(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
Hitachi Semiconductor will make a frontal assault on an emerging sector of the microcontroller market today when it rolls out 20 new MCUs with embedded flash capabilities ranging up to 512 kbytes.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), based here, has hit back at the United States over the future of third-generation mobile communications standards. In an open letter to Rep. Philip Crane, R-Ill., chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee, ETSI protested recent moves by Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) that threaten to delay or even derail the development of the European and Japanese versions of the so-called "3G" spec.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
Lattice Semiconductor Corp. (Hillsboro, Ore.) is to open an R&D facility in the Bristol area of the West of England later this year. The site will develop ICs within Lattice's range of in-system programmable-logic devices. Lattice expects to employ 30 engineers at the center by the end of 1999 and may eventually employ up to 100 engineers there.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
Vision Group plc, the developer of CMOS image sensors based here, is negotiating a worldwide marketing agreement with Siemens AG (Munich, Germany). The announcement is expected to end speculation that Vision could be the subject of a takeover.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
The Intel Developers Forum, planned for Sept. 15-17, is expected to focus on Intel's approaches to content protection for digital video. Jim Pappas, director of technology initiatives, said Intel will disclose its latest work on the Digital Transmission of Content Protection (DTCP) initiative, launched last year with Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
Texas Instruments Inc. announced that by 2001 it will be ready to manufacture ICs on a 0.13-micron process that will support 1-Ghz DSPs, with operating voltages in the 1-V range. The combination of density, speed, power and mixed-signal capability is essential to doing system-on-silicon type ICs, said Peter Rickert, a senior member of the technical staff.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
Reversing the conventional fab sequence, a Fujitsu Ltd. scheme packages all the devices on a wafer before dicing them into separate chips. The so-called "wafer molding" technique, demonstrated here last week, enables processing in one batch, from fabrication to assembly, Fujitsu said, and permits testing in wafer form.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
A new open consortium of instrument users, system integrators and vendors is setting the stage for interchangeable instruments in test systems, much as any PC user can replace any printer without writing new software.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
The immigration visa issue has refused to die. Thus far, the standoff between the White House-which opposes laxer restrictions-and Congress, which favors letting more engineers in, has yet to be resolved. In the annual EE Times "Salary & Opinion Survey" the 1998 anonymous respondents come down on the side of Congress and high-tech corporations: Fully 60 percent of the U.S. engineers and managers said they do not think immigration levels are too high and don't favor cutting them back.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
Canon U.S.A. Inc. is pushing into the high-speed, high-volume copier market with a host of new products, including digital multifunction production systems that integrate copier, scanner and printer. The Japanese-owned company hopes to conquer the copier market's high end, where Xerox Corp. has reigned virtually unchallenged for years, while fending off incursions from such leading printer companies as Hewlett-Packard Co. as document-production solutions move toward converged, digital products.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
Kymata Ltd. has received $1.6 million in seed capital from London-based venture company 3i Ltd. to begin work on silica-on-silicon optical ICs. Such devices will use waveguides, junctions, gratings and the like-etched in a glass layer on a silicon substrate-to process signals from optical fibers bonded to the edge of the device.
(10:30 a.m., EDT, 8/27/98)
Graphics-accelerator chip maker ATI Technologies aims to grab a share of the PC workstation market with two devices that improve 2-D and 3-D rendering, and integrate a DVD encoder and HDTV support.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
The performance boundaries between microprocessors aimed at the low and high ends of the PC market continue to blur, with Intel Corp. introducing faster models of its Celeron and Pentium II processors and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. rolling out a souped-up version of the K6-2.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
A consortium of battery and materials manufacturers here is developing dedicated materials for solar batteries in hopes of addressing a materials-supply shortage that came to light last year. The seven founding companies, working with an office of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, say a dedicated supply of solar-grade silicon (SOG) will lower solar batteries' manufacturing costs and open the door to volume production for the residential market.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
An interlaced driving method for plasma display panels promises to brighten the picture and lower the cost of high-definition PDPs. Based on technology used in VGA PDPs, the scheme could lower the cost of those panels as well, said Fujitsu Ltd., the method's developer.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
There's $10,000 to be had by the designer who comes up with the best new virtual-display application based on Kopin Corp.'s miniature CyberDisplay or Motorola's packaged version of it, the VirtuoVue display module. Second-, third- and fourth-prize winners will receive cash awards of $5,000, $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. The contest closes on Oct. 30.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
Long a niche specialty, high-end PC audio is working its way into the mainstream retail market, as the most recognizable names in multimedia add-in cards are releasing products to run high-quality sound and 3-D audio effects across the PCI bus.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
Yields of 0.25-micron parts have reached 70 percent for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., supporting the foundry's efforts to stay among the leaders in manufacturing technology.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/26/98)
Succumbing to the continued market recession, Applied Materials Inc. has announced layoffs of 2,000 and a restructuring charge that will result in losses for the company's fourth quarter, ending in October.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
Philips Semiconductors is preparing to publicly launch R.E.A.L., its long-rumored digital signal processing (DSP) architecture, at the DSP World/ICSPAT conference in Toronto next month, sources told EE Times.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
Emerging local multipoint distribution services (LMDS) carriers are banding together to form a working group that will lobby Congress and government agencies on behalf of the fledgling wireless industry.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
In another sign that pure foundries are moving closer to an ASIC business model, Avant! Corp. has announced a pact with Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (WSMC) to jointly develop tools and libraries.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
To save employees from driving up to two hours along I-680 to reach its corporate offices in San Jose, Calif., Cadence Design Systems Inc. has set up a satellite office in Pleasanton, Calif. where engineers and administrators can work for a few hours or a full day when they're not needed at headquarters 40 miles away.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
Fluke Corp. has signed a development pact with Orckit Communications Ltd. (Folsom, Calif.) to develop test equipment that will interoperate with the SpeedPort DSL Access Multiplexer jointly offered by Orckit and Fujitsu Network Communications Inc.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
Recently completed interoperability tests by Copper Mountain Networks Inc. and Xedia Corp. demonstrated that Xedia's AccessPoint hardware provides Internet Protocol traffic shaping and bandwidth management for DSL access lines in Copper's CopperEdge 200 Multi-speed DSL central office concentrator and CopperRocket DSL customer-premises subscriber modem.
(11:10 a.m., EDT, 8/25/98)
The EDA verification market became a battlefield with Quickturn Design Systems Inc.'s decision this week to resist a takeover attempt by rival Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/24/98)
Raising the bar for flash memory storage capacity, Hitachi Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corp. have announced a jointly developed 256-Mbit flash chip based on the AND architecture and employing multilevel cell technology.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/24/98)
The traditional library model was upended today when Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and models vendor Artisan Components announced they will give away Artisan libraries to TSMC customers.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/24/98)
Graphics-chip vendor ATI Technologies Inc. has become a key supplier of 3-D graphics ICs for General Instrument Corp.'s advanced two-way digital set-top box. The move marks ATI's first entry into a non-PC, consumer system market.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/24/98)
Intel Monday will roll out a long-awaited update of its Celeron processor equipped with Level 2 cache for the sub-$1,000 PC market. The Celeron 300A and Celeron 333, based on the so-called Mendocino design, perform at 300 MHz and 333 MHz, respectively. Priced at $139 and $179, they won't fatten Intel's profit margins, but they will give the company more competitive offerings for this low-end market.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
A growing struggle for bandwidth ran through the papers at the 10th annual IEEE Computer Society Hot Chips Conference this past week. Superscalar CPUs became more so, SIMD media-processing extensions proliferated and clock rates rose. But key papers betrayed a rising tension between the appetites of processing cores and the advance in cache speeds.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Add Motorola Inc. to the list of companies that plan to leverage a very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) architecture in a digital signal processor. News that Motorola is betting on VLIW for at least one future DSP may trigger a new round of debate within a growing circle of companies that have tapped, or tripped over, this contentious approach for using software to extend processor performance.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Chip-scale packages (CSPs) could be in short supply next year if its Direct Rambus DRAMs (D-RDRAMs) are quickly adopted, warned Rambus Inc. chief executive officer Geoff Tate. Rambus said it hopes that its 10 RDRAM licensees will ship between 100 million and 200 million D-RDRAMs next year. For density and electrical reasons, Rambus designed its D-RDRAM with chip-scale packaging, but few of Rambus' 14 DRAM partners have installed volume CSP production capability, Tate said.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
Several years ago the powers that be in Europe set a standard for digital cellular telephony. Service providers and manufacturers got behind GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and it swept much of the wireless world — except for the United States, where laissez-faire forces splintered a free market into three or four pieces, each of which took a very long time getting a foothold. The result: Europe has a commanding lead in digital cellular and the United States is playing catch-up.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
The debate over how to bring data and Internet technologies to digital television will come into high relief in the next week as a key industry group convenes here to discuss a set of proposals that has come under fire, just as another scheme begins making the rounds. Microsoft and Thomson have tipped plans to develop a proprietary approach — dubbed "eTV" — and take it to a separate forum in hopes of broadly licensing their technology.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98)
IBM principal architect Timothy Slegel described what he called the world's fastest mainframe — the single-chip G5 System 390 CPU — at the 10th annual IEEE Computer Society Hot Chips Conference earlier this week. In almost every respect it is the architectural antithesis of the present RISC world.
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