(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
Eight thousand people queued up Thursday morning at a retail outlet here to get a look at the first digital HDTV sets as they went on sale. The chief engineers of most local TV stations in the San Diego area, and TV media from around the world, were among the crowd.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
House GOP leaders delayed until the fall a vote on high-tech visa legislation after Democrats failed on Thursday to come up with the estimated 50 votes needed to approve a compromise bill.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
Japanese memory vendors moved this week to stanch the bleeding in the DRAM business by shuttering plants or moving production to low-cost locations.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
Sharp Corp. confirmed this week that it is pushing SOI into communications ICs and that it will begin a foundry business for SOI devices. Meanwhile, executives at Motorola Inc. told EE Times that the company is preparing a module for its CMOS process that would enable the use of SOI in a design. And design-automation experts also weighed in, asserting that while SOI won't pose many tools challenges, the technology could throw over traditional CMOS-based design methodologies.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/6/98)
Armed with a hot CMOS process from parent National Semiconductor Corp. and an aggressive superscalar architecture, Cyrix Corp. is taking aim at the high end of Intel's IA-32 processor line. The company is planning to pop its next hot CPU core, code-named Jalapeno, just in time to catch Intel in mid-transition from the IA-32 to Merced.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/6/98)
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) have each started R&D work on the use of copper interconnects for ICs.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/6/98)
A small Silicon Valley company has developed what appears to be the industry's first single-chip codec for a digital video format that is taking on ever more importance, especially in markets outside the United States. Divio Inc., formerly known as Next Wave Technology, is aiming its NW701 chip — designed for the so-called DV format — at PCs, PC add-in cards for video editing and the potentially huge market for DV camcorders.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/6/98)
A contrarian analysis of the semiconductor industry, due to be posted online tomorrow, predicts respectable to strong annual growth over the next three years for the semiconductor industry, which is now struggling through a downturn.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/6/98)
Hitachi has reorganized and is developing system-on-a-chip technologies around 10 product areas that cater toward Hitachi's traditional strengths.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
Abstract Inc., a formal verification tool provider for next-generation system-on-a-chip designs, is apparently in the midst of a power struggle.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
The semiconductor industry is behind on plans to fix the year 2000 bug, and a third of the world's semiconductor makers could face at least one mission-critical system failure related to the problem, according to The Gartner Group (Stamford, Conn.).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
Engineers and managers generally rate their companies as good or excellent in terms of their diversity policies, according to the 1998 EE Times Salary & Opinion Survey, which will be published Aug. 31.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
The fate of what could be the world's largest program for information- and communications-technology research, with a potential value of more than $4 billion, now rests with Europe's politicians. Electronics executives are waiting to see how the final budget for the European Union's Fifth Framework, a four-year plan to fund collaborative R&D from 1999 to 2002, will measure up against the previous four-year framework.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
NeoCore Inc.is pushing the bulk of its business into packet analysis for communication systems. Vice president of marketing Mike Young is busy setting up a dedicated distribution team for networking software at NeoCore, while lead technologist Robert Moore is exploring the possibilities of developing add-on software modules for network-analysis products.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
The latest round of plant closures and spending reductions to hit the DRAM industry may actually be a good thing, inasmuch as they indicate that the bottom of the industry's downturn is near, analysts said.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
The subsystems that control motors represent a huge market that's undergoing significant changes as electronics replace electromechanical techniques. The changes wrought by digital devices, the possible move to standard networking interfaces and the rising importance of software were among the trends described at the first Electronic Motion Control technical session late last month.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/5/98)
System-on-a-chip designs for third-generation wireless terminals are forcing EDA vendors to come up with a new generation of design tools.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
While Chromatic Research Inc. has abandoned its very long-instruction-word approach to graphics processing, its main media-processor competitor, Philips Semiconductors, is still waving the VLIW flag.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
Steep drops in stock prices for Ikos Systems and Quickturn Design Systems (San Jose, Calif.) coupled with second-quarter 1998 revenue shortfalls point to turmoil in the hardware-assisted verification business. But both companies are embracing new register-transfer level (RTL) solutions they believe will revitalize the market.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
VHDL International Users Forum (VIUF), a VHDL user's group, has replaced its Fall VIUF conference with Workshops '98, which will target advanced users of VHDL.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
To kick-start a low-cost home networking market, Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. has launched a proprietary wireless home networking solution called "HomeFree." The product uses radio frequency technology that operates at 2.4 GHz and allows data throughput at up to 1 Mbit per second.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
After years of missionary work, DSP Communications Inc. (DSPC) said it has succeeded in getting cellular system makers in Japan to deploy handsets and basestations that use code-division/multiple-access (CDMA), the digital scheme developed in the United States by Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
Staking out its position to bring embedded Java technologies to market, Integrated Systems Inc. (ISI) is aiming for an October debut of an interface between its pSOS operating system and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s embedded Java Virtual Machine.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/4/98)
GA Playground, a genetic algorithm programming tool kit implemented in Java, allows users to experiment with genetic algorithms and run their own optimization problems on any platform that has a Java compiler.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
The Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG) has asked digital-watermarking technology developers to devise a solution to meet two possibly contradictory goals.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
Motorola Inc. will implement a new final manufacturing flow, initially for flip-chip ICs, using wafer-level burn-in technology codeveloped with Tokyo Electron Ltd. and W.R. Gore and Associates Inc.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
After outlining the system-on-chip design process and discussing system-level design issues such as the need for synchronous design, the middle of the recently published Reuse Methodology Manual (RMM)-which some EDA watchers see as a potentially ground-breaking guidebook-provides an overview of the macro design process.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
A neural-vision system that allows a robot to adapt to a world's changing rules has been developed by researchers at the University of Houston. The machine is designed to explore, experience and then make future decisions based on that experience.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
Intel Corp. has been hit with a $500 million lawsuit charging infringement of an obscure RISC-architecture patent developed by a once high-flying chip startup. Intel officials said the suit is without merit and they plan to contest it.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
The House will try again this week to craft compromise language for high-tech visa legislation after an earlier "compromise" was pulled by the House leadership last Friday in response to a presidential veto threat.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
QuickLogic Corp. has jumped into the the emerging hybrid standard product/FPGA device arena and plans to field first silicon in a few weeks' time.
(10:00 a.m., EDT, 8/3/98)
IBM Corp. will use silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology to manufacture a range of logic ICs, starting with a PowerPC 750 microprocessor in the first half of 1999. By signaling that it is ready to apply SOI technology to volume manufacturing, IBM has set the stage for yet another epic shift in the semiconductor industry, less than eight months after saying it had reached a similar confidence level with copper interconnects.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
A battle is heating up at the bleeding edge of microprocessor technology as Intel Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp.'s Alpha group rush to ready their competing 64-bit architectures. New technical details have come to light about the race, which pits Intel's Merced, due out in mid-2000, against the next-generation Alpha CPU, known as the 21364. (Compaq acquired the Alpha design team when it bought Digital Equipment Corp. in June.)
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
A new generation of microcontrollers, able to adapt their peripherals and even their processing units to the task at hand, is likely to surface in the fall, when startup Triscend Corp. presents a paper on "a configurable processor approach" at the Microprocessor Forum
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
Computer companies and consumer-electronics manufacturers appear headed for a brawl over technical specifications that seek to define a method for data delivery to analog or digital television receivers. The Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), a newly formed cross-industry group led by Intel Corp., has unveiled a draft specification for HTML-based enhanced TV that would enable TV-based datacast service as well as allow broadcast TV programming to be viewed over the Web on a PC. Intel first pitched the effort in the spring as the Open Digital Broadcast Initiative.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 7/31/98)
Just two weeks after Siemens A.G. denied rumors it would sell its chip division and reaffirmed its commitment to DRAMs, the company announced plans to close its North Tyneside semiconductor plant in northern England in what it called "a capacity adjustment."
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