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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, September 12, 1997Three additions round out VSI's steering groupThe Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) alliance has elected Altera, Nokia Group and Nortel Semiconductors to its Steering Working Group (SWG), broadening its technical and geographic scope. Altera, a top player in the programmable-logic market, complements the ASIC vendors represented at VSI's top table. Nokia, based in Finland, is a significant telecommunications supplier and becomes the third European company to join VSI's SWG. Nortel is based in Canada.
Jedec approves double-data-rate SDRAM specsThe Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council (Jedec), in its first overseas meeting here last week, approved specifications for double-data-rate (DDR) synchronous DRAMs. The only DDR issues still needing to be more fully addressed deal primarily with the duty cycle, the clock high time divided by the clock period.
Board companies on a DSP tearThe DSP World Expo kicks off here this week with major board- and systems-level announcements targeting applications that range from high-end sonar and radar to wireless basestations.
Forecast urges a fast track for DTV conversionIf U.S. broadcasters make a fast conversion to digital TV, 38 million viewers could be tuning in by 2006--16 million of them on dedicated HDTV sets--according to a new consumer-electronics study.
Gore eyes packaging beyond the high endW. L. Gore & Associates Inc. is pushing to update the bucolic setting of Eau Claire, Wis., to something more in line with the digital age. The company's Electronic Packaging and Materials Group is ramping production of high-performance board and interconnection materials that will play a role both in altering the city's profile and in the market, where packaging densities are leaping to new levels, the company said.
Thursday, September 11, 1997Vision chip's circuitry modeled on eye and brainMimicking the human eye's neural networks and the brain, an electronic "eye" on a chip can now handle tasks that range from reading sign language to avoiding collisions. The product of 10 years of research, the Generic Visual Perception Processor (GVPP) was developed here by the Bureau Etudes Vision (BEV) Stockplus. The company claims the electronic eye can benefit traditional pattern-recognition applications, such as military target acquisition and fire control, as well as automobile-collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control and automatic "asleep-at-the-wheel" alarms.
IEDM sees novel materials, devicesAs a comprehensive review of recent research, the IEEE's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) offers an ideal venue for spotting trends in the development of semiconductors. This year's meeting, to be held here Dec. 7 to 10, will reveal an increasing attempt to merge formerly distinct materials and processes into integrated systems. While the problems posed by fabricating ever-denser ICs remains a strong theme, the mastery of materials and processes resulting from that effort has set the stage for a host of new device types and exotic system concepts.
Summit buys Simulation TechnologiesSolidifying its position in register-transfer-level (RTL) code coverage and analysis, Summit Design Inc. has announced it will purchase Simulation Technologies Corp. for an estimated $29 million in stock and cash. The acquisition also places Summit in the emerging hardware/software coverification market. The purchase expands the depth and breadth of Summit's tool offerings, as well as adding more than 40 employees to its roster.
Yet another DVD format comes into playDVD technology continued to fragment last week, when a company called Digital Video Express LP came out with a new format that can't be read on conventional DVD players. The format, called Divx, provides more copyright protection than does DVD, so a number of major movie studios have pledged to support it.
Startup charts novel course to Gbit Ethernet LANAmong the host of Gigabit Ethernet startups hoping for a slice of LAN backbone business, Packet Engines Inc. is emerging as an OEM apparently serious about remaining independent for the long haul. In the past six months, the company has been attracting design engineers and marketers to its eastern Washington headquarters from companies as diverse as PMC-Sierra Inc. and Fore Systems Inc. Its head count already stands at 120.
Tokyo court again rejects TI "Kilby patent" claimThe Tokyo High Court today rejected Texas Instruments' claim that Fujitsu Ltd. violated the "Kilby Patent," a fundamental semiconductor invention. TI said it would appeal the decision to the Japanese Supreme Court.
Wednesday, September 10, 1997Avant!-TMA purchase ties TCAD to EDAThe small but strategically vital technology-CAD (TCAD) market merged into EDA this week, as Avant! Corp. announced its intent to acquire Technology Modeling Associates (Sunnyvale, Calif.), ranked as the TCAD market leader. By adding process and device-simulation tools to Avant!'s EDA arsenal, the acquisition paves the way for a unified solution that links deep-submicron IC design with semiconductor-process development.
AMD eyes 0.25-micron for K6Since introducing its K6 processor last April, Advanced Micro Devices has managed to negotiate a minefield of technical and business issues. Now, the company is gearing up for the next crucial step in the evolution of the K6--the transition to 0.25-micron process technology.
ATM chip offers MPEG transfersNEC Corp. has begun sampling an ATM segmentation and reassembly (SAR) controller that supports MPEG packet transfers. The device is part of a wider effort by NEC to bring asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks to small offices and homes via existing digital subscriber lines (ATM over xDSL), moving the technology beyond the central backbone and WAN markets.
Micropolis drive has a 20-Gbyte capacityMicropolis Ltd. has unveiled a 3.5-inch disk drive that more than doubles the capacity of drives shipping today, pushing capacity up to 20 Gbytes. The 20-Gbyte version of the Tomahawk line is designed in large part for audio and video applications, which need both high capacity and high performance.
MathWorks rolls out DSP-development toolsTo further close the gap between algorithm development and implementation on real-time DSP hardware, The MathWorks Inc. here has unveiled an enhanced version of its block diagram simulator called the Blockset 2.0. The company has also bundled the software with other existing signal-processing and algorithm-development tool sets to create a single design and development environment called the DSP Workshop.
Embedded C++ compiler said to ease code workUnder pressure from major embedded consumer-product firms and from users who are turning away from the overly complex standard C++ language, a new and simplified subset version of the language is now available from Green Hills Software Inc. for embedded applications. The embedded compiler will be unveiled at the Embedded Systems Conference/West in San Jose, Calif., beginning Sept 28.
Tuesday, September 9, 1997Researchers pursue the petaflops computerA wide-ranging advanced research initiative has set a 10-year design window for achieving a petaflops supercomputer--a system 1,000 times faster than today's leading-edge, teraflops supercomputing technology. Even if the so-called Hybrid Technology Multi-Threaded (HTMT) architecture fails to beat more conventional parallel-processor designs, it is likely to present an interesting picture of tomorrow's supercomputer as well as establish a record for uniting the largest number of advanced technologies in a single system.
Philips 'open TV' bid opens door to debateUsing Europe's biggest consumer-electronics show as its stage, Philips Electronics N.V. last week set forth an entirely new way to design television receivers. The Dutch electronics power described five "open" hardware platforms, ranging in capability from low-end analog reception to high-end digital entertainment, that would permit a mix-and-match approach to software development for both analog and digital receivers.
Receivers slow to tune in DAB chipsThe Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) consumer exhibition in Berlin last week was supposed to have been the launchpad for the European-developed Digital Audio Broadcasting standard. But though a number of DAB chip sets and prototype receivers emerged at the show, receiver makers now say system shipments won't get off the ground until next year.
Laser display puts its colors on view at Berlin showA projection display based on the mixing of red, green and blue laser beams was demonstrated for the first time last week. Though the projection equipment is large and is still at a prototype stage, its use of a scanning laser beam is considered promising for systems that one day could enable very large-scale projections--up to 30 meters diagonally--for outdoor events and that could yield cool-running displays for home-theater applications.
Mentor swings DSP tools to Belgian start-upIn the wake of the news that Precedence and Exemplar Logic are positioned to be spun off from parent company Mentor Graphics Corp., late last week Mentor announced that it is handing its entire DSP development-tools suite to an independent company it has formed, called Frontier Design Ltd. (Leuven, Belgium).
U.S. telecom exports jump 19 percentU.S. exports of telecommunications gear jumped 19 percent during the first six months of 1997, to $9.58 billion, according to an industry group here.
Monday, September 8, 1997Intel extends reach of MMX technologyIn a pair of stealth multimedia maneuvers, Intel Corp. is enhancing its MMX technology. The company is readying a host of new MMX instructions that will appear in CPUs next year and has already included a set of little-known performance-boosting registers in the Pentium II, EE Times has learned. Separately, Intel has disclosed what's apparently the first MMX-related bug. Though the glitch is not believed to be significant, it could pose new challenges as developers continue to grapple with the complexities of MMX design.
EDA group aims to keep a lid on bugs in softwareSoftware users are striking back at the EDA industry's difficulty in dealing with quality problems by forming the EDA Industry Council's Quality Subgroup. While quality issues have nagged EDA users for years, the subgroup has now come up with a proposed method of classifying and dealing with bugs.
Motorola Semi stacks IP blocks to recast imageMotorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS) will come to the biennial Horizons press and analyst briefing this week as a revamped operation with a profoundly altered strategy. The sprawling supplier of isolated product lines--each with its own process and its own marketing strategy--is recasting itself as a provider of a unified, compatible portfolio of intellectual property, deliverable in highly integrated ICs.
Small firms seek big gains in speedy encryptionTwo small companies are poised to demonstrate that huge gains can be made in the fledgling arena of electronic commerce. This week's Internet Commerce Expo will find nCipher Inc. and Rainbow Technologies Inc. showcasing cryptographic accelerator cards that are claimed to speed Web-server transactions as much as 100 times.
Lucent reveals details of next-generation DSPLucent Technologies has disclosed the details of its oft-discussed Sabre architecture and its first digital signal processor using it. As the communications industry gears for an explosion in digital wireless and wireline services, Lucent faces competition from Analog Devices Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc.
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