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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 18, 1997Avant! may need trust fund, as civil case faces delayAvant! Corp. will probably be able to delay its civil case with Cadence Design Systems but may have to post a bond or set up a trust fund, according to participants in a hearing held recently. Separately, the Santa Clara County district attorney's office issued a stern response against Avant!'s motion to disqualify the district attorney from the criminal case.
Interconnect workshop explores teleroboticsFor the past seven years, a small group of specialists in areas like VLSI design, communications and optoelectronics has gathered annually to explore high-speed interconnection technology. Sponsored by the IEEE, the workshop has become a forum for cross-fertilization of ideas between optical specialists and experts in more traditional areas of electronics design. With interconnect at the chip, board or network level a critical issue for system performance, the organizers hope the workshop will generate new technological opportunities.
Rivalry rattles DSP partnershipThey've been partners for the past 10 years, but signs are that two players in the digital-signal-processing arena are at odds, vying to outdo and possibly even acquire one another. Closely held Loughborough Sound Images and Nasdaq-listed Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. (Vancouver, B.C.) are the world's two largest suppliers of general-purpose boards designed around DSP chips. Each nurses ambitions to expand into the other's domestic market. The rivalry could result in a race between the companies to acquire smaller board makers, or in one company's taking over the other.
VDOnet dials into broadbandVDOnet Corp., a developer of a bandwidth-scalable video codecs for IP-based POTS networks, has unveiled the next-generation VDOPhone in a bid to expand its products into the intranet and broadband-network markets. Called VDOPhone 3.0, the product promises improved resolution and higher frame rates.
Two sign on Rambus as new spec nears completionRambus Inc. and Intel Corp. have nearly finished the specification for the next-generation Direct Rambus DRAM, though memory manufacturers say the there's still much work to be done from a process-engineering standpoint before the devices are ready for mass production. Chief among the problems is power consumption, sources said.
Thursday July 17, 1997Rambus tester ups speed anteWith a data rate of 1.3 Gbits/second, Hewlett-Packard's HP 83000 Rambus Series of ATE systems exceeds current Rambus requirements and provides adequate performance for testing future Direct RDRAM devices, according to the company. Most test systems available today can provide only a 250-Mbit/s data rate, HP notes.
Papers focus on engineering-management issuesIf there's anything more difficult than trying to keep track of technology as it progresses at an accelerating rate, it's trying to manage that progress. At the Portland International Conference on the Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), which will be held on July 27-31, nearly 550 papers will address the issues, presented by speakers representing more than 200 corporations, universities and government agencies worldwide.
NMOS technology sees non-volatile memory revivalA 20- year-old technology based on nitride rather than oxide structures is being revived for advanced non-volatile memory at 0.25 microns and below. Companies and research laboratories are eyeing the material as a better route to dense, non-volatile memory structures in the 1-Gbit arena--with the possibility of replacing DRAMS--as well as for embedded flash for system-on-a-chip applications.
Active-matrix LCD manufacturers behind on government contractsFledgling U.S. manufacturers of active-matrix LCDs are behind schedule in meeting some key government contracts and are operating in a climate largely devoid of confidence in their abilities. Some observers cite the setbacks as evidence that the U.S. government's policy of encouraging domestic suppliers of flat-panel displays has been a bust.
Startup targets HDL code managementSource code management tools are well established among software developers, but are not commonly used by hardware designers. ClioSoft Inc., a new startup company, hopes to change that by offering source-code management tools aimed at users of HDL tools.
Wednesday July 16, 1997Consortium offers chip sets for low-voltage systemsA consortium of three chip vendors has developed a compatible set of logic devices that the partners say will help designers build systems with voltages ranging from 3.6 V down to1.8 V. The 2.5-V 74VCX16xxx family, from Fairchild Semiconductor, Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector and Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc., comprises four 16-bit devices: a bus buffer, D-type latch, bus-buffer transceiver and D-type flip-flop. Each part has 3.6-V-tolerant inputs and outputs that can interface to 2.5-, mixed 2.5/3.3- or 1.8-V systems.
Toshiba puts DTMF in 8-bit ICAlgorithms for generation of dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) signals are fairly well-known and are within the range of a modest microcontroller. But the software approach to DTMF is often sufficiently time-consuming to crowd other useful functions out of the MCU. Thus, the DTMF generator--necessary in a range of telecom applications, from handsets to switches--becomes a second chip and a nuisance. Toshiba America Electronic Components is touting an aid to those troubles in the form of a TLCS-870 microcontroller with built-in DTMF hardware.
Summit chips fight low-voltage data corruptionStartup Summit Microelectronics has introduced microcontroller peripheral devices that meld analog and E2PROM on a single chip--a combination that the company says will provide protection against data corruption.
CompactPCI gains E1 controller boardUntil CompactPCI bus I/O cards become more readily available, developers have been tapping into an interim strategy: putting PMC (PCI Mezzanine Card) I/O boards on their CPUs. Ziatech Corp., however, the originator of CPCI, made a move at the recent Supercomm show to shorten the interim, rolling out an E1 communications control board for CompactPCI.
ACD samples 24-port switchAdvanced Communications Devices Corp. (ACD) is close to sampling a 24-port switch that can handle either 10- or 100-Mbit Ethernet on every port. The ACD82024 provides hooks for network management information bases (MIB) and advanced address resolution on-chip, but it keeps the actual MIB counting and address resolution outside the switch to keep costs low.
Tuesday July 15, 1997Microsoft opens dialogue with NT-security hackersAs Microsoft Corp., in a reversal of policy, sent representatives to a technical conference called the Black Hat Briefings here recently to open a dialogue with the hacking community, a new version of a password-cracking hack of Microsoft's NT operating system was making the rounds on the Internet. L0phtcrack version 1.5 bypasses a Microsoft fix for an earlier version of the program, which decrypts NT user passwords and delivers them in plain text.
Moto quells tempest in Japan over the VMEbus trademarkMotorola Inc. moved quickly last week to resolve the Japanese trademark flap over VMEbus that had surfaced the week before. Over the weekend, Jerry Gipper, of the Technical Products Division of Motorola Computer Group, issued an official Motorola statement asserting that Motorola has no intention of enforcing its trademark on VME in Japan and had sought trademark protection explicitly to protect the openness of the bus..
VertiCom shifts from satellite to terrestrial radioVertiCom Inc., which was founded three years ago to develop frequency synthesizers for satellite communications markets, is ready to move into terrestrial point-to-point and multipoint microwave radio. At the recent Microwave Symposium in Denver, the company showed off ultrasmall synthesis systems that move radio modulation from frequency shift keying to quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), a technique designed to appeal to emerging cellular-like systems, such as Local Multipoint Distribution Service and 38-GHz multipoint radio.
Skeptical reception to Altera's Jam pushAltera Corp. announced recently its open in-system programming (ISP) language, Jam, and found itself toasted almost immediately by a competitor. Altera, citing what it called a compelling need for a common ISP language to meet a growing demand for PLDs that can be reprogrammed in the field, said Jam will give designers and systems manufacturers more incentive to use ISP devices in volume.
SVR retreats from verification marketStung by recent heavy losses and declining sales, Silicon Valley Research (SVR) has discontinued sales of the Clover line of IC verification products licensed from Lucent Technologies. SVR said recently that it discontinued Clover to focus all its resources on its core IC placement-and-routing products.
Monday July 14, 1997Hole seen in Intel's bug-busting featureIntel Corp.'s "BIOS Update" technology to quickly fix bugs that crop up in its microprocessors without having to recall the chips may contain a Trojan horse--a hole that could potentially enable hackers to wreak havoc on the company's CPUs--in the view of a BIOS expert familiar with the technology.
Semiconductor giants see stumbling blocks to memory-on-logicThe question of embedded DRAM--the ability to put large blocks of DRAM on a die alongside significant amounts of high-performance logic--has divided the chip industry into two camps. DRAM vendors for the most part are pressing forward with merged processes and beginning to introduce process-driving standard-product chips. IC vendors who lack DRAM capability continue to question the validity of the concept.
Mitsubishi, Siemens race to next-generation processesRushing to stake out claims in what they're confident is an emerging market, DRAM vendors are announcing second-generation merged DRAM-with-logic processes and are rolling standard ICs based on the new technologies. But the companies are struggling to make the next step--from embedding DRAM in standard products to offering it in a cell-based ASIC methodology.
Designers give diet Java recipe mixed reviewsIn a recent release of specifications for PersonalJava, Sun Microsystems details a subset of its popular programming language that will be positioned as a key enabler for a new generation of Internet-aware consumer devices. But the specification also reveals some serious obstacles that makers of smart phones, mobile Web browsers and Internet TVs may face in trying to leverage the lean language.
French Minitel romances the WebMinitel, the teletext terminal that France Telecom has attached to 6 million phone lines here, strikes most foreigners as an old, text-based appliance with little relevance to a world wired to the graphical Internet. But the aging hardware has delivered profitable services to the French for over a decade, and now France Telecom is looking to expand those services and upgrade the Minitel platform to piggyback onto the Internet as it attempts to become France's largest Internet service provider (ISP).
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