(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
Fujitsu Ltd. and Philips Consumer Electronics have undertaken joint development of plasma display panel (PDP) modules with an eye toward increasing their performance and cost-effectiveness for use in consumer flat-screen TVs.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
A wave of cautionary words broke over a session on high-bandwidth services to the home at the sixth Hot Interconnects conference. In separate papers, researchers warned of unsolved problems looming on the near horizon for both Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services and for cable modems.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
Broadcom Corp. has lined up a roster of customers and partners behind its planned implementation of physical-layer transceivers for 1000 Base T, the future 802.3ab standard for Gigabit Ethernet over Category 5 unshielded twisted-pair wire.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
The sixth annual IEEE Computer Society Hot Interconnects conference documented the start of deployment for two new interchip communications technologies here Thursday.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
Mathematician Andre Weil, whose work greatly influenced modern mathematical thought, died Aug. 6 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 92.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/13/98)
Symbios Inc. and Veritas Software Corp. have linked up to address the increasingly complex storage-system industry. The two will leverage Symbios' expertise in RAID systems and Veritas' knowledge of storage-system software.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/13/98)
The IEEE-USA is looking to attract a younger, broader crowd to its next Professional Activities Committee for Engineers (PACE) conference, which will be held in Phoenix this coming Labor Day weekend with the theme, "Preparing for the New Millennium."
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/13/98)
The U.S. computer industry is seeking broader protection from liability if its fix of the year 2000 programming bug fails to solve the problem.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/13/98)
Startup Stellar Semiconductor Inc. has detailed a 3-D graphics engine that will be capable of a sustained rendering performance of 200 million pixels per second. The single-chip VelaTX rendering engine, which will be described at the Hot Chips Conference in Palo Alto, Calif., incorporates an embedded Multibank DRAM core from MoSys Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). Targeting high-end PC gaming apps, it packs 2.5 Mbytes of embedded DRAM solely to store 3-D textures.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/13/98)
Sales of embedded memory, especially embedded DRAM, are expected to grow sharply over the next few years, according to a new report by Semico Research Corp.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/12/98)
Spurred by a patent-infringement lawsuit that has locked it out of the U.S. emulation marketplace, Mentor Graphics Corp. has launched a hostile takeover bid of Quickturn Design Systems Inc (San Jose, Calif.)., the emulation market leader.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/12/98)
Microcosm Technologies Inc. this fall will offer the initial release of FlumeCAD (fluid-molecular CAD), which it is calling the first integrated CAD system for the emerging "biochip" industry. The tool suite will facilitate a new generation of complex, microfabricated chemical-transport and -analysis systems, the company said.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/12/98)
Wi-LAN Inc., the baseband wireless specialist that has long promoted orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) as a high-speed wireless LAN technology, has garnered unexpected support from the IEEE's 802.11a group working on standards for 5-GHz broadband-wireless LAN/MANs.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/12/98)
The National Wireless Electronic Systems Testbed (N-West) will work with a new Industry Standards and Technology Council inside the IEEE to speed the development of standard interfaces for broadband wireless networks.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/12/98)
Microcom Technologies is juicing up Partminer, its applications software that searches Web sites for information about electronic components, in preparation to spin off a separate company in the coming weeks dedicated to the software.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/12/98)
Intermedius Design Integration LLC, the two-person spin-off of Mentor Graphics Corp., has released Version 4.0 of the Intermediate Data Format (IDF), a file-format specification for exchanging printed-circuit-assembly information between board-layout and mechanical-design and -analysis applications.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
The High-Altitude, Long-Operation (HALO) aircraft, which has been designed to carry a communications payload composed of an antenna array with an aggregate bandwidth of 16 Gbits/second, took a maiden test flight July 26 and will undergo a series of tests Sept. 22 in the Mojave Desert.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s EESof division has unveiled the first fruits of the library-sharing agreement it reached last February with BNeD GmbH (Berlin), under which optical and electronic library modules can be combined in a system for full photonic system design.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
In the face of a struggling chip market and a prolonged bout with the Asian flu, EDA industry revenue grew 21.6 percent in the first quarter of 1998 to $447 million, according the Market Statistics Survey released last week by the EDA Consortium (EDAC).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
Chapter 7 of the manual shows designers how to set up a verification methodology and how to design testbenches. It also suggests that static timing analysis is the best way to verify timing.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
IBM Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center has broadened the range of devices it is producing in silicon germanium technology and tipped its development plans for future SiGe parts.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
The Semiconductor Industry Asociation is forging ahead with its Focus Center Research Program (FCRP), which it calls the most ambitious semiconductor research project since the formation of Sematech in 1987. The program is ultimately expected to pump up to $60 million per year into long-range university research in design, test and interconnect for ICs.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
An undergraduate team at Cooper Union university has developed a digital logic concept that has not previously been attempted by any manufacturer of microwave components.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
As it prepares its bid to make the Alpha microprocessor architecture an industry standard for 64-bit computing, Compaq Computer Corp. has lost one of the seminal engineers behind the Alpha program. Dan Dobberpuhl, an early architects of Alpha, left the company last Fridayto join an unnamed startup.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
The Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) Alliance has taken on new leadership with the election of Howard Sachs as president for the 1998-99 term. Sachs succeeds Doug Fairbairn, who served two consecutive terms as VSI's first president.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/11/98)
Microwave Power Devices Inc. (MPD) has warned that its third-quarter revenues and earnings per share will be lower because one of its major commercial customers has delayed initial production ramp-up of a wireless program, thus providing a clue that programs involving the wireless communication infrastructure may be affected by the Asian economic crisis and the electronics industry slowdown.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/10/98)
Keyware Technologies (Brussels, Belgium) and STMicroelectronics have jointly announced plans to collaborate on the development of a voiceprint identification system that implements Keyware's calls Layered Biometric Verification (LBV) technology and a specialized DSP chip from STM.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/10/98)
Ground-breaking work in interconnect modeling is bearing fruit as part of a Sematech contract awarded in late 1996 to Lucent's Bell Labs Design Automation (BLDA) group. That company and its partners, Ultima Interconnect Technology (Santa Clara, Calif.) and OEA International (Santa Clara), already have three new products under beta test and more on the way.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/10/98)
As a growing number of high-frequency communications applications emerge, demand will rise for engineers to measure and quantify the problems that come with the applications' complimetary high-speed interconnects.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/10/98)
Sirf Technology Inc. has set itself an ambitious goal. The vendor of global positioning system silicon hopes to see its GPS core integrated into nearly half of all cellular phones sold in the United States over the next several years, and it has lined up some heavyweight help to get there, including the world's two leading cell-phone makers.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/10/98)
Forging a strategic partnership for low-power system-on-chip design, Frontier Design BV and Xemics SA (Neuchatel, Switzerland) this week will announce their intent to pool intellectual-property libraries and design services. The agreement targets low-voltage, high-power chips with mixed-signal, microcontroller and memory cores, as well as custom logic.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/10/98)
A major breakthrough announced last month by Planar Systems Inc. involving electroluminescent (EL) displays was made possible by refinements and modifications to several facets of the display's subsystem, rather than by fundamental changes in the light-emitting technology itself.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
Texas Instruments Inc. has revealed details of its process-technology road map and product directions as the semiconductor giant reshapes itself into a company focused on digital signal processors.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
As consumer-electronics companies scramble to set real-time operating-system and middleware strategies for a dizzying roster of digital products, Microsoft's Windows CE may appear to have sewn up the market, with heavyweights Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, Philips and, most recently, Thomson all having licensed the operating system. But a closer look at some consumer companies' strategies reveals that they have taken a CE license as a strategic hedge that gives them an option to tap the technology for some equipment but does not constitute a mandate to apply it across product categories.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
Clinton administration officials did little this past week to dispel lawmakers' fears about continuing budget shortfalls and schedule slips for the International Space Station, saying a strategy for fixing the program won't be ready until early next year.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
Recent turmoil at Abstract Inc., a small provider of formal-verification tools, reflects a larger upheaval in that overcrowded and fiercely competitive business. With the market entry of Synopsys Inc., Cadence Design Systems Inc. and, ultimately, Mentor Graphics Corp., small companies are fighting for survival in equivalency checking and are contemplating the difficult leap to model checking.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/7/98)
In a deal that will bring on-chip DRAM a step closer, Silicon Access Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. have announced a partnership for embedded DRAM that will make customizable cores and DRAM compilers available for TSMC's 0.25 micron process.
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