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

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Friday January 17, 1997

DRAM vendors accelerate shift to 64-Mbit

Faced with $6 price tags for 16-Mbit DRAMs, Asian memory makers will spend 1997 trying to bring down production costs of the 64-Mbit density, as well as shifting manufacturing resources to flash and logic devices.

IHS, Team forge access deal

Users of PC-based EDA tools will be able to directly access the CapsXpert component database from Information Handling Systems (IHS), following an agreement between the Denver company and Team Corp. The pact calls for the two to develop an interface between CapsXpert and Team's EDA Bridge product.

CAD-to-CAM spec in works

With a $2.2 million contract in hand from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a joint industry group last week began work on a standard that promises to speed and simplify the transfer of data from the design environment to manufacturing.

Report card favors U.S.-Japan pacts

Despite friction on several fronts, U.S.-Japan trade agreements covering semiconductors and cellular phones have been relatively successful, a survey of 45 major trade deals finds.

Toshiba fields 20X CD-ROM chip set

Toshiba Corp. has developed core circuitry that will push CD-ROM drive speed to 20X. The company will promote the chip set based on expectations that CD-ROM drive speed, currently advancing from 8X to 12X, will continue to advance.

Thursday January 16, 1997

Ferro displays enter consumer arena

The liquid-crystal displays of 20 years ago ushered in a new age of portable products, enabling such now-ubiquitous items as calculators and digital watches. Now the consumer-electronics arena is about to be rocked again, this time by the arrival of ferroelectric liquid crystals, whose integration with advanced silicon technology promises a blend of speed and resolution that simple LCDs cannot touch.

Impulse radar micropowered for sensor apps

A three-year-old technology rooted in a radar technique discovered roughly a century ago is rapidly amassing practical applications as a low-cost, high-precis-
ion sensor.

Full 64-bit PCI bridge chip rolls

The latest of Digital Semiconductor's popular Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus-interface chips, the 21154 PCI-to-PCI bridge chip, extends full 64-bit address support to both primary and secondary PCI buses.

Tool kit allows online multimedia in real-time

Olivr Corp.'s production tool kit for fractal/wavelet online, real-time compression/decompression of interactive virtual realities is now available.

Aisys software eases device-driver creation

Aisys Inc. has rolled out a pair of development tools for device drivers that moves the company into the high end of the embedded-systems market.

Wednesday January 15, 1997

Genlock chip takes on tough video task

Micro Linear Corp. is attacking one of the nastiest problems in digital video -- extracting digital sync pulses and sample clocks from the incoming analog signal -- with the introduction of its single-chip Genlock circuit.

Four-port ISDN router targets small offices

ISDNet Inc., a joint venture of CoSystems Inc. and Furukawa Electric Ltd., is taking its ISDN router architecture into small offices via a four-port system called the NetRouter 1040. The router's Ethernet hub handles LAN duties typically seen in small offices.

Atmel adds to low, high ends of programmable logic

Atmel Corp. has made both low-power and high-speed additions to its family of low-density programmable logic.

HyperLynx offers analysis tools in suite

HyperLynx has unveiled HyperSuite, a bundling of its Windows-based signal-integrity and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) analysis tools into one package.

Tuesday January 14, 1997

Intel pushes design envelope

The behind-the-scenes story of the P55C CPU formally announced by Intel Corp. last week is not about increased speed or the MMX instruction-set extensions, but about the pioneering use of cycle-accurate simulation, formal verification and other tools not available to the rest of the CMOS logic industry.

VME getting 4X speedup to 320 Mbytes/s

With a new backplane scheme to be unveiled at the Real Time Computer Show this week, the old VMEbus is turning the tables on the upstart Compact PCI (CPCI). The scheme will give VME a 4X bandwidth boost, leapfrogging CPCI and altering the competitive landscape.

Acacia's Gbit Ethernet switch mixes DSP, ASICs

Acacia Networks Inc. is betting that its 10/100 Layer 3 NovaSwitch, a combination of dedicated DSPs and MAC-layer ASICs, will sweep the startup past its many competitors in the Gigabit Ethernet field.

NBC orders digital-TV transmitters

NBC has taken the plunge into digital TV, becoming the first network to order digital-TV transmitters since approval of a U.S. transmission standard. The network announced last week that it will purchase DTV transmitters and engineering services from Comark Communications Inc. (Southwick, Mass.) for 11 stations.

Study finds Web sites are open to attack

An Internet security study compiled by a former Sun Microsystems Inc. software engineer, Dan Farmer, shows that nearly one-third of the Internet's most commonly used addresses are vulnerable to attack.

Book-to-bill ratio ends on a down note

The Semiconductor Industry Association last week unveiled the last of the controversial book-to-bill ratio with a report like others last year that contributed to its demise: the ratio went down.

Monday January 13, 1997

Startup turns up volume of wireless ATM

This week, a startup funded in part by AT&T, Cisco Systems Inc. and Vebacom GmbH will disclose an asynchronous-transfer-mode (ATM) and frame-relay system that uses millimeter-wave radio links in licensed bands.

Apple's chief outlines status of recovery plans

Chief executive Gilbert Amelio said his three-year recovery plan for Apple Computer Inc. remains on track, but the company hit some setbacks going into last week's Macworld trade show here.

Executive exodus presages IC-CAD shakeout

High-level turnover at two IC design-tool companies may signal the start of a major shakeout in the industry, observers said last week. At issue is whether Compass Design Automation and Silicon Valley Research (SVR) can avoid being trampled by a troika of market leaders as they struggle to restructure.

Last year's bang is now more a whimper

Among the biggest non-developments at last week's Consumer Electronics Show here was the falling expectations for digital videodisk from last year's promise of a flood of DVD titles and consumer purchases.

Yago partitions switch for price

Yet Another Gigabit Operation (Yago) doesn't seem a promising name for a new venture in the already-crowded Gigabit Ethernet switching business. But the founders of Yago Systems Inc. intend to provide a multilevel -- Layer 2 and Layer 3 -- switch that can substitute for a router, handle at least 16 1-Gbit/s ports, and sell for so little it can be used on small, 10-Mbit/s applications.

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