(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
Sony Corp. will debut its Memory Stick flash-memory card in September in Japan. The card is shaped like a stick of gum and tailored for consumer electronics. Sony hopes to establish a flash-card-based data-exchange platform for consumer gear.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
ARM Ltd. and NEC are developing a memory controller core together to interface with a range of virtual channel synchronous DRAMs available from NEC. The controller macrocell is expected to be available for licensing from ARM in synthesizeable VHDL and Verilog formats in the fourth quarter of 1998. It is being designed to be compliant with the ARM's on-chip bus called AMBA.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
In a joint effort with WWP Fiber, a fiber leasing subsidiary of Washington Water & Power, Packet Engines has snared a $14 million contract to supply an educational MAN (metropolitan area network) to the Spokane-area school districts. The project represents the first attempt by any Gigabit Ethernet company to enter MAN markets.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
The U.S. military and Lockheed Martin Corp. will share the cost of improving the performance of a faulty theater-missile-defense system, the Pentagon said.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
With Thomson Multimedia, the world's largest consumer electronics manufacturer, signing up Microsoft, Alcatel, NEC and DirecTV as strategic partners, the company hopes to improve profitability and create new recurring revenue opportunities in various product and service areas, ranging from digital and analog consumer electronics, information technology and in-home communication networks.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/30/98)
ARM Ltd., will detail its next-generation microprocessor core, the ARM10 at the Embedded Processor Forum, October 15, (San Jose, Calif.). Dave Jaggar, director of ARM's design center in Austin, Texas, is scheduled to give a paper on a core that includes floating-point support, and is based on a new ARM pipeline architecture.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/30/98)
The highly touted "software radio" may be one step closer to fruition if Jeff Parker's claims can be validated. Parker's company, ParkerVision, an $11 million design shop here, is beginning to demonstrate a direct-conversion architecture for RF receiver circuits that Parker says eliminates almost all RF decoding and demodulation elements. Called Direct2Data or D2D, the system captures RF signals and outputs digitized voice or data.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/30/98)
The Clinton administration is expected to veto high-tech immigration legislation if, as expected, Congress approves a compromise bill that waters down worker protection provisions favored by U.S. engineering groups.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/30/98)
In a business climate of cratering components prices, Toshiba's components division is in the middle of a major reorganization. Changes at Toshiba America Electronics Components Inc. (TAEC) to some extent mirror a broader realignment of Toshiba Corp., and ultimately could presage the spin-off of the components group into a separate company.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/30/98)
BTA Technology is offering an interconnect characterization service to meet the calibration needs of verifiable systems-on-a-chip designs. Called "VeriSure," the service calibrates a customer's RC extraction tools with actual measured data from a test chip, and ensures that the accuracy of the RC extractors is within 2 percent of actual measured performance.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
Embedded systems continue to be a major worry for federal officials working to coordinate national efforts to confront the year-2000 bug.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
As anticipated, Applied Microcircuits Corp. signed a supply deal with IBM Microelectronics that gives it 48 months of access to IBM's most advanced methods of producing silicon germanium circuits, potentially including SiGe devices that employ copper interconnect technology.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
The summer of mergers and alliances among large carriers has so blurred the line among long-distance interexchange carriers, ILECs, CLECs and cable TV operators that it has become difficult to typecast the players, though doing so will be necessary to determine if the mergers comply with the spirit of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act. It's also tough to tell if residential and business customers will experience more or less competition on a practical basis.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is funding development of biochemical sensors. A $2 million grant jointly awarded to Caliper Technologies Corp. here, Microcosm Technologies Inc. (Raleigh, N.C.) and the University of Washington underwrites development of CAD tools for integrated fluidic microsystems — what Caliper is calling "laboratory-on-chip" systems.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
Bringing an old idea into deep-submicron IC design, EDA startup TransLogic Technology Inc. (TTI) is promising big performance gains with a library of cells based on pass-transistor logic. "We want to allow people a turbo-charged way of increasing the performance of a chip — in a transparent way — to the design engineer," said J. Randolph Young, president and chief executive officer, and former head of Intel's P6 group. He said that tests run so far point to performance improvements of up to 30 percent on critical paths.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
NEC Systems Laboratory Inc. is launching a "Socks5 Everywhere" initiative next week on its Web site, offering embedded-client Socks technology to independent software vendors and OEMs on a license-free basis. The company is driving to make its session-layer Socks5 technology a mainstream competitor to security products operating at both application and packet layers. In mid-September, NEC will work with Stardust Forums, the company that helped launch the IP Multicast Initiative, to host a Socks development conference and interoperability test demonstration, to run Sept. 15-18 at the Santa Clara TechMart.
(3:45 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
Newbridge Networks Corp., acting to halt a perception among analysts that it is losing corporate and product identity in its alliances with Siemens AG and 3Com Corp., has begun to reorganize into three product-related groups. Newbridge will also establish a revamped corporate marketing headquarters at its U.S. offices in Herndon, Va., after two years in which many key Herndon executives left the company.
(3:45 p.m., EDT, 7/29/98)
Stanford University believes that this fall, it will become "the first major research university in the U.S. to offer a master's degree totally online," according to Joseph Goodman, EE professor there.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/28/98)
A new American Management Association survey finds that despite the rough sledding that middle managers suffered in the widespread downsizing of the early '90s, today the overall picture looks good for bosses and supervisors.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/28/98)
Motorola Inc. has begun selling a 366-MHz version of its PowerPC 750 processor, which boosts the top performance of the 750 series by 20 percent while reducing power consumption to 5 W.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/28/98)
A new frontier for workstation designers is opening up, as the engineering pacesetters of the field look to Hollywood as an emerging market with limitless potential. High-end workstations fitted with graphics accelerators are being snapped up by creators of digital content for television and for Hollywood.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/28/98)
Sony Electronics Inc. (SEL) is "no longer an extended arm of Sony Corp. in Tokyo," but "an autonomous company now serving as a good partner for Sony Corp.," said Teruaki Aoki, president and chief technology officer of Sony Electronics (Park Ridge, N.J.), in a press briefing held here yesterday.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
The nation's leading engineering association is opposing compromise legislation reached by Congress last week that will raise the annual cap on high-tech visas, stating that it effectively removes key worker safeguards and raises the visa quota too high for too long a period.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
Now that the semiconductor industry is facing the limits of optical methods, a debate over a fundamental question has taken shape: How far can optical lithography be pushed before the return on investment in new tools becomes too small to be worth it? While most major semiconductor makers are looking into alternatives, at least one has come to a definitive conclusion: the team at Lucent Technologies working on an electron-beam system called Scalpel (for "scattering with angular-limitation projection electron-beam lithography").
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
Researchers at the University of Munich and the University of Delaware have created a method of stimulating artificial molecules into action, in a manner similar to the way light excites real molecules. The finding brings engineers and scientists one step closer to creating artificial systems based on molecular and possibly biological behavior.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
LSI Logic Corp. has settled its suit against Maker Communications Inc. (Framingham, Mass.), whose founders had been accused of misappropriating LSI trade secrets.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
Once in a great while, a book comes along with the power to change fundamental aspects of electronic design. The Reuse Methodology Manual, co-authored by design chiefs at Synopsys Inc. and Mentor Graphics Corp. and recently published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, may well become such a book.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
8x8 Inc., a video-communications chip and system vendor based here, is launching a development platform that would allow cable-modem vendors and cable operators to design Internet Protocol-based videotelephony systems for operation over broadband networks.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 7/27/98)
Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) has bought Esperan Ltd. (Ramsbury, England), a privately held company that specializes in training ASIC and FPGA designers in VHDL and Verilog and design methodologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 7/27/98)
In a move that could make it a potent force in the system-on-a-chip era, Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. has taken a broad license of IBM Corp.'s custom logic semiconductor technologies. The deal gives Sanyo access to IBM's prized semiconductor core library and chip technologies, including those involving 0.18-micron copper interconnect, silicon germanium and the PowerPC.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 7/27/98)
A vote to raise the cap on high-tech visas could come as early as this week after House and Senate negotiators announced a compromise plan last Friday.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Foreseeing Hollywood-class computer graphics as the potential killer app that could reenergize the flagging mainstream PC market, Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. used the recent Siggraph '98 to disclose separate, ambitious research efforts dedicated to pushing the envelope in 3-D animation and rendering software.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
The advent of low-cost CMOS sensors modeled on the workings of the human eye is opening new vistas in consumer-oriented imaging applications spanning the gamut from diversions fit for videogames to practical networks equipped with machine vision.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Computer and consumer-electronics companies are jockeying to set standards for digital watermarking — a technique for electronically identifying and protecting copyrighted material. The technology they establish could bring a new level of security to digital videodisks and could prove a key enabler for electronic commerce via the Internet, cable TV and satellite.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/24/98)
Synopsys Inc. is aggressively reshaping its mission, with bold thrusts into logic verification and IC layout. The EDA giant has announced its acquisition of Systems Science Inc. (SSI), a provider of testbench-development tools, and separately revealed in a Tokyo meeting that it is preparing the release of three new IC physical-design tools, including full-chip verification.
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