    |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
|
  Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times. Previous editions are available from the 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997 News Archives.
 Friday May 16, 1997Salary raises for EEs outpace the rate of inflationFor the fourth year in a row, IEEE members have increased their purchasing power, according to the 1997 "IEEE U.S. Membership Salary and Fringe Benefit Survey." The median primary income for U.S.-based members of the IEEE rose to $72,000, up 7.5 percent since the last survey was conducted in 1995, when the median was $67,000.
Web vet, startup spin embedded-Net softwareSeeing the potential for embedded controllers to find their way into almost every mechanism in the household, a Web pioneer (Spyglass) and a startup (emWare) are attacking the promising market for embedded Internet software.
Designers claim shortage of accurate RF toolsTime-to-market pressures are forcing RF and wireless-system designers to seek out new, largely analog IC-design solutions. Yet despite commercial tool vendors' assertions, neither existing Spice-based tools nor the new breed of microwave simulators satisfy user needs for accuracy and speed. So said designers in a heated discussion at the recent Custom Integrated Circuit Conference (CICC).
LCD advance comes to lightU.K. startup Screen Technology Ltd. (STL) came to the Society for Information Display (SID) conference here last week to report on a novel liquid-crystal display technology that it says will yield five to 10 times higher efficiency than conventional LCD approaches.
IC vendors eye IP licensing for local-area netsCoreEl Microsystems Inc., a supplier of VHDL cores for asynchronous-transfer-mode designs, has linked with CoreCom, a small Swiss design house, to provide behavioral cores for Gigabit Ethernet Media Access Control designs.
Thursday May 15, 1997Moore: Halcyon days of electronics may be overThe smooth path technology has enjoyed for the past 50 years may prove to be a historical anomaly, Intel Corp. chairman Gordon Moore said here recently. Over the next decade, he predicted, the industry will continue to reap the rewards of silicon integration while confronting many engineering challenges. Beyond that 50-year milestone, however, electronics may have to endure a disruptive discontinuity beyond which lies unknown terrain.
Digital finds NT-Unix middle groundWhen Digital Equipment Corp. placed a heavy bet on the Windows NT operating system four years ago, it couldn't foresee that it would one day use its NT experience to keep a hold on the fading Unix market. But that's precisely what is happening with Digital's new "au" (Alpha Unix) Personal Workstations, hardware originally designed for NT but--with the latest introduction--now capable of running Unix, too.
Tiling techniques take aim at pcb-switching noiseA systematic approach to modeling and analyzing simultaneous switching noise in printed-circuit boards could yield an important tool for designers working with powerful microprocessors.
Hitachi Maxell squeezes Li-ion into card sizeHitachi Maxell Ltd. and its R&D venture subsidiary, Battery Engineering Inc., have jointly developed a credit-card-sized rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The 86-x-54-x-0.5-mm battery has a capacity of 40 milliampere hours (mAh) at 3.6 V.
Viewlogic beefs up Sunrise TestGen DFT lineupViewlogic Systems Inc. has attacked the submicron-test problem with a bevy of tools and enhancements for its Sunrise TestGen suite. The object is to give designers automated methods of dealing with the new faults posed by dense chips. Included in the rollout are capabilities for determining bridging and delay faults, accounting for physical layout, speeding simulation and debugging silicon.
Wednesday May 14, 1997Chrysalis brings symbolic simulation to marketBy adding a multicycle analyzer (MCA) option for its Design Insight family of formal model-checking tools, Chrysalis Symbolic Design Inc. is claiming to offer one of the industry's first commercial symbolic simulators. Until now a research topic in the formal-verification community, a symbolic simulator propagates equations rather than values through circuits.
Glint MX doubles OpenGL 3-D graphics rendering renderingA redesign has enabled Glint MX, the 3-D graphics-processing engine from 3Dlabs Inc., to offer a rendering performance of 1 million polygons/second, doubling the 500,000-polygon/s performance of the older Glint 500TX. The improvement is due largely to the move to a 0.36-micron (effective-gate-length) CMOS process.
Lucent combines PCM modem with PCI busThe latest offering in Lucent Microelectronics Inc.'s pulse-code-modulated (PCM) modem line marries a K56flex modem core with a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus interface.
DSL-access mux stacks upA question for OEMs in the digital-subscriber-line industry is how to reduce the cost of DSL-access multiplexers (DSLAMs) for carriers and Internet service providers. Paradyne Corp. took a form-factor lead at the recent NetWorld+Interop show by putting its HotWire DSLAM system in a stackable chassis.
PADS boosts OLE, routing supportIn a significant upgrade to its Windows-based PADS-PowerPCB layout system, PADS Software has announced support for Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). PADS-PowerPCB 2.0 also claims improvements with routing and design-for-testability.
Tuesday May 13, 1997Tools enable virtual design over the WebCollaborative design engineering over the Internet is poised to take a major step forward this week, with the release of three Web-based EDA tools. The introductions from Synchronicity, Viewlogic Systems and Altera are essentially "design groupware" that make possible "virtual components, virtual design teams and virtual corporations."
Tool targets collective hardware design over the NetIn an attempt to facilitate collaborative design on the Web for hardware-engineering groups, startup Synchronicity Inc. this week will launch DesignSync HLD, which uses standard Internet protocols to allow configuration management with revision and release control.
Analysis: WebTV -- Microsoft's consumer foothold?Microsoft Corp.'s acquisition of WebTV Networks Inc. for $425 million has left some industry veterans scratching their heads, wondering what Bill Gates saw--and what they may have failed to see--in the startup.
IC-verification startup zeros in on elusive bugsA new approach to IC verification takes shape this week when a startup, 0-In Design Automation, discloses its technology-development plans. Led by EDA-industry veteran Curt Widdoes, 0-In (Zero-In) is readying tools aimed at finding design bugs caused by complex control-logic interactions.
CMOS 16-bit codecs target cost-sensitive audioAKM Semiconductor Inc. and Analog Devices Inc. have each launched 16-bit codecs in CMOS for the price-sensitive voice and audio markets.
Monday May 12, 1997Intel posts response to Pentium II bug reportsIntel Corp. Friday afternoon owned up to the floating-point bug involving its Pentium II and Pentium Pro processors, stating that it would fix the "flag erratum" in future chip steppings. In the interim, software workarounds are being prepared.
U.S. Robotics puts TI's DSP in central officeU.S. Robotics Inc. fleshed out its recently announced "V.everything" program at NetWorld+Interop here last week, revealing that it will use Texas Instruments Inc.'s 320C6X DSP core architecture as a common platform for pulse-code-modulated modems and future digital subscriber line (DSL) processors.
Gigabit Ethernet hits bumpWhile no serious challenges remain to implementing IEEE's fiber-optic-link standard, a Gigabit Ethernet standard for existing twisted-pair cabling could still be a year or more away.
FCC rules seek to spur telecom competitionFederal regulators last week cut access charges for long-distance phone calls and took steps to ensure that schools, libraries and rural areas get access to the Internet and other advanced communications capabilities.
Japan vendors give color to reflective displays at SIDMatsushita Electric Industrial Co. and other Japanese display vendors will discuss advances in color reflective LCDs (liquid-crystal displays) this week at the Society for Information Display (SID) conference, in Boston, picking up the theme where April's Electronic Display Forum 97 left off.
National gets EDA design help for mil-aero ASICsMilitary IC maker National Semiconductor Corp. is teaming up with two EDA houses to offer ASIC design services to its military and aerospace customers.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
RSS
 |
Home | About | Editorial Calendar | Feedback | Subscriptions | Newsletter | Media Kit | Contact | Reprints|  RSS| 
Digital|  Mobile |
|
| Network Websites |
|
|
International |
|
|
Network Features |
|
|
|
All materials on this site Copyright © 2009 TechInsights, a Division of United Business Media LLC All rights reserved. Privacy Statement | Terms of Service | About |
