(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
At next month's Hot Chips conference that will convene here the paper on the StrongARM 1500 microprocessor will mark a significant new direction for Intel Corp. Intel will for the first time discuss a specific product it apparently backs. Prashant P. Gandhi, a senior engineer in the StrongARM and Bridges division of Intel's Computer Enhancement Group (Chandler, Ariz.), will detail the StrongARM 1500 as a part aimed at everything from set-top boxes and digital TVs to modem banks and video games.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Matsushita has developed a chip set that enables a 5x DVD-ROM disk drive and that it says is the industry's first chip set to allow DVD-ROM drives to read DVD-RAM disks. The chip set has been designed into a DVD-RAM-capable DVD-ROM drive from Matsushita Kotobuki that will ship in OEM volumes in the next few weeks.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Representatives of Cadence Design Systems and Bell Labs Design Automation (BLDA, Murray Hill, N.J.) confirmed that they are negotiating Cadence's purchase of the Lucent Technologies subsidiary. But the companies denied published reports suggesting that a deal has been signed and that terms have been established.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Hoping to bolster its efforts in embedded-memory parts, Motorola Inc.'s semiconductor products sector has pooled its nonvolatile-memory talents into a single group under the company's transportation systems group.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Judge Leon Fox of the Santa Clara County Municipal Court has been appointed to preside over the Avant! Corp. criminal case, replacing Judge Thomas William Cain, who stepped down from the case last week after speaking to a journalist about the case.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
A strong performance by Philips Semiconductor Division, in which it increased profits 34 percent, was one of the highlights in Philips Electronics' financial results for the first half of the year ending June 30.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/23/98)
Raising serious new allegations of anti-competitive behavior by Microsoft Corp., the head of RealNetworks Inc. told Congress on Thursday that his company's product is disabled when Microsoft's streaming media software is installed on a PC.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/23/98)
Texas Instruments Inc. has vowed that it will be able to combine standard cells with user-definable blocks of gate array logic by the second half of next year. The company's TimeCell approach is intended for customers who plan to respin some logic in a gate array block while sticking with existing standard cells of DSP, ARM or mixed-signal functions.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/23/98)
Lucent Technologies is among the growing list of semiconductor makers considering how rapidly to use copper interconnect materials on high-speed digital ICs. While Lucent will inevitably turn to copper, it doesn't see the technology as "cost-effective" for the next generation of circuits, said Emelio Martinez, who heads interconnect research at Lucent's Bell Laboratories.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/23/98)
A Colorado Springs startup has defined a server architecture capable of converting analog voice messages from the circuit-switched phone network into streaming, compressed RealAudio files. The iTalk Server architecture from TellSoft Technologies Inc., a company formed by telecommunications consultants formerly with MCI Communications, supports near-instantaneous conversion to ASM or HTML code, making it possible to add a recorded voice message to a Web site seconds after the words are spoken.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/23/98)
Suppliers to Intel Corp. are finding that they have to take their lumps along with the chip giant, which continues to struggle with shrinking margins and lackluster PC sales.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/22/98)
Hardware compilation has taken a step forward with the release of a rapid prototyping board as the last stage of a European collaborative research program called Aspire (Advanced Silicon Prototyping in Reconfigurable Environments).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/22/98)
Two new programs at the George Washington University of Engineering and Applied Science will allow you to earn a master's degree on weekends.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/22/98)
Mentor Graphics Corp. said that Renoir '98, a recent release of its graphical design environment, has become the first EDA product to get Microsoft's "Designed for Windows NT and 98" logo. Renoir generates HDL code from graphical input.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/22/98)
A group of 14 mobile systems, peripheral and silicon makers formally joined forces this week to form a so-called Mobile Advisory Council (MAC) to speak out on design issues for notebook computers. The group has set its first target: to influence the PC '9X road map written by Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/22/98)
Synopsys Inc. has agreed to acquire Systems Science Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), a privately held design verification and test tool company, for $26 million in cash, plus notes and assumed options.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/22/98)
The manipulation of 3-D images on the Web with a standard browser drew a bit closer to reality this week when several companies and research outfits showed their latest software developments in the annual Web 3D roundup at Siggraph.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/21/98)
Blaming the Asian crisis in general and "ruinous" DRAM pricing in particular, Siemens AG (Munich) has announced a company-wide program to improve profitability, including urgent measures for the semiconductor division.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/21/98)
Openly acknowledging that Internet TV has been a flop in Japan, executives of major consumer electronics manufacturers are seriously rethinking their next-generation systems. Virtually every promising technology is on the agenda, but the road map for digital "combo" products -- gadgets that merge functions like set-top and Web box, DVD player and game machine -- remains unclear.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/21/98)
Integrated Technology Express Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and the Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) have each introduced new LCD controller chips targeted at distinct applications areas.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/21/98)
The MicroDisplay Corp. said it is fulfilling one of the promises of LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) display technology by integrating VGA and NTSC encoder circuitry into a miniature display, which it demonstrated at the Siggraph conference this week.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/21/98)
Claiming it is on track to release a full specification by the end of this year, the HomeRF Working Group yesterday released version 0.5 of its Shared Wireless Access Protocol (SWAP).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/21/98)
As part of its new thrust in data converters, Texas Instruments Inc. is hoping to make waves with a high-speed A/D converter that offers programmable resolution.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
Pushing to keep pace with advances in silicon technology, Motorola Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have signed a cross-licensing agreement aimed at accelerating the development of the companies' embedded flash and microprocessor efforts.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
Siemens said it believes it has integrated an unprecedented variety of smart technologies into one development tool with the introduction of the Environment for Computer Aided Neural Software Engineering (Ecanse). Billed as a universal software-development tool for next-millennium engineers, Ecanse uses neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, expert systems and chaos theory to aid electrical engineers in the design of algorithms for pattern recognition, process monitoring and control, time-series forecasting, image analysis, signal processing and other tough application areas.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
A design crisis in the ASIC community is reaching a boiling point as engineers struggle with deep-submicron physical effects and multiple iterations between layout and physical design. Unfortunately, the register-transfer level (RTL) design-planning tools that were supposed to ease these problems have been painfully slow in coming.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
Hewlett-Packard, Intergraph and Silicon Graphics-are showing off hot new accelerator architectures at the Siggraph'98 show here this week. The announcements-along with a slew of research papers due from Microsoft, Intel and others on advanced software algorithms-demonstrate that graphics visualization and rendering is poised to advance from its adolescence into a mature discipline.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
In a move to position themselves as winners in the competition for the digital-watermark standard, IBM Corp. and NEC Corp. have agreed to merge their digital-watermark technologies. The standard is being sought by the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG), composed of movie studios and computer and consumer-electronics manufacturers.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
Researchers at the University of Delaware are working on technology that may one day lead to alumina (known as aluminum oxide) replacing silicon in electronic transistors, producing faster, smaller and more reliable circuits.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/20/98)
In a move that could further delay the criminal trial of six Avant! Corp. executives, Judge Thomas Cain of the Santa Clara County Municipal Court disqualified himself from hearing the case this week following an interview with the San Francisco Daily Journal, a legal trade newspaper. Cain said he was worried that remarks made during the interview could be misinterpreted.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Intel Corp. this week will ship PC makers technical details of a long-awaited chip set that marks a shift in direction for both PC graphics and sub-$1,000-system design. The so-called Whitney chip set could also mark a renewed move by the microprocessor giant toward integrated processors, as well as raise new concerns about Intel's extending an alleged monopoly in PC processors into the realm of graphics.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Scottish Enterprise, Scotland's national development agency, has received permission to continue its work on a Virtual Component Exchange (VCX) from the European Commission, the administrative arm of the 15-nation European Union.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
EE unemployment rose above 2 percent last quarter, the first hard evidence that recent staffing cuts at semiconductor and electronics companies are taking the bloom off a once-rosy job picture.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/17/98)
Traditional telecom IC rivals are turning up the heat in their summer battle for 2.5- and 10-Gbit/second Sonet markets. As Vitesse Semiconductor Inc. brings up the world's first commercial 6-inch gallium arsenide fab here, competitor Applied Microcircuits Corp. is expanding its CMOS and bipolar Sonet offerings and is readying plans to build or buy silicon-germanium process technology.
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