(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
To bring color video displays to portable equipment with low power consumption, Sony Corp. has developed a reflective type of low-temperature polysilicon LCD, which is says has the highest contrast and reflection rates of any competing displays.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
The sluggish market for PCs, communications systems and the semiconductors that drive them continues to push the industry toward a deepening recession. That was the outlook following poor second-quarter reports this week from Motorola Inc. (Schaumburg, Ill.) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
Chromatic Research Inc. is rebuilding its concept of a media processor after deciding that its Mpact chip won't be sufficient to drive volume sales. The move signifies a realization that the still-promising media processor concept has a long way to go before it can become a substantial business.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/9/98)
Despite the shaky business climate, the exhibitors that head to Semicon/West next week intend to demonstrate progress in preparing for the next generation of deep-submicron manufacturing.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/9/98)
With this month's kickoff of a Nikola Tesla-related exhibit, and with the swelling trove of data and dialogue on the inventor's life and legacy available on the Internet, it's clear that Teslaphiles in the engineering community are intent on ensuring the controversial pioneer's rightful place in the annals of electrical science.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/9/98)
With Nikola Tesla's sweeping legacy of innovation, many wonder why today the prolific inventor and electrical engineer is not canonized along with his 19th-century peers such as Edison and Marconi. "Often he would say his mind was constantly bombarded with new ideas, and he simply did not have time to write them all down," said Bogdan Kosanovic, a DSP engineer at Telogy Network (Germantown, Md.).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/9/98)
In what could be a trend-setting move for the system-level integration era, STMicroelectronics and IBM Microelectronics have agreed to exchange a number of their existing intellectual property (IP) cores and to jointly develop new ones for a common library. The cores will be used for application in data storage and PC-compatible information appliances.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/9/98)
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. has become Japan's third major consumer electronics producer to form a strategic alliance with Microsoft Corp. over Windows CE, but it will not open its entire range of products to the operating system.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/9/98)
As part of its forthcoming announcements on telecomm intellectual property (IP), Mentor Graphics Corp. said it would provide universities with reduced-price versions of its VHDL-AMS modeling tool kits.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/8/98)
Engineers are waging war on spam. This unsolicited e-mail — the scourge of the Internet — has prompted crafty EEs to cobble together their own mail filters on the client side.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/8/98)
Analog Devices Inc. has licensed DSP technology based on the systolic-array approach to data processing, where an array of simple processors acts on data as it flows through the array.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/8/98)
It started with a product announcement in May of 1955. IBM Corp. was introducing a product that offered unprecedented random-access storage — 5 million characters (not bytes, they were 7-bit, not 8-bit characters).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/8/98)
Broadcom Corp. has been a participant since the inception of CableLabs' Data Over Cable System Interface Spec (Docsis), so it should be no surprise that the company has become the first to sample a burst demodulator for cable-TV head ends. But the BCM3137, shipping to customers this summer, is earlier to market than many might have anticipated.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/8/98)
Intel Corp. and Level One Communications Inc. have agreed to work together to develop Gigabit Ethernet products for category 5 copper wire networks.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/8/98)
Palm OS, the systems software behind the PalmPilot handheld computer, has a new and high-profile licensee: its developer. Jeff Hawkins, chief technology officer at the Palm division of 3Com Corp., has announced that he is leaving 3Com to form a startup that will license the Palm OS and develop consumer products based on it. Donna Dubinsky, the head of the division, will join Hawkins in the new venture.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/7/98)
Toshiba American Electronic Components Inc., armed with new devices, a new process road map and new system requirements in the PC sector, is trying to regain its place among the memory leaders.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/7/98)
Cirrus Logic Inc.'s Crystal Semiconductor unit is preparing products to grab a share of the PCI audio market, when it finally takes off. The company is strengthening its hand in the dominant, price-driven ISA sound card market while getting ready for when motherboard and sound card makers move audio to the PCI bus.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/7/98)
With its semiconductor operation joined at the hip to the digital consumer systems future, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. may be the dark horse in the system-on-a-chip race.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/7/98)
Crimble Micro Test Inc. (CMT), a designer and manufacturer of advanced automated test equipment, has released a memory module test system optimized for 100-MHz-and-up SDRAMs. The system is the first high-performance product in the company's new CMT3000 series.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/7/98)
Hidden amid the fanfare surrounding the launch last month of Intel Corp.'s powerful Xeon processor are a host of technical surprises that will pose new challenges for systems designers. As a result, even seasoned engineers will have to delve into some unfamiliar territory before they declare their latest workstations and servers ready for release to manufacturing.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/7/98)
Taking aim at a very specific but potentially lethal problem, EDA startup Aprés Technologies is preparing to release Scorpion, a suite of products for analyzing noise and "hot spots" transmitted to analog circuits through IC substrates, interconnects or packaging. The product stems from a broader company mission to commercialize EDA software developed by Korean semiconductor giant LG Semicon.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/6/98)
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology used microelectronics manufacturing techniques to make microscopic needles out of silicon that can deliver drugs painlessly through the skin.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/6/98)
While demand for DVD-ROM drives will soon kick into high gear, thanks to surging volumes of Intel Corp.'s Pentium II and the debut Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 98, writeable DVD-RAMs will grow more slowly than anticipated for both PC and consumer applications, according to Koji Hase, general manager of Toshiba Corp.'s DVD division.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/6/98)
A pair of mathematicians at Cornell University have discovered a new principle of organization for networks that could have broad implications for design.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/6/98)
The prevailing wisdom that PLD and FPGA designers will overwhelmingly adopt VHDL comes under challenge this week as Cypress Semiconductor Corp. unveils Verilog support for its widely used, $99 Warp2 synthesis tool. Other vendors are also noting a shift toward Verilog, and Xilinx Inc. has revealed plans to add full Verilog support to its Foundation Series tools.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/6/98)
Wind River Systems Inc., with one eye on Microsoft's encroachment into the embedded-systems space, will announce tomorrow that it has acquired Zinc Software (Pleasant Grove, Utah), a small tools developer with a compact graphical user interface (GUI) for embedded systems.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/6/98)
Microsoft Corp. this summer will introduce Visual C++ 6.0, the latest version of its integrated development environment for the popular programming language.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/2/98)
Memory module maker Kingston Technology Co. has launched a Web site with market data and information about the PC, DRAM and memory module industries.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/2/98)
In a PC market with nothing much to cheer about, thin notebooks about the size of a box of chocolates are captivating Japanese buyers. Toshiba Corp., the world's largest notebook maker, has become the latest company joined the limbo dance of giants, including Matsushita, NEC, Sharp and Sony, trying to build mobile systems that dip below an inch in thickness.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/2/98)
In the war to define the digital living room, consumer electronics companies here say home networking is the new battleground. Leaving behind the platform fights of PC vs. TV, engineers in Japan believe it's communication protocols and the other building blocks of the home net that will ultimately define the look and feel of next-generation digital consumer products.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/2/98)
After a long concentration on custom mixed-signal circuits, Texas Instruments Inc. is ramping up a frontal attack on the market for standard analog components. In the first of several planned product announcements, TI will introduce a series of high-speed data converters designed to carve out a niche in the area of 1 to 20 Msamples/second. In the future, the company will zero in on high-speed applications like cellular basestations and handsets.
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