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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 11, 1997MPEG LA begins one-stop shop MPEG-2 video licensingA Denver company recently kicked off a one-stop shopping service for patents that cover nearly 80 percent of MPEG-2 Main Profile video technologies. Patents being offered by MPEG LA (Licensing Administrator) include Advanced Television Systems Committee formats and coming HDTV systems in Europe and Japan. But audio and other MPEG-2 profiles are uncovered.
3Com, Siemens dial up alliance for LAN telephony3Com Corp. this week expanded its alliance with Siemens AG (Munich, Germany) to cover emerging technologies that will carry data and voice over a unified Internet Protocol (IP) switching fabric. Siemens has agreed to carry integrated IP traffic over three 3Com-developed architectures--CoreBuilder, SuperStack, and OfficeConnect.
GEC Plessey Semiconductors put on the blockGEC Plessey Semiconductors, the United Kingdom's last major indigenous company skilled in the art of making integrated circuits, is for sale. GPS (Swindon, England) was formed in 1990 as a merger of the semiconductor capabilities of Ferranti, Marconi and Plessey under the control of the U.K.'s General Electric Company (GEC). GEC's other subsidiary, test and measurement equipment maker Marconi Instruments (Stevenage, England), will also go on sale.
Thursday July 10, 1997Simulation, pcb benchmarks hit the comeback trailTwo EDA-industry benchmarks are returning after absences of a year or more. DA Solutions said it will hold a logic-simulation benchmark this fall, while organizers of the PCB Design Conference will hold a benchmark at next year's show for the first time in two years.
Startup ices CPU to max Mips in S/390 replacementCommercial Data Servers Inc. (CDS) has found the ultimate way to shrink an S/390-compatible mainframe computer: put it on ice. The company, which is already shipping tiny replacements for the aging low end of IBM Corp.'s S/390 line, plans to use 90 Kelvin cryogenic technology to wrench 260 S/390 Mips out of a single-chip CMOS microprocessor. The system will live happily in an office environment, emulate the S/390's elaborate I/O structures and sell for a fraction of the price of a similarly fast IBM mainframe.
'Everest' stakes claim for peak 3-D performanceStaking a claim to the leadership position in computer graphics, Hewlett-Packard Co. launched recently what it called the world's most powerful 3-D rendering engine. The new Visualize PxFl system, code named Everest, is the capstone of a long, multifaceted gambit to take the mantle of graphics leadership away from rival Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI; Mountain View, Calif.). But analysts say the real winners in this technology fight have yet to be determined, and that the spoils will be difficult to measure.
Gear grabs a rebound in '97With demand apparently on the rise and their stock prices likewise climbing, capital-equipment companies are expected to arrive at Semicon West, being held here and in San Jose, Calif., with high hopes for a strong year ahead. All signs indicate that capital equipment is pulling out of its latest down cycle, and there's evidence that the exaggerated swings of the past are over. Preliminary figures from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (Mountain View, Calif.) show the book-to-bill ratio for the industry was 1.09 in May, and has been above 1.00 for all of 1997.
Revamped Ross pins its hopes on workstationsWorkstations might be an unlikely place to start a new life, but Ross Technology Inc. is banking on a rebirth in that market, after a near-fatal year of losses. In an interview, Ross's director of marketing, John Rasco, discussed the company's recent troubles--including a tectonic shift in executives--and its hopes that a marketing push targeting specific markets can turn the company's fortunes around.
Wednesday July 9, 1997Filter design enables single chip transceiverThe meteoric rise of wireless products has made development of single-chip silicon transceivers a research priority. A team at the University of California here claims to have moved nearer to that goal by solving a critical problem in integrating receiver and transmitter circuit blocks: achievement of a good low-noise filter.
Iron doped junction opens path to silicon LEDA team at the University of Surrey, based here, has created a light-emitting diode (LED) structure that buries "islands" of iron disilicide (FeSi2) in a conventional silicon diode junction. The LED has a peak response at a wavelength of 1.54-micron, and has been operating for several hundred hours without any deterioration in output, according to Karen Reeson, the team leader.
Cellular radios gain multicomm abilitiesHarris Semiconductor has introduced a software-driven programmable digital downconverter/demodulator that allows a cellular radio to handle multiple communications standards such as AMPS, GSM, PCS-1900, IS-54, IS-136 and IS-95. Eliminating the need for dedicated hardware, the HSP50214 packs multiple demodulation schemes to permit a single digital radio to support a variety of air-interface standards.
Si optical connector a stepping-stone to opto integrationHoping to bring down the cost of optical systems, a research group here has devised a simplified way to hook optical fibers to other components like photodetectors, light emitting diodes and lasers. Cambridge Consultants Ltd. (CCL) has developed a method of aligning and connecting fibers via structures that are defined on chips when they are manufactured, thereby eliminating costly custom alignment.
Siemens claims efficiency milestone for large solar arraysSiemens Solar Industries, working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has produced what the company claims is a record efficiency for large-area solar arrays. Each module in the array has an area of 3,665 cm2 with an efficiency of 11.1 percent, producing a total output of 1 kW. According to records, that represents a new milestone for solar-power technology.
Tuesday July 8, 1997Advantest creates R&D armCiting a need to become more nimble in its work with customers, Advantest Corp., one of the world's largest suppliers of automatic test equipment, will reorganize into two subsidiaries of a newly formed holding company, called Advantest America Corp. The two subsidiaries--each is already an existing entity--will be called Advantest America Inc. (AAI) and Advantest America R&D Center Inc. (ARD).
Spin-off launches satellite bus chipA small semiconductor spin-off of Lockheed Martin Co. will help NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center promote a common single-chip bus controller design for space applications. FirstPass Inc. collaborated with UTMC Microelectronics Systems Inc. (Colorado Springs, Colo.) on design of the Essential Services Node (ESN) chip. It will collaborate with Honeywell Inc.'s solid-state electronics center on a hybrid version of ESN on a multichip module, integrating memory and analog I/O with the core controller.
VESA pushes digital-display scheme to the foreIn an attempt to ease the transition from CRT monitors to flat-panel displays, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has recently announced that it has completed a digital-interface standard for graphics cards and is several months away from finalizing a companion specification for panels. The new Plug and Display standard is designed to make it easier for OEMs to move from analog CRTs to digital LCDs as screen resolutions climb to XGA and beyond.
Hitachi develops single-chip video format converterHitachi Ltd. has developed a one-chip video format converter which converts various types of input video formats to a required output format, thus enabling a low-cost, versatile display.
Monday July 7, 1997Intel patent provides a peek inside MercedMore details about Intel Corp.'s forthcoming 64-bit processor have come to light now that the company has obtained a U.S. patent for a processor with a RISC-like architecture--presumably Merced--that can accept multiple operating systems and application programs with mixed instruction sets.
Alcatel/Cisco deal gives IP-vs.-ATM debate a new lookThe recent development and marketing deal between Alcatel Alsthom and Cisco Systems Inc. sheds light on the continuous Internet Protocol (IP) vs. asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) debate. At the recent ATM Year '97 conference in San Jose, Calif., Cisco's chief technology officer Ed Kozel said that data traffic in the WAN will so overwhelm voice traffic, it makes sense to make most public networks IP-centric.
Cypress redesigns cell in push for embedded SRAMCypress Semiconductor Corp. has developed a six-transistor cell SRAM process that it hopes will bring it to the forefront of application-specific design while giving it an edge in standard SRAMs as well as programmable logic devices.
Analog synthesis sprouts in new research vesselPushing hard on the boundaries of analog-design tools, researchers at the University of Cincinnati will announce this month a fully integrated, top-to-bottom synthesis environment for analog circuits. They will demonstrate a hierarchical environment--Vase, for VHDL-AMS Synthesis Environment--that is one of the first to use the emerging extensions to VHDL for analog and mixed analog/digital circuits developed by the IEEE 1076.1 committee.
Europe puts Emphasis on delivering MPEG-4The emerging MPEG-4 standard is building up steam in Europe, as chip makers, service providers and a European Union project called Emphasis experiment with the algorithm-agnostic specification for next-generation multimedia processors, applications and object-oriented programming languages.
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