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Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times . Previous editions are available from the 1994 , 1995 , 1996 , 1997 , and 1998 News Archives.
Friday, May 1, 1998Internet-investment mania-how sane can it get?(3:00 p.m., EST, 5/1/98)"It's like oil," said Roger McNamee, general partner of venture company Integral Capital Partners. "To make it, you have to kill off a lot of dinosaurs. Then you have to be patient." McNamee is talking about the Internet. EDA vendors get sniffles from Asian flu(3:00 p.m., EST, 5/1/98)The Asian slowdown has apparently had a moderate impact on EDA vendors, but has not stalled the industry's forward momentum, according to the first-quarter reports that are now in for all public EDA companies. Only Quickturn Design Systems and Mentor Graphics cited lower revenues due to weaknesses in Asia. Comsat wins regulatory round with FCC(3:00 p.m., EST, 5/1/98)The Federal Communications Commission said this week it will explore the implication s of giving users direct access to Intelsat's satellite communications network after declaring Comsat Corp. a "non-dominant common carrier." ODS acquires Essential Communications(3:00 p.m., EST, 5/1/98)ODS Networks Inc., the former Optical Data Systems Inc., said it would acquire Essential Communications Inc. (Albuquerque, N.M.) in a mixed cash and stock offer worth approximately $8.4 million. Essential began in 1992 as a specialist in High Performance Parallel Interface (HiPPI) switches, but expanded last year into Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards. Motorola sells its transmission unit(3:00 p.m., EST, 5/1/98)Motorola Inc.'s transmission products division, which has been on the auction block since late 1997, has been sold to an unspecified group of international investors, consisting of both individuals and groups. Motorola will retain a minority investment in the o peration, which has been renamed Cpath Inc. VHS inventor JVC tries again to improve its tape standard(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)JVC Corp., which developed the VHS recording system 22 years ago, has devised a way to record video at 400 lines of horizontal resolution using standard VHS tape. Microsoft works with other to revise old 3-D audio API(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)Audio-sound-card leader Creative Labs Inc. and two audio-software developers have partnered with Microsoft Corp. to revise a two-year-old 3-D audio applications programming interface in a bid to whittle at the PC-game market lead of a proprietary API from Aureal Semiconductor. A face-off between the Microsoft-led group and Aureal's supporters is likely to ignite sparks when the Computer Game Developers Conference opens here next week. LCD vendors push to impr ove reflective panels capabilities(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)Japan's major LCD vendors showcased a variety of schemes for bringing color and better brightness to reflective liquid-crystal displays at the Electronic Display Exhibition '98 here this week. The aim is to ready these products-which drastically cut power consumption by eliminating a backlight-for the coming generation of Windows CE handheld computing devices. Japanese shuttering fabs for Golden Week(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)The Golden Week celebrations here are starting off on a sour note for some: Toshiba Corp., Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. announced this week they are closing fabs for the holiday period, according to published reports. The closures are being undertaken to help the companies battle falling semiconductor prices, particularly in memory devices. Thursday, April 30, 1998Inte rnet spawns engineering, computer science jobs(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)A recent survey of Internet positions finds a wide range of Internet and Web jobs already in place at electronics companies. Some of those jobs could prove to be new career paths for degreed engineers and computer scientists. TauSim, a Verilog simulator newcomer, pushes speed(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)Tau Simulation Inc., a new provider of Verilog cycle-based simulators, is promising fast compile and run-times with TauSim version 2.3. The product is one of the first EDA offerings to run under the Linux operating system. ADI thermal device uses embedded diode on Mobile Pentium II(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/30/98)With the introduction of the ADM1021, Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) becomes one of the first manufacturers to take advantage of the "thermal diode" embedded on the Intel Mobile Pentium II chi p. The technique, which uses temperature-dependent base-emitter voltage (Vbe), provides an accurate, low-cost way to gauge MPU temperature. LCD prices in free-fall(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)The bottom's falling out of LCD prices again, this time for 14-inch active-matrix (AM) LCDs for the desktop-monitor market. Pushed by an oversupply of notebook screens and an aggressive Korean strategy reminiscent of DRAM price drops, LCD players are moving to the monitor market earlier than expected and dropping prices more rapidly than anticipated. In turn, they've had to cut costs and postpone all new fab development indefinitely. Japan prepares satellite broadcast service for cars(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)Toshiba Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. will launch a joint digital-satellite-broadcast project targeting 70 million cars in Japan and, in the future, personal mobile recei vers. Using the 2.6-GHz S-band frequency along with MPEG-4 and AAC compression, the scheme will deliver TV-quality video and CD-quality audio in addition to various types of data. New tool from Intel will monitor 3-D graphics performance(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)Intel Corp. will roll out a performance-monitoring tool for its i740 silicon to try to spread the reach of the company's new 3-D graphics accelerator. The Performance Software Developers Kit aims to help developers writing 3-D application and driver software to optimize their code for the Intel graphics chip launched earlier this year. HP set to enter optical inspection market(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)Hewlett-Packard Co., after its 1997 purchase of Vital Technologies, is poised to launch its first automated optical-inspection system. Tools vendor interHDL taps E DA veteran as CEO(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)IC EDA tool vendor interHDL, has a new president and chief executive officer, and a new vice president of marketing, and is headed toward offering verification tools targeting the emerging cores market. Wednesday, April 29, 1998Danaher to acquire Fluke(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)Fifty-year-old Fluke Corp., one of the earliest and most successful U.S. test companies, has agreed to be acquired by Danaher Corp., a $2.1 billion Washington D.C.-based maker of process controls, tools and other components. Hitachi to kick off 0.18-micron production(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)Hitachi Ltd. will launch 0.18-micron production at its Naka Works by the end of this year. The line was designed to produce either memory or logic products on the same fab line, and the company plans to make 256-Mbit flash memories, super-shrin k 64-Mbit DRAMs, SH-4 RISC processors and ASICs with embedded DRAM. CompactPCI hot swap, but is it ready for prime time?(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)After about a year and a half of work, the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) has completed its hot-swap spec for CompactPCI to allow boards to be inserted into or extracted from a system while that system is operating. Vendors have started to announce "hot-swap ready" boards and backplanes. But what, exactly, does that designation mean? FPGA arena taps object technology(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/29/98)Configurable computing, like the parallel-processing trends that preceded it, was launched with the enthusiastic recognition that VLSI advances coupled with new processor designs could result in a massive leap in performance. But like other approaches to advanced computing, configurable computing is running up against th e puzzle of translating high-level problems into code that low-level hardware components are able to efficiently crunch. Wafer demand expected to grow robustly this year: report(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/28/98)Despite signs of trouble throughout the semiconductor industry, wafer demand from fabless companies is expected to rise by 45 percent this year to more than 2.5 million 6-inch-equivalent wafers, according to the Fabless Semiconductor Association. IBM's 'Deep Blue' gets performance boost(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/28/98)IBM Corp. has beefed up its RS/6000 SP supercomputer, the system used last year in the historic man-vs.-machine chess match with grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The latest version of the SP delivers five times the performance of the chess-playing "Deep Blue" supercomputer, according to IBM. ADI unveils open architecture for Sharc DSP tools(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/28/98)Analog Devices Inc. (ADI; Norwood, Mass.) has announced the VisualDSP graphical framework, which is intended to provide a unified development environment for the company's 32-bit Sharc DSPs. Tuesday, April 28, 1998HP paves software path toward Merced(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/28/98)Paving a software path toward Intel's upcoming 64-bit microprocessor, Hewlett-Packard Co. today disclosed that it has licensed a Merced-capable version of its Unix-like HP-UX operating system to Hitachi, NEC and Stratus Computer. DOD calls GaAs project a success(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/28/98)The Pentagon is declaring victory in its campaign to beef up the U.S. gallium-arsenide industry. Lucent pays $1B for ATM access company(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/28/98)Lucent Technologies Inc. raised eyebrows in the investment community last week by offering approximately $1 billion for Yurie Systems Inc. (Landover, Md.), an ATM wide-area-network access specialist with sales of less than $100 million in the last fiscal year. The move augments several recent acquisitions by Lucent, including Gigabit Ethernet switching specialist Prominet Corp. and secure-router developer Livingston Enterprises Inc. NetWorld+ Interop caters to home office market(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)While the integration of data and voice traffic has been a hot topic since the last NetWorld+Interop, next week's s pring show in Las Vegas will feature routers, gateways and servers that bring voice capabilities to smaller locations than were possible in the past. OEMs are looking to packetized voice that's carried over frame relay or Internet Protocol, but also at servers and routers that can handle circuit-switched voice as efficiently as a PBX. ASIC design program helps Canada meet designer shortage(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)The University of Toronto and Ontario's Strategic Microelectronics Consortium (SMC) have organized an intensive two-week training program in July to turn recently hired electrical-engineering graduates and retrainees into microelectronics designers. Student contest on for education web site(9:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)Hewlett-Packard Co. is sponsoring a contest inviting engineering students to share ideas for a new HP education Web site. Five students will win an all- expense-paid week in Colorado and an opportunity to serve on the HP Student Advisory Council to help design HP's first Web site for engineering students. Monday, April 27, 1998Legal hearing boosts Avant! stock(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)Avant! Corp. stock soared 32 percent Friday after a "status conference" in which a judge indicated he's unlikely to place an immediate ban on the company's flagship Aquarius placement-and-routing product. The judge also suggested he might allow some portions of Cadence Design Systems' civil suit against Avant!, which was put on hold because of a related criminal trial, to go forward. AMD and Tut to develop Ethernet controller for home networking(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will jumped into the emerging market of home networking today when it announced plans to sample by the end of the year a single-chip Etherne t controller that supports 1-Mbit/second links over standard telephone lines. Using the HomeRun technology licensed from Tut Systems Inc., AMD hopes to beat a number of players scrambling to find a place on PC motherboards and inside Internet appliances that support in-home communications over existing wires or wireless links. Orckit, Virata team up on ATM over ADSL(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)Orckit Communications Ltd. (Tel Aviv, Israel), a pioneer in digital-subscriber-line technology, and Virata Ltd. (Cambridge, England), are working together to develop DSL systems with integrated asynchronous-transfer-mode (ATM) hardware and software. EDA startup gets $22 million in venture funding(3:00 p.m., EST, 4/27/98)Duet Technologies this week will announce the receipt of $22 million in first-round venture-capital funding, an unusually large purse for a young EDA company. Duet is also announcing a new business strategy aimed at leading what it calls the "IP infrastructure" market. Guidelines proposed for Japan's set-top boxes(11:45 p.m., EST, 4/24/98)A special working group has outlined the desirable form of set-top boxes for digital-TV broadcasting in Japan. And the group has forecast that the Japanese market for such set-tops will grow to about $13 billion in 2005 and to $24.6 billion in 2010. Battle royal brews in workstation silicon(11:45 p.m., EST, 4/24/98)An engineering-workstation battle royal is in the offing as Intel, Sun and IBM get ready to field powerful new technologies. Intel is poised to launch Xeon, a beefed-up Pentium II-class processor, aiming the CPU and board-level reference designs at workstation OEMs. IBM is prepping the first systems to feature its new Power3 RISC architecture. And Sun next month will unveil enhanced Ultrasp arc IIi models, while readying future systems built around its next-generation Ultrasparc III chip. Scotland plans a clearinghouse for core trading(11:45 p.m., EST, 4/24/98)A novel "private law" system for buying and selling silicon intellectual property, called Virtual Component Exchange (VCX), is quietly taking root in Scotland as the country's national development agency campaigns for support among companies and industry organizations. Envisioned as a kind of stock exchange, VCX could accelerate the use of IP cores worldwide by lowering legal barriers. PC revolution sweeps China(11:45 p.m., EST, 4/24/98)Nine years after government tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush a nascent revolution, another powerful grass-roots movement is sweeping China as its citizenry embraces the personal computer. Pact could transform I nternet backbone(11:45 p.m., EST, 4/24/98)While industry attention has focused on the recent joint development pact between Ciena Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., a little-noticed second agreement between the two companies may have been an industry milestone. Ciena and Cisco united with AT&T, Bellcore, Hewlett-Packard Co., Sprint Inc., WorldCom Inc., and Qwest Communications International Inc. to form the Optical Internetworking Forum. LCD monitors get boost from new class of chips(11:45 p.m., EST, 4/24/98)A new class of universal display controllers is about to storm the market, promising to equip flat-panel displays to accept all manner of input and making it cheaper to turn the panels into monitors. Industry players prepping for the Society for Information Display (SID) international symposium here say the product category could help kick-start the market for LCD monitors. |
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