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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.
 Friday May 23, 1997Intel and upstart Centaur struggle over CPU powerSimmering debate will soon break into full-scale competition in the mobile-personal-computer market, as Intel Corp. and its new rival Centaur Technology go head-to-head over the ways to control CPU power consumption. Intel will continue to emphasize low operating voltages and intelligent power management, while Centaur will offer a new architectural approach to the problem.
Novell lumbers into the NetNovell Inc. is setting sail for terra incognita, aiming to provide services at the very edge of a network, between the public and private pipes. Its vessel is BorderManager, a Windows NT-compatible package, due out in August, for use in conjunction with Novell's NetWare operating system and Net-enabling IntranetWare to juice up the capabilities of intranets.
Motorola makes bid for voice and video trafficMotorola's Information Systems Group this summer will bring continuous-bit-rate (CBR) traffic into its line of routers, switches and frame-relay access devices. The company is launching a multi-pronged effort to support voice over both frame relay and Internet Protocol packet services, support high-bit-rate videoconferencing through a pact with VTEL Corp. and support a new concept of using low-bit-rate real-time video for remote monitoring and surveillance.
Europe leads the intellectual-property chargeWith roughly two-thirds of the world's independent IC-design houses operating on its soil, Europe stands to wield considerable influence on the course of the burgeoning intellectual-property industry, according to market statistics gathered by Dataquest Inc.'s European research arm.
NEC taps Navio for Internet-TV browserNEC Home Electronics Ltd. has built a unique form of "push" technology into an Internet TV that incorporates the Navio TV Navigator, a browser developed by Netscape affiliate Navio Communications Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
More signs of IC-market rebound emerge in TokyoRecent days have brought mounting evidence of the semiconductor industry's cautious return to optimism. NEC Corp. is predicting an 18 percent increase in semiconductor revenue, in yen terms, for the fiscal year that started April 1. LSI Logic Corp. chief executive officer Wilfred Corrigan, in Japan last week to unveil a single-chip controller for digital still cameras, broached the possibility of "15 percent growth as an industry this year" and predicted that "1998 will be very strong."
Thursday May 22, 1997Creators divided over artificial intellectsGarry Kasparov's defeat by a contemporary computer may be only the first battle in a war of attrition, as one human ability after another is surpassed by the increasingly powerful computers of the future. That possibility has been raised by Hugo de Garis, an artificial-intelligence researcher here at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR). De Garis is convinced that a fundamentally new type of computer is on the way that will use reversible computations to allow ever-denser circuits that are configured in three, rather than two, dimensions.
Fabs in Thailand for saleIf you're in the market to buy some fab capacity, Thailand's Alphatec Group has a deal for you. Two deals, in fact. Alphatec's Submicron Technology has been in financial trouble for some time now. And Texas Instruments Inc.'s pullout from its joint venture with Alphatec, Alpha-TI Semiconductor Co., puts the Thai company's second 8-inch fab project also on the auction block.
Darpa looks to optical interconnectsThe Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is mapping out an aggressive program to develop optical interconnects at the board and chip level in a bid to to save billions of dollars in defense-electronics spending. The plan was outlined here earlier this month by Anis Husain, assistant director of the agency's Electronics Technology Office, at the 8th Annual Workshop on Interconnections within High Speed Digital Systems.
DSP blocks pursue wireless appsOki Semiconductor and GEC Plessey Semiconductor have independently launched DSP blocks that have been optimized for wireless baseband applications. Both companies are betting that hard-wired optimized solutions can be competitive with the general-purpose programmable DSP solutions that are now available.
Mergers mean change at Top 100 systems firmsWhile there's no question that the employment picture has brightened considerably among the EE Times Top 100 Systems OEMs in the past year, that doesn't mean there's tranquility in the workplace. Economically driven downsizing may have ebbed considerably, but mergers and strategic refocusing means that engineers and managers have had to adjust to new partners, new alliances and perhaps new owners in the past year.
Wednesday May 21, 1997Concentrator speeds analog Net connectionsAccess specialist Ramp Systems Inc. has used the form factor from its original WebRamp ISDN product to create an unusual modem concentrator called WebRamp M3. The rollout completes the company's transition from broadband ATM switching systems to wideband remote-access systems for homes and small offices that have analog or midspeed digital connections.
Congress eyes $32 billion from spectrum auctionsThe sale of broadcast and other spectrum at auction is expected to generate $32.3 billion over 10 years, according to final details of the balanced-budget deal worked out last week.
Atmel aims serial E2PROMs at cellular phonesAtmel Corp. has released a pair of two-wire serial E2PROM devices with storage capacity of 128 and 256 kbits. The parts, AT24C128 and AT24C256, were designed for cellular-phone manufacturers who want extra space to store phone numbers.
Vantis boosts CPLD speedVantis is improving the performance of its Mach 4 family of CPLDs with the introduction of a handful of devices with speeds of 7 and 10 ns.
Aavid develops passive cooling system for Pentium IIBeyond its performance characteristics, the Pentium II processor module brings a big challenge for designers: They have to cool a large block that generates more than twice as much heat as its predecessor. Aavid Thermal Technologies has developed a passive cooling system that handles the task.
Tuesday May 20, 1997DRAM makers take half-step to 128-MbitA half-dozen DRAM makers are moving to shoehorn 128-Mbit DRAMs into their production schedules, to stave off the burdensome costs of developing the 256-Mbit generation and to give customers a cost-effective bridge device to meet expanding system-memory requirements.
Trident ties 3-D bid to Talisman, testing Microsoft architectureTrident Microsystems Inc. will attempt to propel itself into the forefront of 3-D graphics for the PC this week, when it announces its intention to build one of the first commercial accelerators using Microsoft Corp.'s Talisman technology. The chip could become a sorely needed vehicle for proving the merits of Microsoft's widely debated graphics architecture.
Digital camera's essentials crammed into one ICLSI Logic is unveiling a chip that integrates the essential ingredients of a digital still camera, and that is designed to enable camera manufacturers to lower system prices to the $300-to-$500 range. The DCAM-101 is the industry's first attempt to combine a CPU and a companion ASIC--plus functions that were in some cases implemented as several discrete chips--onto a single chip.
Two add plumbing to the 3-D graphics pipelineIn separate efforts to stake out new territory in 3-D graphics processing, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Silicon Graphics Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) have detailed plans for high-level applications programming interfaces (API) they plan to roll out later this year. HP's DirectModel and SGI's Scene Graph Toolkit will attempt to raise the bar in computer-graphics performance and win the hearts of leading technical- and Internet-graphics developers.
Synopsys eyes static sign-offSetting the stage for greatly reducing or eliminating gate-level timing simulation, Synopsys Inc. this week introduces PrimeTime, a full-chip static timing analyzer that's already garnered sign-off support from several ASIC vendors.
Monday May 19, 1997IBM plans VLIW chip that runs Java codeEnvisioning vast potential performance gains for cost-sensitive network computers and set-top-boxes, engineers at IBM Corp.'s T.J. Watson Research Center here plan to build a prototype very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) microprocessor that can run Java code. The chip could be the basis for a single-board network computer.
Legal jabs at Intel may sting designersTo engineers who'd rather innovate than litigate, last week's patent-infringement suits against Intel Corp. may have brought to mind the words of William Shakespeare, who wrote, "Let's kill all the lawyers." Indeed, the two, separate suits--in which Digital Equipment Corp. charged Intel with infringing 10 patents related to its microprocessors and in which Cyrix Corp. alleged that Intel violated two chip-level patents--could elevate legal considerations into an increasingly intrusive factor in engineers' daily lives.
Receivers battle for position in digital-TV warDespite calls by both camps for cooperation, the battle lines are being drawn in the race between PC makers and TV manufacturers to deliver digital TV receivers. The outcome of the high-stakes debate could determine which approach to digital TV (DTV) finds its way into U.S. living rooms, and whether a hybrid is possible. For now, neither side is compromising.
Satellite consortium mulls Internet multicast servicesThe satellite industry wants to deliver next-generation Internet services but remains skeptical about the available technology. Members of the 140-nation Intelsat communications consortium gathered at its headquarters last week to hear how the group can position itself to deliver Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting and other broadband services.
Wind River spins real-time OS tuned to I2O architectureWind River Systems Inc. is rolling out an operating system that will make it much simpler to use the I2O architecture to dramatically improve the performance of PC-based servers. The real-time OS, called IxWorks, could be one of the final pieces I2O needs for takeoff.
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