(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Despite their frustration over the snail's pace of the 300-mm wafer transition, executives who attended a closed-door meeting put together this week to discuss the matter insisted that chip and equipment vendors are determined to cooperate as they wait out the production delay.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry has tapped the Video CD Consortium to devise a next-generation, higher-quality Video CD format. The government's decision to back the plan by Matsushita, Philips, Sony and Victor Co. of Japan (JVC) rather than competing formats was made to fend off market confusion. But it was done with the understanding the spec would fold in aspects of the government's own format.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Aiming at Texas Instruments' perceived hegemony in digital signal processors, Analog Devices Inc. has added competitive-performing $2 DSP chips for consumer appliances to its product road map for motor control devices.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Investor confusion over an unannounced licensing model, first implemented over a year ago, has apparently been a major reason for a falloff in Cadence Design Systems stock during the past few weeks. Worries over licensing, Asia and the semiconductor slump have sent the EDA leader's stock from a high of $39 in May to the low $20s in mid-July.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Despite difficult market conditions, European chip maker STMicroelectronics logged increases in both sales revenue and net income in the first half. For the six months ended July 4, net revenue totaled $2.08 billion, an increase of 8.4 percent over the respective 1997 period. Net income increased 2.8 percent, to $187.7 million, compared with $182.6 million for the six months ended June 28, 1997.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
The IEEE 802.11 working group on wireless LANs (WLANs) has approved a coding scheme proposed by Lucent Technologies' WaveLAN group (Berkeley Heights, N.J.) and Harris Semiconductor (Melbourne, Fla.) that supports data rates ranging up to 11 Mbits/second. The code also was approved by the general IEEE 802 plenary group, allowing for a quick addendum to the 1- and 2-Mbit/s baseline standard for wireless LANs.
(11:40 a.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
While analysts praised Motorola's effort to establish an Advanced Systems Technology Laboratory (ASTL) to foster system-on-chip designs as the right direction, they noted that system-on-chip capabilities are no panacea for the ills being suffered by both Motorola and the semiconductor industry at large. The ASTL will address IP issues across Motorola's broad semiconductor group. The mandate of the lab is to set company-wide guidelines for sourcing, validating, integrating and distributing intellectual-property cores.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/16/98)
Fairchild Semiconductor, seeing the semiconductor industry's downturn as its chance to make another acquisition, is eyeing money-losing product lines that Texas Instruments, Motorola and other firms inside and outside the U.S. may want to shed, company executives told EE Times.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/16/98)
Sun Microsystems has sketched out a set of Java programming guidelines and source code that it claims could make it easier for users to install devices or access services over a network, pushing closer to the company's long-held vision of distributed computing. But like Java itself, the approach to create a kind of plug-and-play networking environment will require widespread adoption by systems and services companies if it is to be successful. The effort is also subject to the same performance questions that have dogged Java generally.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/16/98)
News good and bad about Linux's progress was discussed last week at "The Future of Linux," an informal panel presented by software consultants Taos Mountain (Santa Clara, Calif.) and the Silicon Valley Linux Users' Group (SVLUG). A packed house of more than 1,000 Linux fans came to shower praise and complaints on some of the software's leading architects, as well as get in touch with Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/16/98)
A panel of Silicon Valley business leaders identified analog and mixed-signal devices as outstanding investment opportunities. The panel here concluded this year's conference on Analog and Mixed-Signal Applications.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/16/98)
Thirteen companies, led by Cisco Systems Inc., have proposed an alternativeto the FBI/NSA key escrow system. But critics immediately charged that the "private doorbell" proposal was merely another way to give intelligence agencies full access to packet-switched data flows.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/16/98)
Sanyo has developed a two-chip solution for 8x CD-R drives. To speed the drives' development, the company plans to offer its chip solution as an off-the-shelf product.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
Ball Semiconductor, which reported success in exposing an integrated circuit pattern on the surface of a silicon sphere last week, still faces technical challenges if it is to reach its goal of commercial production of 1-mm spherical semiconductor devices by the year 2000.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
At an event here that brought 800 of its worldwide dealers and distributors to the final match of the World Cup, Victor Co. of Japan Ltd. (JVC) announced completion of the full technical specifications for Digital VHS, adding further speed modes, with recording bit rates ranging from 2 to 28.2 Mbits/second.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
In a bid to become a leading supplier of both graphics chips and boards for the PC workstation market, 3Dlabs Inc. has acquired Dynamic Pictures (Santa Clara, Calif.) in a stock-for-stock transaction. The privately held Dynamic Pictures offers professional 2-D and 3-D graphics boards for Windows NT systems.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
Partnerships and industry standards are the new hallmarks of the design process for today's computer engineer, according to William Strecker, the former chief technical officer of Digital Equipment Corp. and new top technologist at Compaq Computer Corp.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
Enhanced Memory Systems Inc. said it has started shipping 16-Mbit samples of its low-latency ESDRAM, manufactured by its two foundries, Siemens and IBM.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
MoSys Inc. today announced a new application for their widely acclaimed but little-understood multiblock DRAM architecture: SRAM. The company claims to have made substantial changes to the architecture, permitting a MoSys DRAM to behave functionally exactly like a 7.5-ns SRAM, but with power consumption and density closer to that of a conventional DRAM.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/15/98)
APack Technologies Inc. will leverage a license to a Lucent Technologies process when it opens what it believes will be Taiwan's first flip-chip foundry at the end of this year. The fab will be aimed not at chip fabrication but at connecting two or more bare dice into functional systems-on-chip.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
Novellus Systems Inc. has allied with IBM Corp. to develop copper-interconnect processes, part of an unusual four-company intertwining that Novellus has arranged to create Damascus, its multitiered scheme for manufacturing copper-interconnect ICs.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
In a largely upbeat keynote address at this week's Conference on Analog and Mixed-Signal Applications, Wally Rhines, president and chief executive officer of Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.), portrayed the analog market as an island of strength in a beleaguered semiconductor industry. He spoke of profound changes due to systems-on-chip, analog HDLs and the emergence of analog intellectual-property libraries.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
At yesterday's Semicon/West opening, attendees were commiserating with one another over what could be the worst downturn in the industry's history.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
The Interuniversities Microelectronics Center (IMEC) has demonstrated a magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) based on spin-valve devices, which is claimed to be the first-ever integration of magnetic multilayers with semiconductor devices in a single bit cell. The achievement demonstrates the feasibility of MRAM in a DRAM-like architecture.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
In a bid to toughen up Windows CE and make it a more potent player in the embedded market, Microsoft Corp. has unveiled a preview of its latest release -dubbed 2.10-of the downsized operating system.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
European engineers, warily getting used to Windows CE, currently see it as suitable for only a narrow range of embedded applications. The OS is too big and too slow for most portable products that need a "hard" real-time OS (RTOS), engineers said in recent interviews here.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
A collaboration between researchers in France and the United States may lead to a new type of microactuator with applications in both space exploration and medicine.
(11:00 p.m., EDT, 7/14/98)
Motorola Inc. is pulling together its disparate resources into a major technical support group for system-on-chip designs, called the Advanced Systems Technology Laboratory.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
The size, shape and fidelity of domestic and professional loudspeakers could get an overhaul thanks to R&D being conducted by engineering consultant Tony Hooley and a small team gathered around him. Hooley believes his group has been the first to develop a completely digital loudspeaker.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
Offering the prospect of a more integrated approach to design, Ambit Design Systems Inc. this week will announce work with five ASIC vendors to use Ambit's BuildGates tool for static-timing signoff. The vendors have also agreed to work with Ambit to support processes modeled with the emerging Open Library API (OLA) standard.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
Programmable-logic vendor Altera Corp. has released a new version of its Max+Plus II design environment with what the company calls better synthesis results and support for advanced PLD families and ball-grid array packages. In addition, the tools sport a new compiled representation of the Jam programming language for faster in-system programming.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
Xemics SA and Argonaut RISC Cores Ltd. (ARC) have agreed to combine Xemics' Cool-Lib low-power standard-cell library with ARC's synthesizable 32-bit RISC core to produce a low-power customizable processor for cellular phones that could operate at voltages as low as 0.9 V.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
Engineers from Toshiba Corp. say they have cleared two hurdles in the fabrication of future microprocessors by finding ways to improve production throughput and to enhance the precision of circuits with gate lengths of 0.15 micron or less.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
In a bid to bring commercial support to the popular Tcl scripting language, John Ousterhout, Tcl's creator, has launched a startup called Scriptics Corp. The company hopes to greatly expand the use of Tcl, already widely used in EDA, test and other applications.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/13/98)
Moving toward its goal of system-level hardware/software codesign, Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced concrete progress with its university-based Co-Design Consortium. The company is also moving its Seamless CVE coverification tool to a higher abstraction level.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
At its Meltdown multimedia conference in the coming week, Microsoft Corp. will tip plans to push polygon-based PC graphics from high-end simulation systems to low-end consumer gear via its DirectX applications programming interfaces (APIs).
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
While Microsoft Corp. is keeping mum about its plans for bringing its multimedia programming interfaces to Windows CE, the company is more vocal about how it intends to leverage improvements in its DirectX APIs to enable high-end graphics workstations and simulation systems built around Windows NT.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
NEC Corp. has crafted a novel approach to behavioral-synthesis design using a homegrown language based on C code. The company claims the approach can lop off a big chunk of design time and turn just about anyone schooled in C programming into a crack logic designer overnight.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/10/98)
A small semiconductor startup here has demonstrated a microprocessor concept that could do an end-run around the debate between microprogrammable RISC engines and hardwired packet processors as vehicles for moving ATM and Internet Protocol packets at gigabit speeds.
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