs is one percent or less. This is an essential component in the WSC's mandate and one with which Europe and South Korea will have trouble conforming.

The delay in Taiwan's formation of a TSIA is based mostly on the glacial speed of its government bodies. The semigovernmental Electronics Research & Service Organization (ERSO) is viewed as an integral player in the formation of TSIA. But the head of ERSO's strategic planning division has quit, leaving the TSIA project in the lurch.

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Trade talks ease tension between China and Taiwan

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The Chinese, who were lobbing missiles near Taiwan earlier this year, now are tossing bouquets at the island nation. And the Taiwanese are cautiously returning the advances.

The missiles and military exercises seen earlier this year have g iven way to calls for increased economic ties between Taiwan and China. No less a figure than Chinese President Jiang Ze-min, as well as lesser officials on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, have recently been highlighting the need for continued Chinese-Taiwan trade.

"We will continue to carry out our long-time policy of encouraging Taiwanese businessmen to invest," Jiang said late last month. "No matter what the circumstances, we will protect all legitimate rights of Taiwanese investors.'' Jiang said this to a group of 80 Taiwanese businessmen who were on a 12-day visit to China. The group also included Taiwanese government officials. True to the shadowy world of Taiwan/China politics, they were along on an "unofficial'' basis.

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China's PC market hits some bumps

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AMP unit targets online commerce

Leveraging the company's Internet-based AMP Connect electronic catalog, the division will offer electronic commerce consulting, development of electronic catalog database and business transactions, Web site hosting, and support and systems integration for turnkey operations.

"What began as AMP's vision to offer speedy and comprehensive information to its own customers has simply taken off. We aim to turn AMP eMerce into a model of 21st century information technology," said AMP Chairman James E. Marley.

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Wednesday, September 11, 1996

Superconductors are finally ready for practical applications

WESTBOROUGH, Mass. -- Researchers at American Superconductor Corp. say they have improved the critical current density of the company's high-temperature superconductor (HTS) composite conductors to the point at which practical application becomes viable. Working with a rolled multifilamentary powder-in-tube technology using the Bi-2223 superconductor, the researchers claim to have achieved critical current density of 55kA/cm2 and critical current of 125 A at 77 K.

The company presented the data at the Applied Superconductivity Conference in Pittsburgh last month. Also at that conference, American Superconductor discussed the design and successful test of a high-temperature superconducting 125-hp motor operating at 1,800 rpm and of a 50-meter com posite wire for power-transmission cable.

To apply that breakthrough in practical applications, the short prototype wire had to be lengthened for manufacture, and a method had to be devised for winding the longer cables into coils for use in motors.

In collaboration with Reliance Electric Corp. (Cleveland), a business of Rockwell Automation, a 125-hp motor was designed using the superconducting wire. The winding reportedly achieved an operating-current density of more than 6,300 A/cm2 at an operating temperature of 27 K.

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Confined electrons boost semiconductors

BOSTON -- Fundamental research into the properties of semiconductors is turning up a variety of techniques for confining electrons to nanometer-sized structures. The boxed electrons are revealing new insights into electronic behavior that might one day be employed in novel electroni c devices.

Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington) have been able to create a trapped "exciton" in a quantum dot by bumping up the confined electron's energy. Instead of escaping from the dot, the electron enters a higher energy level, leaving a hole behind. The electron then begins to orbit the hole, creating a stable particle that has a lot in common with a hydrogen atom, which is simply an electron orbiting a proton. Excitons occur as the natural by-product of electron-photon interactions in semiconductors, but they are short lived and difficult to isolate from other activity in bulk materials.

Excitons also play a prominent role in organic and polymer electroluminescent materials which are being studied as an alternative to gallium arsenide-based LEDs and laser diodes.

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RF , signal-processing chips from SiRF Technology advance GPS

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Hoping to open up a new consumer market for products based on global positioning , SiRF Technology Inc. is introducing a complete chip, board and software solution for decoding the signals from the U.S. military's global-positioning satellite system. While products that exploit the satellite signals are available, they are typically high-cost systems devoted to a specific task. SiRF Technology was founded last year to develop a system that would allow any OEM to put GPS capability into products, said Kanwar Chadha, SiRF's marketing vice president.

While the technology is commonly perceived as a navigational aid, widespread integration of GPS capability into consumer products would open up many innovative applications using spatial coordinates. "It would be easy to use a GPS system to secure your portable computer simply by having it shut down if it senses that it has been moved from a designated location," Chadha said.

The same concept applies to auto security systems and even to data. "When you include time along with position information, you have a completely unique identifier for any transaction," said Greg Turetzsky, product manager for the chip set, which is called SiRFstar.

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Granulation called key to human cognition

NEW ORLEANS -- The IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (Fuzz '96, September 8-11, 1996) opened with a revelation from the father of fuzzy logic, Lotfi Zadeh.

Information "granulation," Zadeh said, plays a key role in human reasoning, in concept formation, and in "computing with words." As an AI concept, granulation has come naturally from fuzzy logic, which arrives at appropriate conclusions in environments rife with imprecision and uncertainty. Fundamental to that capability is the ability to not treat all information equ ally, but rather to weigh granules of information with proportional factors that are derived from a given situation.

"Our quest after machine intelligence has made it increasingly clear that information granulation plays an essential role in human cognition," Zadeh said. "Information granulation underlies the human brain's ability to employ words, rather than numbers, to solve imprecisely defined problems."

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Mentor founder throws hat in political ring

The number of people from the electronics industry who have been elected to national office can be counted on one hand, and you would still have fingers left over. Aiming to be the next is Tom Bruggere, a founder of Mentor Graphics (Beaverton, Ore.) and the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat that will soon be relinquished by Republican Mark O. Hatfield.

"There is a recognition that there is no one in the House or Senate from the high-tech industry," said Bruggere. (The American Association of Engineering Societies counts five members of Congress as engineers, though not necessarily in high technology.)

For a number of reasons, including the industry's entrepreneurial spirit (the I-can-do-it-myself/hands-off ethic), high-tech has not paid much attention to national politics, Bruggere noted, adding that remaining uninvolved in politics is no longer a viable option, however.

"Federal policy is becoming more and more important to high tech," he said. "You've got NAFTA, GATT, the trade and budget deficits, R&D funding, capital formation, trade issues with China and Japan. More people in the industry are becoming more affected by the issues."

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Tuesday, September 10, 1996

Motorola samples an audio chip for DVD systems

The 81-MHz 56011 replaces up to four chips in the audio portion of initial DVD prototypes. This chip reduction is made possible by the DSP's integration of an IEC958 protocol digital audio transmitter, packetized elementary stream decoding, a parallel host interface, and large amounts of RAM and ROM for executing the Dolby digital AC-3 algorithm.

The heart of the new audio chip is the 24-bit 56000 DSP core, which is also the engine of Motorola's currently available audio solutions.

Sitting alongside the DSP core are 12.5 kwords of program ROM, 0.5 kwords of program RAM, 5.5 kwords of data ROM and 8.25 kwords of data RAM. Up to 2.25 kwords of data RAM may be switched to program RAM to allow users to download and run algorithms. There is no need for flash memory in this ap plication.

The device has pre-programmed ROM software for the full range of DVD audio functions, including Dolby digital AC-3, Dolby Pro Logic, MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio decode and linear pulse-code modulation. A software implementation of packetized elementary stream (PES) decoding is also provided, including backward compatibility to MPEG-1 packet decoding.

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Gate-array vendors put focus on power

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. -- As momentum in the computer and communications industries shifts toward portable -- even palmtop -- equipment, there is inexorable pressure on chip suppliers to reduce power consumption to ever-lower levels.

The gate-array business has not escaped this trend. Arrays destined for telephone handsets, for palmtop computers, or notebooks -- where color displays and Pentium CPUs vacuum up every available microwatt -- must show signif icant improvements in power consumption to stay in the running. One approach explored by GEC Plessey Semiconductors Inc. looks at the architecture of the ASIC itself to reduce power requirements.

Maha Osman, U.S. director of the ASIC systems business unit at GEC Plessey Semiconductors (GPS), said "If you understand your data, you can make choices -- like the decision on whether to use a shared bus or separate data lines, for instance -- that can make a huge difference in power. We feel that vendors have to work with customers at this level." For instance, can computations be performed in parallel rather than in serial fashion to reduce the number of transitions in an ALU? How much clock gating and clock choking really makes sense, without introducing metastability problems between clock domains on the chip? Such decisions often require consultation from both the ASIC vendor and the customer.

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8-Mbit flash shows speed

BRISBANE, Calif. -- Hitachi America Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. have continued to jointly develop divided bit-line NOR-type flash memory. After introducing a 16-Mbit part late last year, the companies are returning to the workhorse 8-Mbit level to concentrate on two key parameters for handheld systems: speed and efficiency. Ideally, flash parts would be fast enough for execute-in-place code storage and real-time data recording, yet efficient enough not to require a battery the size of a small shotgun.

This, the companies contend, is just what the DiNOR architecture is good at: delivering high speed at low voltage and high density. The essentially identical Hitachi HN29Wx800 and Mitsubishi M5M29Fx800 seem to support their point. The chips are 8-Mbit flash devices available in either 1 Mbit-by-8 or 512 kbits-by-16 configurations. They are further subdivided into a rather complex block structure.

All of this permi ts an embedded application to have a bullet-proof boot block, an easily modified parameter block and then a group of independently lockable (both in software and hardware) general blocks. This eliminates the need for at least one external memory in many embedded systems, Hitachi said.

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Frontline accelerates cycle simulation

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Frontline Design Automation will accelerate cycle-based Verilog simulation next week when it comes to EuroDAC with PureSpeed CycleDrive 3.1, which supports multithreaded simulation on single workstations with multiple CPUs. The offering is also claimed to offer algorithmic improvements, such as "selective trace," which alone can boost performance by a factor of two.

The multithreaded capability is especially valuable for random diagnostic testing, which can take days to complete, noted Frontline president and chief architect Badruddin Agarwala, who also claimed that the speedup available is nearly linear in proportion to the number of CPUs. "A simulation that used to take eight days can be done in a day using eight CPUs," he said.

At present, the capability is available on systems that support the Posix standard for multi-threaded packages. Those include multiple-CPU Unix workstations from Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Fujitsu, Digital Equipment and Hewlett-Packard.

Since the PureSpeed simulation line offers both event-driven and cycle-based simulation, it's important to note that the multi-threading capability is for cycle simulation only.

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Compass Design rolls functional-extraction tool

GENEVA -- With the introduction of a new EDA tool at the EuroDAC conference and exhibition here next week, engineers will be able to take low-level physical net-lists and automatically extract their functionality and output it in a low-level form of either Verilog or VHDL.

Laybool, a functional-extraction tool from Compass Design Automation Inc., will render Spice-level or EDIF net-list designs into either the VHDL or Verilog hardware description languages.

Also at EuroDAC -- the European, small-scale equivalent of the Design Automation Conference -- Compass will take the wraps off an extension to its VFormal verification tool to cover designs written in Verilog. VFormal already operates on VHDL descriptions, so the enhancement means that one tool can cover both of the major languages used for circuit description.

By combining VFormal with Laybool, designers can perform a direct formal verification that the physical layout of a circuit element is functionally identical with the original RTL description in either of the two leading design languages.

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Flip-chips hit production

AUSTIN, Texas -- While much of the excitement during the fall show season will be around design issues for flip-chip, chip scale and ball-grid arrays, presentations slated for next month's International Electronic Manufacturing Technology (IEMT) Symposium will also discuss ways to move these technologies into production.

Most manufacturers are just starting to get up to speed with ball-grid arrays, but a handful of board producers who are already doing work with flip-chip and chip scale will discuss their work at the 19th incarnation of the IEMT symposium here October 14-16 in conjunction with the Semicon Southwest exposition.

Among them is Motorola's Interconnect Technology Research Group (Schaumburg, Ill.), which will discuss its exploration of the encapsulants used when flip-chips are attached directly to circuit boards. Underfillings are generally thought to improve the overa ll reliability of flip-chips attached to FR-4 boards.

Hewlett-Packard's Electronic Assembly Development Center (Palo Alto, Calif.) will also describe efforts to decrease the fatigue life of flip-chip solder connections by using underfill materials. HP is putting flip-chips on ceramic substrates, a common technique for processors and other high-lead-count devices.

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Monday, September 9, 1996

IP alliance details plans for system-on-a-chip design

San Jose, Calif. -- The 35 vendors that assembled here last week for the kickoff meeting of the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) alliance outlined an ambitious plan that sets the stage for next-generation chip design.

The unprecedented coalition of EDA, semiconductor, systems and intellectual-property (IP) vendors seeks to develop standards that will allow users to mix and match intellectual prope rty from various sources using what it calls "worldwide IP networks". The initiative promises an abrupt chip-design-methodology shift through which ICs would be developed with reusable, "virtual components," much as boards are designed today.

It also hints at a new ASIC business model -- one that would preclude ASIC vendors from locking customers to proprietary fabs and that would compel them to offer cost-competitive manufacturing.

At a press event to detail the initiative last week, speaker after speaker called VSI the only hope for million-gate IC design. A few obstacles still stand in the way of the VSI vision. Several large U.S. ASIC providers haven't signed up with the alliance, and issues of intellectual-property protection, portability and silicon-area and performance trade-offs have yet to be addressed.

Nonetheless, the coalition is already nearing completion of its 1.0 specification. Though that spec only covers digital, hardware intellectual property, it sets forth the industry's first intellectual-property standards for common sets of deliverables, interfaces and data formats.

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VSI spec cuts to the core of Japan's ASIC strategy

TOKYO -- While some of their U.S. counterparts are riding the fence, Japanese and European semiconductor vendors are rushing to embrace the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) alliance's system-on-a-chip standards effort.

Several Japanese ASIC vendors, unwilling to wait for the promised release of the initial spec early next year, have already committed to fielding VSI cores. Based on the preliminary, Version 0.9 spec, VSI-compliant test chips are under development at Fujitsu Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and other Japanese ASIC houses, EE Times has learned.

It has also been learned that VSI "Pilot Group" member Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. is considering offering the VSI alliance t he opportunity to standardize around an on-chip bus, called Amba, that ARM uses to link processor cores, memories and peripheral devices.

Fujitsu's embrace of the alliance extends into design tools. It reportedly has contracted with several EDA suppliers to develop a design environment that would adhere to the VSI specifications. The effort is said to include development of a hardware/software cosimulation environment and a hardware emulator. If all goes smoothly, Fujitsu could be using the VSI standard for real-world designs in about a year, company executives said.

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Air Force taps image sensors to sharpen Cruise missile accuracy

The cruise missiles that swept across Iraq last week carried new guidance technology, based on global-positioning-system (GPS) navigation, that rendered them far more accurate than the weapons of the Gulf War. But the need to launch multiple strikes before all targets were taken out indicates room for improvement. An Air Force-funded tool-development project called the Parallel Algebraic Logic (PAL) consortium is working to make such mop-up deployments a thing of the past.

U.S. missile designers envision a new breed of terminal sensors, augmenting GPS with automatic target recognition (ATR) and other advanced imaging technologies, that would enable next-generation missiles to home in on targets with pinpoint accuracy. ATR uses image-processing algorithms to sort through the view in front of a missile. The system selects the target for which it has been programmed and directs the missile toward the target through visual tracking, rather than simply flying the missile to predetermined GPS coordinates.

The biggest hurdle to ATR's deployment has been cost: Early ATR processors have ranged up to $500,000. PAL is taking a roundabout approach to cost-cutting by combining algorithm-development tools with a programmable archite cture to foster commercial applications that, in turn, should drive down unit costs for the military.

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Microsoft preparing a real-time OS for multimedia called Rialto

REDMOND, Wash. -- A compact yet powerful real-time operating system developed by Microsoft Corp. researchers could fuel the company's march into multimedia consumer platforms, sources close to the company said. The OS, called Rialto, has already seen service in a set-top box used in an interactive-TV trial and in the reference design for Microsoft's new Talisman 3-D graphics architecture.

Rialto is a distinct and separate effort from Pegasus, the new embedded -- but not real-time -- OS Microsoft is aiming at handheld computers and PDAs.

Designed by computer scientists at Microsoft Research, the software powerhouse's advanced-development laboratory, Rialto is officially clas sified as a research project. However, it is currently up and running in a variety of prototype setups where it's handling control of real-time video players, interactive games and Web browsers.

Because of the looming popularity of such applications -- particularly Web clients running on low-cost "network computers" -- some industry observers believe Rialto could have a big impact on Microsoft's efforts to surge ahead in multimedia and distributed computing. But others -- even within Microsoft itself -- question just how committed the company is to fielding an RTOS.

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Bay Networks bids to acquire LANcity

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The rampant consolidation in the internetworking industry took an unusual turn last week, when Bay Networks Inc. made a $59 million offer to acquire LANcity Corp. (Andover, Mass.), an early leader in cable modems and Eth ernet bridges. P> "Bay's strategy involves being a player in all edge-networking markets, including residential markets like the emerging cable-modem industry," said Bruce Sachs, executive vice president of Bay Network's new Internet and Telecom Business Unit (ITBU).

Founded in 1990, LANcity originally worked with Digital Equipment Corp. and other OEMs on bridging and routing technologies for the coaxial cable infrastructure. The LANcity Personal CATV Modem (LCP) has been several quarters ahead of most cable modems, with the exception of those from Zenith and Motorola.

LANcity has developed three generations of modems: a $15,000 system; a second-generation $5,000 system; and a newer $595 LCP modem for the home. The latter generation will be updated to meet IEEE 802.14 and Davic standards for QAM modulation downstream and QPSK modulation return-path in the near future.

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S amsung puts DRAM onto ASIC

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Breaking new ground for the ASIC industry and asserting its intention to be a world-class ASIC vendor, Samsung Semiconductor Inc. has announced an ASIC family that includes up to 1 Mbit of on-chip DRAM. The family is the first cell-based ASIC line to offer true single-transistor DRAM in a conventional ASIC design flow with industry-standard tools. As such, it promises to accelerate the gradual exploration of on-chip DRAM that has been proceeding in the graphics, communications and consumer-products industries.

Most previous attempts to integrate DRAM with logic have required customer-owned tooling and full-custom design. In ASICs, the closest approach to true DRAM capability so far has been a sort of synthetic DRAM developed by LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.) for use in its standard submicron ASIC process. But that technology uses a three-transistor memory cell, and falls considerably short of the density of a true single-transistor DRAM cell.

Farzad Zarrinfar, senior product marketing manager at Samsung Semi, said "The on-chip memory can run much faster than conventional DRAM, giving greater effective memory bandwidth. It consumes much less power than driving a conventional DRAM bus. The footprint is smaller, and the system reliability is higher. We see applications in a wide range of areas, from PC graphics to cell phones and set-top boxes."

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