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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, October 17, 1997Nov. 2 bug spooks Apollo usersMentor Graphics users who are still running Hewlett-Packard Apollo Domain workstations will get a nasty post-Halloween "trick" at precisely 14:59 Greenwich Mean Time Nov. 2, when the real-time clock will increment in a way that may cause a catastrophic system crash. And Mentor and HP are providing conflicting advice on what to do about the problem.
Rival X86 vendors plan future versions of MMXRivals to Intel Corp.'s X86 hegemony are attempting to boost the graphics performance of future Socket 7 processors by putting their own spin on the MMX instruction set, though observers said software developers may resist the vendors' moves. Meanwhile, Intel is quietly preparing its next version of MMX.
TI takes a DSP tack with ThunderSwitchLeading with its corporate strong suit, Texas Instruments Inc.'s networking business unit will use the TMS320 DSP architecture to handle all Internet Protocol packet-routing functions above Layer 3, the company revealed at the recent Networld+Interop show.
Cyber-agent standard gets nodIn an attempt to set standards for intelligent network agents, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) ratified the results of its first full year of work on the FIPA-97 standard at a meeting held here this month, hosted by Siemens corporate research FIPA, with members from the United States, Europe, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, set out a year ago to bridge the worlds of science fiction and software engineering by creating standards for interoperable agent-based applications.
Auto FPDs stuck in low gearDon't expect to see a flashy new flat-panel display in the dashboard of your next family car unless you live in Japan. That was the word out of the recent Flat-Panel Display Strategic Forum and Technical Symposium, sponsored here by the Detroit Chapter of the Society for Information Display and the Center for Display Technology and Manufacturing of the University of Michigan.
Thursday, October 16, 1997Synopsys-Viewlogic merger creates EDA giantThe biggest merger in EDA history was announced Wednesday, as Synopsys Inc. agreed to acquire Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) in a stock swap valued at around $540 million. The move gives Synopsys several key point tools for ASIC design, and solidifies its position as the clear number two revenue leader in EDA.
Confab sees rise in photovoltaic usageThe quantity and quality of the R&D presentations made at this year's Photovoltaics (PV) Specialist Conference, held here earlier this month, support predictions by some analysts that PV technology could change the energy infrastructure of the world. To do that, however, it's going to need more funding support for manufacturing-related research and development.
MMX speeds PC neural modelingWhile the multimedia extension (MMX) to Intel's latest microprocessors was designed for graphic and video application areas, the new capability may also have an impact on scientific computing. One example is a performance enhancement that California Scientific Software recently added to its neural network development suite called BrainMaker. The new "Professional MMX" version runs six times faster than its predecessor by using the MMX co-processor.
IEEE-USA, Commerce meet on IT shortagesIEEE-United States Activities and officials at the Commerce Department met on Oct. 10 to discuss reported shortages of information-technology (IT) personnel. George McClure, candidate for IEEE-USA's presidency, and past Career Policy Council chair, called the meeting "very fruitful."
TI tips floating-point plansIn a move that will provide its floating-point DSP customer base with a performance upgrade path, Texas Instruments Inc. is readying a new generation of 32-bit cores that will start at 1 Gflops and go to 3 Gflops by the year 2000. However, the family based on the 320C67X will not be available to the market before the end of next year.
SimMatrix gets C interfaceA new system-level verification capability has become available, as Precedence Inc. has added a C-language interface to expand its SimMatrix simulation backplane technology. Called Precedence C Model Client (PCMC), the interface allows C-language models to control HDL simulations.
Wednesday, October 15, 1997OrCAD, MicroSim merge into Windows powerhouseIn a move that might position OrCAD as the overwhelming market-share leader in shrink-wrap EDA tools, the company has disclosed it plans to acquire MicroSim Corp. (Irvine, Calif.), in a deal valued at $22 million.
Intel details IA64's EPIC operationIntel Corp. introduced the IA64 instruction set architecture at the Microprocessor Forum here today. IA64, according to the company, will rely on compilers to explicitly indicate the available parallelism in code. Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) was the marketing term Intel coined for the concept.
M-core debut touts low power, memory efficiencyMotorola Inc. will pull the wraps off its M-core compact RISC architecture this week, claiming it has the lowest power consumption and best memory usage in the industry. The core, which runs at 50 Mips while drawing just 1.8 V, is targeted at mobile products and transportation markets.
TI Unwraps 32-bit Floating-Point Derivative Of VelociTI ArchitectureEroding market share and fierce competition in the floating-point signal-processing market has forced Texas Instruments Inc. to accelerate development of the floating-point version of its latest VLIW (very long instruction word) DSP architecture. Responding to pressure from Analog Devices Inc.'s Sharc family, TI will detail the much-talked-about 32-bit C67X floating-point core this week at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif.
Symbionics fields RF design for multiband handsetsSymbionics Ltd., a design company that specializes in RF and mobile communications, has created a multi-band cellular-RF design suitable for dual- and triple-band handsets that need to operate at combinations of 900 MHz, 1.8 GHz and 1.9 GHz for global use.
DVD Forum faction fights back with drives, ICsFaced with a revolt within the ranks of the DVD Forum in favor of the Sony Corp.-led movement against a unified DVD standard, the leading members of the group, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Osaka) and Toshiba Corp., are fighting back with low-power chip sets, portable drives and a hardball approach.
Hitachi, Fujitsu prepare 0.25-micron familiesHitachi Ltd. and Fujitsu Ltd. have tossed their hats into the 0.25-micron ASIC ring. Hitachi will start taking orders in December for cell-based ICs with up to 10 million gates; Fujitsu has set a January date for the debut of its 0.25-micron standard cell and embedded array products.
Tuesday, October 14, 1997Startup's DSP cores take VLIW route to programmabilityStartup Billions of Operations Per Second Inc. (BOPS) will give the first public view of its scalable signal-processing architecture at the Microprocessor Forum this week in San Jose, Calif. The company aims to license a family of DSP cores that will give system makers a fully programmable alternative for such normally hardwired functions as MPEG-2 encoding, MPEG-4 decoding and 3-D image processing, at an affordable die size. Its unique, semi-VLIW architecture may have the horsepower to do so, but programming the complex chips could be a barrier.
Cisco shows Gbit Ethernet switch; taps Granite techAnxious to dispel rumors that it has gotten little from its acquisition of Granite Systems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. showed off a working Gigabit Ethernet switch and MAC silicon at last week's Networld+Interop. Cisco said its Gigabit Ethernet offerings will include network interface cards, a switching processor for its Catalyst 5000 workgroup switch, and an add-in module for its 7500 router.
First fruits of Intelligent I/O effort shown at N+IThe Intelligent I/O initiative got a boost from Intel Corp.'s OEM development partners at last week's NetWorld+Interop (N+I) when the companies displayed the first practical results of the move to a common I/O scheme based on simple message-passing protocols and a tiered PCI bus. I2O-compliant server products that combine Pentium and Pentium Pro hosts with i960 architectures for local I/O coprocessing are shipping this fall.
Virtual-component 'yellow pages' hits the WebDesign and Reuse (D&R) intends to open a virtual-component service on the Web at www.design-reuse.com. The site's opening next Monday is timed to coincide with Intellectual Property '97, a conference to be held near London. The service, which D&R describes as a yellow pages of virtual components, is written in Java and should be accessible from any browser.
Atmel aims FPGA architecture at data-path appsCiting the increasing use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for computational data paths, Atmel Corp. today will announce a family of high-capacity FPGAs. The AT40K architecture borrows incremental reprogrammability from Atmel's AT6000 family but uses a new architecture. The underlying logic cell in the devices is relatively conventional--a D-type flip-flop and a pair of three-input look-up tables (LUTs).
Monday, October 13, 1997Intel varies VLIW for IA-64Forging a new direction for VLIW technology, Intel Corp. tomorrow will lift the lid off its IA-64 instruction-set architecture in a presentation at the Microprocessor Forum, here. But some experts believe Intel will also open up a Pandora's box of technical challenges as it works to implement the instruction set in its upcoming 64-bit Merced microprocessor. Toughest will be extracting maximum performance from IA-64 while ensuring that Merced stays compatible with existing X86 software.
Japanese TV industry leaps into datacastingJapan's consumer-electronics giants broadcast a new vision of where television is headed at last week's Japan Electronics Show. Blending new displays, resolution-enhancing algorithms and data-broadcasting technologies, vendors here showed how the TV can be an Internet-friendly entertainment system.
Nets: DOD's first line of defenseThe Pentagon isn't ready to trade in its tanks, planes and ships for laptops, but defense analysts say U.S. military strategy is shifting toward what planners call network-centric warfare. Proponents of the planned Defense Information Systems Network (Disn) say the global military network, which would support voice, video, data and imagery, could give the U.S. armed forces an unprecedented "plug and shoot" capability based on what the Pentagon calls "information superiority."
Cadence threat rankles Avant! users in Japant's not yet clear whether Cadence Design Systems Inc.'s statements about taking legal action against Avant! Corp. users will have a deterrent effect or result in a backlash against Cadence. But there are indications that some Japanese and U.S. companies may be reconsidering Avant! purchases in the wake of an aggressive speech here by Joseph Costello, president and chief executive officer of Cadence (San Jose, Calif.).
Siemens aims at direct conversionSiemens Microelectronics has just taped out test silicon on a receiver front end for satellite-television applications that can significantly reduce the component count for satellite-TV receivers. The design uses direct analog extraction of the digitally encoded in-phase and quadrature (I and Q) signals from the RF signal. This will eliminate multiple intermediate-frequency (IF) stages and their associated surface-acoustic-wave (SAW) filters.
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