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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 July 4, 1997Microsoft's site down, but not hackedDespite the recent reports of hackers attacking Microsoft corporate Web, Thursday's access problems may have been caused by the company's planned upgrade -- and human error.
New driver could lead to brighter, cheaper displaysBright Lab Co. Ltd. has developed an LCD driving method that can crank color, video-rate images out of a passive, monochrome display. Called the Dynamic Excite Drive (DED), the technique will give passive LCDs higher speeds than active-matrix LCDs, which typically cost twice as much, the company claims.
Mentor to pursue libraries, cores with CharteredMentor Graphics Corp.'s Inventra business unit will develop standard ASIC cell, memory and data-path libraries for Chartered's 0.35-micron process, the two companies have agreed, and will jointly develop test chips based on some of Inventra's "hard" cores.
Fujitsu shows 3-D geometry processorFujitsu Ltd. has developed a programmable 3-D geometry processor which can be used with any rendering engine. Fujitsu will aim the processor, called Pinolite, at midpriced desktops, in the hope of replacing software-based geometry processing.
DIGITAL-TV spec talks slog onMore than a dozen executives from several companies gathered at Panasonic's AVC American Laboratories in Burlington, N.J., recently to try to forge a cross-industry agreement over a baseline digital television (DTV) specification.
Moto drops DRAM sales, continues developmentMotorola Semiconductor Products Sector will stop selling DRAMs but will continue DRAM development, according to Bud Broeker, general manager of Motorola's dynamic-memory products division. The company, which builds no DRAMs in its own fabs, has been selling parts from a Sendai, Japan, facility jointly owned with Toshiba Corp. and known as Tohoku Semiconductor Corp. It has also begun work on a jointly owned fab outside of Richmond, Va., with Siemens AG.
Thursday July 3, 1997EDA market goes 'formal'At this year's Design Automation Conference, Lucent's Bell Labs Design Automation (BLDA) operation gave out little penguin dolls after demonstrating its new formal-verification tools. That prompted some wags to crack: What does formal verification have in common with penguins? Answer: Neither will fly.
University and commercial labs in Europe to explore high-speed physical processesA European university network researching ultrafast, subpicosecond optoelectronic processes is being broadened to include commercial activities. The collaborative effort, similar to Japan's Ultrafast program, is aimed at gaining knowledge of optoelectronic processes in solid-state materials, with an eye toward enabling technology for terahertz signal sources and digital devices operating at frequencies above 100 GHz.
Nanomachine sniffs specific moleculesA pioneering nanomachine application promises to revolutionize the design of molecular-level pattern recognition--from artificial "noses" that smell minute quantities of a chemical to medical diagnostic tools that isolate and pinpoint disease. The super-sensitive sensor--measuring less than 1/100th micron3--was created by researchers at an Australian national lab, called a cooperative research center (CRC).
Moto preps expandable VMEbus boardThe Technical Products Division (TDP) of the Motorola Computer Group has designed a VMEbus CPU board that undercuts the pricing on its current line by 40 percent and even comes in at $300 below the CompactPCI CPU board it introduced last month.
Current-mode scheme slashes powerAn approach to high-frequency interconnects devised at the University of California Santa Barbara may offer substantial system power savings by smoothing voltage swings at terminations such as pins. Using a current-mode scheme, the technique employs a dynamic impedance-matching circuit at each pin to reduce the power cost associated with rapid switching.
Wednesday July 2, 1997Xilinx keeps pace as PLDs pursue low-end gate arraysXilinx Inc., staying stride for stride with arch-rival Altera Corp., said recently it too has a programmable- logic family in the works that will achieve die-size parity with comparable gate arrays.
IBM offers desktop continuous-speech dictation toolIBM Corp. has taken continuous-speech recognition out of the lab and aims to put in on the desktops of the masses with Via Voice, a general-purpose continuous-speech dictation product that will retail for $199.
SanDisk rolls chips for compact systemsSanDisk Corp., a company best known for its flash cards, has introduced a series of IDE-compatible flash chip sets for an emerging class of consumer and industrial applications that needs low-capacity nonvolatile memory storage.
Test-bench tool processes VIL input modelsStartup Levetate Design Systems Inc. has launched LevBencher VHDL, an HDL simulation test-bench generation tool that's based on a formal specification language. The product processes input models written in the VHDL Interface Language (VIL), which was developed as part of a NASA research contract to Boeing Co.
Tool verifies test during chip designThe Virtual Test Division of Integrated Measurement Systems Inc. (IMS) says its Digital VirtualTester can shave weeks and cost from IC development time. Running on Unix- or NT-based workstations, the automated test-productivity tool is a virtual desktop ATE system aimed at verifying and debugging IC test patterns and timing during the chip-design process.
Tuesday July 1, 1997'Handover' brings hope to China's EEsAs the giant digital clock in Beijing's infamous Tiananmen Square counts off the hours, minutes and seconds to Hong Kong's momentous "handover" to China at midnight tonight, the question on everyone's mind is what sort of hybrid culture the reunification will engender. Will China become more like the British protectorate it will reabsorb--wealthy, entrepreneurial, less authoritarian? Or will Hong Kong become more like the People's Republic, where the authorities define treason broadly and arbitrarily and where a Tibetan monk recently drew a six-year prison sentence for leaking the identity of the next Dalai Lama before Beijing could announce it?
Synopsys eyes migration toolsTo enable "process-portable hard cores," Synopsys Inc. is preparing a set of tools that will allow users to import, export and migrate cores based on its Cell Based Array (CBA) architecture. One of the offerings, CBA Block Import, will let users drop any hard intellectual-property block in a process supported by CBA into a CBA core.
Wireless-LAN standard setThe IEEE's Standard Boards Activity voted final approval for the 802.11 wireless-LAN standard late last week, closing a seven-year process to define 2-Mbit/second LAN protocols for spread-spectrum-radio and infrared local-area networks.
Mobile giants work on wireless protocolThe world's leading mobile-phone makers, Nokia Mobile Phones, Ericsson and Motorola Inc., are working together to define a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) that would be used to transfer data to and from smart mobile phones.
EU rethinks DRAM anti-dumping rulesThe European Union (EU) appears set to make a U-turn and abandon DRAM anti-dumping legislation aimed at Korean and Japanese suppliers in favor of a voluntary code of conduct.
PowerPC CPU gets 0.25-micron boostThe Motorola-IBM Somerset Design Center today will unveil its 250-MHz 604e PowerPC built on a new 0.25-micron (drawn) process technology.
Monday June 30, 1997Intel preps plan to bust bugs in Pentium MPUsIntel Corp. plans to make a high-profile public announcement next month that it has developed technology to quickly fix bugs that crop up in its microprocessors without having to recall the chips, EE Times has learned. "It's a piece of hidden technology in the processor, which enables the chip to be patched after it's been shipped," said a semiconductor expert who requested anonymity. Intel declined to provide details on its bug-busting feature, though a company official said: "We're going to make it a big deal."
Group targets gaps in DTV infrastructureIn an effort to bring order to the continued chaos of the digital-TV transition (DTV), an alliance of engineers in the U.S. and European broadcast, computer and video-equipment communities last week issued two formal requests for technologies (RFT) that they hope will smooth the path to universal, interoperable digital-TV service.
MPEG-2 patent pooling approvedThe Department of Justice has given the green light to a group of nine companies and one university to create a pool of patents that are essential to the MPEG-2 video standard.
Cisco continues acquisition bingeCisco Systems maintained its acquisition juggernaut last week, buying San Jose-based Ardent Communications Inc., a hardware startup specializing in voice over Internet Protocol (IP), for about $156 million in stock. Cisco also picked up Global Internet Software Group.
ASIC core-licensing heats upAs part of its move into intellectual property, a French EDA company is working with the Fraunhofer Institute of Microelectronic Circuits and Systems on a plan to license ASIC cores for reuse. Dolphin Integration SA (Meylan, France) will commercialize and market Motorola-compatible microcontroller cores developed by the two institutes.
Digital-subscriber-line trio pushes uniform specsThree pioneers in digital-subscriber-line technology have teamed up to promote uniform specs to the American National Standards Institute for a next-generation spin.
Full-color EL display demonstratedIdemitsu Kosan Co. Ltd. has developed a full-color organic electroluminescent (EL) display by adding color-changing mediums to its blue EL display.
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