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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 26, 1997Will new ruling put Avant! users on the run?Avant! Corp.'s placement-and-routing products were once again threatened this week, after the U.S. Court of Appeals (San Francisco) ordered a lower court to halt sales of Avant!'s obsolete ArcCell products and reconsider enjoining the current Aquarius products. But the Cadence-Avant! battle is spilling over into the user community, where, like it or not, designers might be forced to take sides for their own good: Cadence plans to make life difficult not just for Avant!, but for Avant!-software users, as well.
Citing weak IC sales, Mitsubishi forecasts lossMitsubishi Electric Corp. is confronting red ink on its bottom line for the first time. Citing weak sales of semiconductors and price competition in the North American market for audio/visual products, the venerable Japanese giant has forecast an after-tax loss of about $80 million for its 1998 fiscal year, which ends March 31. For the half-year ending Sept. 30, the company expects to lose about $208 million.
AT&T, Microsoft take stakes in e-postage startupSeeking to capitalize on the U.S. Postal Service's pending shift to digital postage metering and embrace of electronic commerce, AT&T and Microsoft Corp. last week bought separate, 10 percent stakes in E-Stamp Corp. That startup is readying a production version of a Windows-based postage system that has been under development for three years. The investments underscore the American postal system's move into the electronics era.
Dutch vendor re-releases graphical entry tool in U.S.North American users of graphical entry and HDL editing tools will gain another option when Translogic BV (Ede, Netherlands) opens a U.S. subsidiary. But the subsidiary, Translogic USA Corp., faces a tough challenge competing with home-grown EDA vendors.
Minorities urged to pursue grad degreesBy having them work on the type of original research projects that would be expected of them in graduate school, a program at the Georgia Institute of Technology tries to encourage more minority undergraduate students to pursue higher degrees in engineering.
Thursday, September 25, 1997Embedded tools ready to rollAs vendors showcase the latest advances in development tools at this week's Embedded Systems Conference, a quiet revolution is brewing, one that may propel a small and relatively immature tool market into a period of explosive growth. One catalyst for this change is the increasing use of 32-bit and 64-bit embedded processors.
Kilby's slice of germanium sparked the IC revolutionTexas Instruments released this photo of the first integrated circuit ever built, a phase-shift oscillator invented by Jack Kilby in 1958. The invention is being commemorated with a new research center the company opened recently in Dallas to further its push into advanced digital signal processors.
Struggling Exponential pins its woes on AppleNearly defunct Exponential Technology Inc. is pinning its troubles on former sponsor Apple Computer Inc. But one analyst believes Exponential's bipolar-based PowerPC replacement chip may not have been sufficiently dazzling to sustain the company.
Smart-card development focuses on securityAs government agencies look at smart cards to simplify citizens' interaction with state and federal agencies while trimming government costs, their focus is turning heavily to security. A key facet of their efforts is the topic of certificates, digital signatures that assure identification when transactions are made remotely over the Internet or other communication pathways.
Micro heat engine cools hot processorsEngineers at Sun Power Inc. are engaged in an ambitious micromachine research effort that aims to shrink cooling technology to the chip level. If the project achieves its goal, a standard CMOS IC process could be used to fabricate a Stirling cycle heat engine on a microprocessor, promising a novel cooling method for electronics.
Silicon light valve seen as new waveSingle-crystal-silicon technology could propel rear-projection monitors, large-screen front projectors and virtual display systems into major markets, an IBM executive told a recent conference here on flat-panel displays.
Wednesday, September 24, 1997MPEG-4 to split into basic, advanced versionsMPEG-4--the multimedia specification being built atop MPEG-2 to allow the transmission of multiple video, audio and graphics data streams for composition at the receiver--is to be split in two. Advanced functions that cannot be settled and tested adequately within the existing timetable will go into a second spin of MPEG-4, a committee hammering out the spec decided at a meeting recently in Stockholm.
Smart cards fuel Visa chargeVisa International is banking heavily on smart cards. While the financial giant believes U.S. consumers will be slow to adopt them as a cash alternative, it thinks two high-profile technologies--Java and the Internet--will help to propel the cards by the middle of the next decade.
ARM cores get debug supportSoftware-development options are increasing for embedded ASIC cores. That's the upshot of VLSI Technology's newly announced "multicore" development system for chips containing Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) and DSP cores. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard and Embedded Performance Inc. are breaking new ground in emulation capabilities for ARM cores.
Synopsys extends Cossap to system-level designTo further strengthen its position in digital communication-systems design, Synopsys Inc. has launched three major moves to bolster the capability of its Cossap DSP tool. These developments center on system-level design-implementation technologies.
ADI spins a DSP modem for telco central officesAnalog Devices Inc. has launched a special version of the 21xx DSP that can be packaged in single-die or multichip-module versions for analog and digital line concentration in a telco central office. The ADSP-21mod870 is a unique digital modem that also can find a home in customer-premises equipment like remote-access servers and DSL-access multiplexers.
Tuesday, September 23, 1997Sun to Microsoft: "We won't surrender Java"Responding to requests that it give up its trademark rights to the Java programming language, Sun Microsystems today told Intel and Microsoft to take a hike.
IBM steps below quarter-micron technologyMoving "one step beyond our quarter-micron CMOS 6X process," in the words of IBM Fellow Bijan Davari, IBM Microelectronics has silicon in hand from its latest production process, CMOS 7S. Nominally a 0.22-micron (half the uncontacted pitch) process, 7S is the first example of the process generation beyond 0.25 microns.
DOD, Year 2000 drive U.S. computer spendingThe military's drive for "information superiority" and the looming "Year 2000" problem will keep federal spending on information technology nearly level through 2002, at about $26 billion annually, an industry group estimates.
Chromatic narrows focus to stress graphics, DVDWith the introduction of its second-generation coprocessor, the Mpact 2, Chromatic Research Inc. continues to retreat from initial efforts to offer an all-in-one multimedia accelerator, focusing instead on providing 2-D and 3-D graphics along with DVD video.
Chip vendors prep Ethernet lines for NetWorld+InteropLarge and small semiconductor makers alike are lining up enhancements to their Fast Ethernet switching and Gigabit Ethernet silicon, hoping to come to next month's NetWorld+Interop show with a workable long-term strategy for complex switched networks at 100 Mbits/second and 1 Gbit/s.
In embedded design, the more things change. . .Despite a flood of new processors, new tools and new methodologies sweeping the embedded-systems landscape, actual design practices remain amazingly static, an EE Times survey finds.
September 20 - 22, 1997First Java-specific chip takes wingFollowing months of speculation over the whereabouts of three long-awaited Java-specific CPUs from Sun Microsystems Inc., the first microprocessor to directly execute the Java instruction set will be unveiled on Tuesday by an unlikely source: avionics manufacturer Rockwell Collins Inc.
TI betting $100 million on DSPIn a bold move to spread the DSP gospel and to make its own architectures the de facto standard, Texas Instruments Inc. last week announced it is making available a whopping $100 million to entrepreneurs, start-ups and others with ideas that will broaden the base of digital-signal-processing technology.
Setbacks slow digital-subscriber line rollout pushThe rush to bring home the bandwidth hit two setbacks last week. A draft standard for so-called "56K" pulse-code modulated modems got pushed back to the second quarter of next year by a working group of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Separately, Motorola Inc. disclosed that its long-awaited CopperGold transceiver for asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) may not be available for sampling until next year.
X86 vendors parry Intel with Socket-7 strategiesIf Intel Corp. has its way, most, if not all, of next year's PCs will employ the company's proprietary Slot-1 as the one and only interface to a microprocessor. But PC makers say they are eager for alternatives that might extend the life of current systems that use the older, slower Socket-7 connection. And it looks for now like they will get at least two. Both AMD and Cyrix plan enhancements to Socket-7-type CPU interfaces for their next generation of desktop X86 microprocessors.
Broadcasters give low-res answers to HDTV questionsBroadcasters sought to downplay worries about their wavering commitment to HDTV during a Senate hearing last week. But they supplied few details about when they will begin offering the service and how broadly.
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