(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Equator Technology Inc. is developing programmable processor architectures that will add multimedia features to computers and consumer electronics, and it expects to accomplish its work almost entirely in software.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Analog Devices Inc. has signed on ECI Telecom, Patton Electronics Inc. and Advanced Computer Communications Inc. as customers for its single-chip ADSP-21mod870 central-office modem, augmenting a design win last year with Digi International Inc.'s DataFire boards.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
AMP Inc.'s board of directors has unanimously voted to recommend that shareholders reject AlliedSignal Inc.'s offer to buy the company for $44.50 per share in cash.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
The patent dispute between Nortel and the vendors of VMEbus and CompactPCI boards heated up this week, with legal letters flying fast and furiously on both sides.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Feng-hsiung Hsu, an unassuming researcher at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., has changed the game of chess forever.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
The content-addressable memory market, virtually owned until now by Music Semiconductor Inc. and Kawasaki LSI, will have two new entrants this summer who hope to lower the cost of using CAMs as lookup tables in routers and switches.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
U.K. workstation maker Tadpole Technology plc will acquire U.S. rival RDI Computer Co. (Carlsbad, Calif.) for cash, the companies said Thursday.
(10:45 a.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Speculation of an imminent acquisition of Ambit Design Systems Inc. by Cadence Design Systems Inc. was at least partially responsible for a sudden drop yesterday in the shares of Synopsys Inc., observers said. Synopsys' stock dropped nearly 12 percent to close at 31 3/16 and other EDA suppliers suffered smaller losses on the day.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/20/98)
The MathWorks Inc. has formed a joint development partnership with Algorex Inc. (Iselin, N.J.) intended to speed the development of DSP simulation tools for cellular telephone and wireless communications.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/20/98)
With principals drawn from GEC Plessey, Synopsys, BellSouth Wireless, and Cadence, a new company has been formed to create intellectual-property cores for reconfigurable baseband chip sets used in third-generation (3G) handsets.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/20/98)
The Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (Jeida) has boiled down a draft standard for a digital interface between flat display monitors and personal computers.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/20/98)
In a wide-ranging joint development agreement, Fujitsu Ltd. and Hitachi Ltd. will cooperate on new core technologies aimed at reducing the cost and improving the picture quality of plasma display panels (PDPs).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/20/98)
Creative Labs Inc. demoed SoundBlaster Live! here recently and guess what — the new audio card is not 100 percent SoundBlaster compatible.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/20/98)
When Canadian distributor Future Electronics Inc. began to carry the products of Texas Instruments Inc., some of its applications engineers needed to learn about the capabilities of TI's C54X digital signal processors.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
Armed with a new Web site dedicated to beefing up the nation's high-tech work force, U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley continued to push for state and national training programs designed to overcome a projected IT-worker shortfall.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
Shedding the last vestiges of the old Zycad Corp., GateField Corp. has forged two alliances to support its ProASIC line of programmable-logic devices. In addition to giving GateField better market visibility, its deals with Actel Corp. and Rohm Co. Ltd. will transform it into a fabless chip house and provide it with some much-needed cash.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
The Taiwanese are struggling to bring their world-renowned cost-cutting ability to the production of plasma display panels. In mid-September, Acer Display Technology (ADT) will begin sampling a 42-inch PDP and then will work on halving its power consumption and price. "The price has to drop by half before the market can mature," said H.B. Chen of ADT.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
Continuing its aggressive legal defense against charges of illegally copying source code, Avant! Corp. has filed a response to Cadence Design Systems Inc.'s July motion to ban Avant!'s Aquarius place-and-route product from the market.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
Intel Corp.'s latest initiative has nothing to do with promoting a new technology. Instead, the microprocessor giant is trying to stomp out an existing one — the venerable Industry Standard Architecture bus. Intel has assembled a tiger team that aims to eliminate ISA from new PCs by the year 2000.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
Semiconductor equipment orders fell to their lowest level of the year in July, and the industry's 0.69 book-to-bill ratio for the month indicates continuing problems with excess manufacturing capacity and Asia's economic crisis.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
In a bid to increase its use of commercial technologies on the battlefield, the Pentagon will appeal to the high-tech industry to provide dual-use technologies ranging from networks to sensors.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/19/98)
The continued growth of digital wireless communication applications will help drive a 20 percent increase in the sale of programmable DSP chips in 1998, when the market will reach $3.9 billion, according to a new report from Forward Concepts.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
The lines have been drawn in Europe for a battle over cable-modem standards between a European-developed version, known as DVB/Davic or DVB-RC, and the U.S.-developed multimedia cable network system (MCNS).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
Five long years ago, a Silicon Valley startup called Chromatic Research Inc. burst on the scene in a media blitz, trumpeting its plans to build a new kind of PC component — a media processor — based on an emerging technique known as VLIW and sold on a new business model it dubbed the "chipless" chip company.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
As IBM, Sharp, Motorola and others prepare to use silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor technology, EDA vendors have looked at the implications for design tools and concluded that SOI doesn't pose huge tool challenges, but will require new models and possibly new methodologies.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
Texas Instruments Inc. is bringing out a number of proprietary analog parts in the hope of setting the market standard. As the market leader in custom analog circuits, TI wants to lead in standardized building blocks as well. The company has already announced thrusts in data converters, and is forging ahead in audio amplifiers and in-line drivers for low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
There's a reason for the RMM's orientation to block authoring, said coauthor Michael Keating, director of engineering at Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). Referring to intellectual property, he said, "If IP is created to be easy to use, the integration effort is relatively straightforward. The game is really won or lost in how you create IP."
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
Intel Corp. has conceded defeat in its effort to promote the Miniature Card flash-memory module as the de facto standard for portable consumer electronics devices, leaving the rival CompactFlash and SmartMedia camps to battle for dominance in the small-form-factor flash-card market.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
Nascent display technologies could hold the key to the industry's holy grail: bright, flexible, thin, low-cost displays that might one day replace television and laptop computer screens, or form the pages of a portable electronic book. Research work includes investigation of bacterial protein, white capsules floating in oil, and particles suspended in a glue.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
Silicon Graphics Inc. last week delivered a 512-processor module of the supercomputer known as Blue Mountain to Los Alamos National Laboratory, bringing the lab a step closer to solving one of the most critical computing problems facing the United States: accurate simulation testing of the nation's aging nuclear weapons.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
Burr-Brown Corp. is expected to take the wraps off a 14-bit analog-to-digital converter that breaks ground in terms of speed and resolution.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/18/98)
As IBM Corp. and other major semiconductor makers push strongly into silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, new research suggests that even denser circuits could be realized in SOI than in CMOS.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/17/98)
Xicor Inc. has commercialized a extremely small ball-grid array packaging technology developed by an Israeli startup, ShellCase Ltd. (Jerusalem).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/17/98)
Concluding a portion of one of the more controversial subjects it's tackled, the Virtual Socket Interface (VSI) Alliance this week announces phase one of its on-chip bus specification.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
When it briefs the industry about its next-generation Carmel chip set here next month, Intel Corp. will also be detailing a path for Direct Rambus memories to find their way into workstations and servers. But server makers here and in the United States are showing some reluctance in just how fast they want to go down that road, especially for high-end systems that might need larger memory sizes and more elaborate error-correction code than Rambus may cost-effectively deliver.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
Nortel is taking action to enforce a patent portfolio with component, board and system makers that base products on the IEEE 1101.10 packaging standards. Observers say this may be the tip of an iceberg of patent imbroglios involving open architectures for board-level computers.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
Proponents of millimeter-wave broadband systems are still smarting from the lukewarm response to the FCC's 28-GHz auctions, which raised a less-than-stellar $570 million from a smaller-than-expected pool of carriers. In a lunch address at the latest IEEE Radio & Wireless Conference (Rawcon '98), National Telecommunication & Information Administration head Larry Irving told local multipoint distribution service (LMDS) developers that they are perhaps the last great hope for "last-mile" broadband services. But much is riding on their ability to get the cost out of their systems.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/14/98)
Hector Ruiz isn't done yet. The president of Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector hopes to craft the sprawling chip division into a new kind of silicon provider. Neither fully fabless nor dependent on its own high-volume manufacturing clout, it would share with a handful of high-volume chip makers its leading-edge process technology for systems-on-chips that would plug into a growing market for embedded communications systems.
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