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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, November 7, 1997Internet draws the fiscal attention of CongressIf this week was any indication, the Internet is increasingly dominating the science and technology debate in Congress. In a single day, a congressional committee sent Internet tax legislation to the Senate floor in the morning and examined the future of the Internet in an afternoon hearing.
Two pursue home networks via separate pathsSeparate efforts emerged this week to create home networks based on existing telephone wiring within the house. Microsoft Corp. put its significant weight behind the technology of Tut Systems Inc., based here, in an effort to push a 1.3-Mbit/second version of Ethernet rapidly into the consumer PC market next year.
Chip packager preps first foundryAmkor Technology Inc. is preparing to launch its first wafer-fabrication plant, in a move designed to add manufacturing to the roster of the chip-packaging powerhouse. With technology garnered from Texas Instruments Inc., Amkor plans to build three fabs on one site here. The first, due to handle process technologies of 0.35, 0.25 and 0.18 micron (Leff), is expected to be ready for prototype order entry this week, with qualification for production-volume runs expected next month.
Fibre Channel expands from loop to switch appsThough the Fibre Channel standard has not met the LAN-like application base many proponents were hoping for in the early 1990s, the flurry of activity at last month's Networld+Interop and this month's Comdex/Fall indicates that its served market is expanding from its roots in storage access.
Echelon opens Lon Works to legacy control netsLonWorks developer Echelon Corp. is launching products, tools and alliances that will allow integration of its proprietary control network systems with legacy control systems and data nets. The company says it is pursuing the developments in response to the market's call for open and interoperable control systems.
Thursday, November 6, 1997Cell computing advances simulationWhile scientific computer systems seem to have fallen on hard times in the past five years, scientists continue to push for the advanced computers they need for more-accurate physical modeling. Research efforts like the petaflops computer initiative also benefit from the government's interest in supercomputing.
AMI continues turnaround, opens Idaho fabNestled in the mountains of southeastern Idaho, normally quiet American Microsystems Inc. made some noise last week with the official christening of Fab 10, its latest expansion. Despite being one year late due to a dispute with the construction management firm, the new fab marks the end of a particularly gratifying period at AMI. After near death, the company has fought back to become a steadily profitable and growing business.
Lucent signs pacts involving ATM switches, telecom linksLucent Technologies Inc. last week signed pacts with Natural Microsystems Inc. (Framingham, Mass.) and General DataComm Inc. (Middlebury, Conn.) to broaden telephony-integration architectures. Lucent's microelectronics group will work with Natural Microsystems to link microprocessors to the H.100/H.110 telecommunications bus, defined by the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum.
Seeq and Essential agree to develop Gigabit MAC chipSeeq Technology Inc. is expanding its relationship with Essential Communications Inc. (Albuquerque, N.M.). The two had worked together on Gigabit Ethernet media-access control applications in Essential's Gigabit network interface card. Specifically, Seeq has gained rights to core aspects of Essential's Roadrunner ASIC for Hi-PPI/Gigabit Ethernet control logic and to the Essential power-factor-correction chip for PCI bus interfaces and will use the cores to produce a single-chip device for Gigabit Ethernet NIC cards.
Samsung spins Gbyte plattersSamsung's Storage System Division has launched a line of disk drives that store 2.1 Gbytes on a platter. The drives bear the family name for the company's present and future desktop offerings, SpinPoint.
Wednesday, November 5, 1997PCs improve their imagesWith Internet video, CD-ROM playback and videoconferencing becoming more common, users can forget that the display of video on a computer graphics screen requires specialized hardware and software. The horizontal-scan rates for consumer televisions defined by the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) are different than the scan rates required by computer monitors.
Funding shortage scales back research projectMicroelectronics Development for European Applications (Medea), the collaborative research program that began earlier this year, isn't drawing as much financial support from European national governments--especially Germany--as had been expected. As a result, the four-year program will draw only about half of its forecasted budget over its first two years, gaining about about $120 million of support in 1997 and about $185 million in 1998.
Cadence announces major contractIn an announcement that seems to confirm it is well on its way to becoming the EDA industry's first billion-dollar company, Cadence Design Systems Inc. this week disclosed it has begun work on a multi-year services contract that could pull in over $100 million for the company.
Mezzanine card vies to play standard roleThe hope of settling on a single mezzanine-card standard for add-on boards is gaining momentum, as SBS Technologies Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.) and Micro Electronik Nuremburg GmbH (Nuremburg, Germany) plan to bring a compact card to the standards process. The PCI-compatible card, dubbed PC-MIP, can be used with VME or with the rapidly emerging CompactPCI bus.
Live Internet broadcastBe Here Corp. has entered a technology development agreement with Eastman Kodak Co. to leverage 360ý panoramic still-image camera technology into a full-motion panoramic live-broadcast capability for the Internet.
QuickLogic updates process to speed up pASIC familyQuickLogic Corp.'s formula for continuing the growth of its field-programmable gate-array line into 1998 is to improve its process, but not change the architecture. Consequently, the pASIC 3 FPGA family has announced will use essentially the same logic cells and overpopulated interconnect structure as the pASIC 2 family. But it will be built in TSMC's four-metal, 0.35-micron process.
Tuesday, November 4, 1997Intel to frame digital camera in PC's imageIntel Corp. will bring a decidedly PC-centric bent to the digital-imaging market this week when it unwraps a digital-camera kit based on a 768 x 576-pixel CMOS imaging sensor. The OEM kit marks a rare step out of the PC space for Intel in a bid to bring a separate digital-product category in line with PC standards, which the company outlines in its "Portable PC Camera '98 Design" guidelines.
Giga grabs all the attention at upcoming ISSCC forumThe 1998 edition of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference here in February will document a number of performance milestones. Papers describing microprocessors,synclink DRAM, a receiver and a converter will all stake out new territories in their respective areas.
HP ships encryption software in Net-commerce pushTaking a big step toward boosting commerce over the Internet, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s VeriFone last week began shipping products based on the Secure Electronic Transaction standard. Several major banks have pledged support for the encryption scheme, developed by Visa and MasterCard.
Rockwell adds a C (for consumer) to DSL mixNewcomers to xDSL technologies may already be confused by the alphabet soup of digital-subscriber-line services, but Rockwell Semiconductor Systems last week threw another abbreviation into the kitty. At a meeting of the International Telecommunication Union's Study Group 15, hosted here by Globespan Technology Inc., Rockwell introduced some core concepts for what it calls Consumer DSL, or CDSL.
OrCAD to launch interactive net for designersOrCAD Inc., an EDA software vendor, is planning an ambitious extranet system that will make an interactive Web environment available for design engineers. The OrCAD Design Network (ODN) will have several features that further the concept of extranets--the private, secure Web environments accessible only to subscribers and that companies use to connect customers, partners and suppliers to their proprietary in-house intranets.
Monday, November 3, 1997Hitachi, VLSI launch attack on the homeWith Microsoft's Windows CE operating system as its centerpiece, a two-pronged technology assault aimed at enabling a new category of high-end embedded applications in the consumer-electronics marketplace will be unleashed next week.
Digital's deal may tie up StrongARMWhat ostensibly began as a patent dispute between CPU developers at Digital Equipment Corp. and Intel Corp. has become a watershed agreement, reshaping Digital. But it has also become a tale of two very different CPUs, with perhaps two very different fates.
Design-productivity gap looms at IP ForumLSI Logic Corp. chairman Wilfred Corrigan, in a keynote speech at the IP Forum here last week, said his company's management has "consistently underestimated" the difficulty of system-on-a-chip design and has had to limit LSI's core-based design efforts to parts whose high volumes justify the costs of the methodology.
Market jitters belie electronics outlookEquity markets on Wall Street and around the world tested the mettle of the electronics industry last week, taking technology stocks on a roller-coaster ride. In the end, analysts said, the ups and downs revealed an industry that faces some stiff challenges but that seems set for solid expansion.
Engineers' organization rebuts shortage claimsThe American Engineering Association has slammed predictions of a shortage of 190,000 information technology workers as "lacking in accuracy," biased and based on "overextended extensions of questionable data."
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