(1:00 p.m., EDT, 9/4/98)
Though hiring levels are down from the first half of the year, "the employment outlook for the electronics industry is very healthy," according to Allen Salikof, president and chief executive officer of Management Recruiters International (MRI), a recruitment firm.
(1:00 p.m., EDT, 9/4/98)
Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector will use the IBC '98 broadcasters conference late next week to detail a flexible consumer-electronics platform, dubbed Blackbird, on which many of its hopes are riding.
(1:00 p.m., EDT, 9/4/98)
When members of the House of Representatives went home in mid-August to campaign, pending legislation raising the annual quota of high-tech visas had just slipped off the legislative fast track.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS) of Taiwan will begin volume production next month of the industry's first Pentium II chip set with integrated 3-D graphics. Intel is not scheduled to launch its similar product until early next year.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
Prompted by congressional aides who said opponents of looser immigration-visa requirements were lagging industry lobbying efforts, the IEEE-USA has issued a rare "legislative alert" for its members.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
The small but growing market for DSP design tools will grow more contentious when the DSP World Conference and Exhibition opens in Toronto later this month. HP EEsof (Westlake Village, Calif.) is set to announce tools that put it virtually head-to-head with market leaders Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. Other tool vendors jockeying for position in DSP tools include the Mentor Graphics Corp.'s spinout, Frontier Design (Leuven, Belgium), and Elanix (Westlake Village).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
Zuken Inc. is investing $10 million and reaching out to intellectual-property (IP) providers in the United States to establish a system-on-a-chip design center here. Fueled with the cash, new relationships with IP companies and new tools in development, the pc-board CAD powerhouse hopes to position itself at the leading edge of next-generation chip and board-level design.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
With data-transfer rates of up to 350 Mbits/second, Marvell Semiconductor Inc. believes its 88C3000 and the 88C3100 PRML (Partial Response Maximum Likelihood) read-channel ICs set the new speed record for hard-disk drive read-channels.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
DVD-RAM video recorders will hit the consumer market next year, according to Hitachi Ltd., which demonstrated prototype models in Tokyo this week.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/3/98)
Copper interconnects have hit the marketplace with IBM Corp.'s initial commercial shipments of the 400-MHz PowerPC 750 microprocessor. Apple Computer Inc. is expected to use the processors, which Apple refers to as the G3 MPU.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 9/3/98)
Two of South Korea's three largest chip makers — Hyundai Electronics Industries Co. Ltd and LG Semicon Ltd -have agreed in principle to merge as part of restructuring plan that will affect the country's five largest chaebols, according to Korean news reports.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
Intel Corp. is hoping to ignite sweeping changes in the PC audio and motherboard businesses with new hardware specifications to be studied in depth at the Intel Developer Forum here later this month.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
A former head of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division warned on Wednesday that the government's case against Microsoft Corp. threatens consumers and the credibility of U.S. antitrust enforcement.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
A U.S. magistrate judge here has denied a post-trial motion by Kent Display Systems for a retrial in its patent-infringement suit against American Display Systems Inc. (ADS; Amarillo, Texas), capping an acrimonious dispute over the rights to cholesteric LCDs that began in the middle of 1995.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
Hitachi Ltd. will close its memory IC fabrication facility in Irving, Texas, and lay off 500 people there. The company will also cut 150 workers from its design and sales operations in California.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
The chip industry is learning the hard way that the "money talks" adage also applies to the brave new world of intellectual property trade, even if it means paying someone who is supposed to be part of the same team. Succumbing to such realities, Toshiba is moving forward with a plan to allow its various divisions to buy and sell reusable IP among themselves through inter-departmental licensing deals.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
Aptix Corp. said it will appeal a U.S. district judge's dismissal of the company's antitrust suit against Quickturn Design Systems Inc.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/2/98)
While getting high marks for its R&D, the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and sensor industry has been a real yawner when it comes to commercializing its products. Of the approximately 600 companies involved in MEMS research and development, few get good grades for marketing insight or their ability to attract venture capital funding, according to Roger Grace.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/1/98)
A first glimpse of the smart-compiler software technology that will be the linchpin of Intel Corp.'s IA-64 architecture and its Merced microprocessor is now available. Hewlett-Packard Co. has authorized the release of a research compiler called Trimaran, which is billed as an academic "infrastructure" aimed at enabling universities to develop compiler technology for IA-64.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/1/98)
Third-generation handheld wireless terminals that meet the mobile-communications standards being developed by the International Telecommunications Union's International Mobile Telecommunications 2000 initiative will be design challenges for both hardware and operating system vendors.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/1/98)
QNX Software Systems Ltd. has broadened its processor base beyond the X86 platform with a real-time operating system—called QNX/Neutrino—that supports the PowerPC and MIPS architectures.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/1/98)
A vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) developed here at Gore Photonics could push the promising laser-diode technology into long-haul optical networking. The device operates efficiently at 1,300-nm wavelengths, which makes it a good match for the fiber used in long-haul networks.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/1/98)
Mitsubishi Electric Corp. has decided to close its Durham, N.C., fab, laying off 230 workers. Earlier this year, the company said that the front-end fabrication of 4-Mbit DRAMs would end, and the facility would become a test and assembly facility for newer-generation parts.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 9/1/98)
Siemens AG has sued LG Semicon Co. for patent infringement in a case that may include every 16- or 64-Mbit DRAM ever sold by the Korean company.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 9/1/98)
Quickturn Design Systems, Inc. announced last week that Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted Quickturn's motion for a summary judgment and has dismissed Aptix Corp.'s antitrust suit against Quickturn.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 9/1/98)
National Semiconductor's Cyrix processor division this year will roll out a reduced-voltage version of its MediaGX processor aimed at mini-notebook computers. Japan's Casio Computer Co. Ltd. will be one of the first to employ the processor in its A5 line of notebooks, scheduled to hit shelves here later this year, the companies announced here Tuesday.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 9/1/98)
Avant! Corp. is in the process of acquiring privately held ACEO Technology Inc. (Fremont, Calif.), an ASIC logic-synthesis tool vendor, for an undisclosed amount of money.
(12:00 noon, EDT, 9/1/98)
Despite the gloom that prevades Wall Street in the wake of Monday's diving markets, semiconductor analysts weren't terribly pessimistic and pointed instead to an expected fourth-quarter seasonal improvement in sales, to stock bargains and to early signs of an industry recovery.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
A billion-dollar satellite careens out of orbit, blacking out millions of frustrated wireless communications users. An Internet server goes down, along with the hopes of millions trying to establish a connection. A late-model luxury car laden with advanced electronics suddenly swerves into incoming traffic.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
The Cabling Products Division of Mentor Graphics Corp. is offering a new enterprisewide viewing and cross-referencing technology to the automotive industry, called ViewWare. The technology is in essence an enterprisewide viewing tool that links Mentor's cabling tool, Logical Cable, with related tools used in the automotive and aeronautical industries.
(5:30 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
In a bid to solve some of the fundamental problems in image recognition, a scientist in Israel has extended optical correlator techniques from two dimensions to three.
(5:30 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
Simutech, a startup company run by two EDA veterans, is planning a two-stage assault on the system-on-chip design problem. The company is first planning to offer services that help make legacy intellectual property (IP) reusable, and will then provide "verification acceleration" tools for chips with IP blocks.
(5:30 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
Two xDSL chip pioneers have served notice on semiconductor developers working on either asymmetric or symmetric digital subscriber line modems: Prepare to lower chip-set costs significantly, or see your market disappear.
(5:30 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
Motorola Inc. has produced its first chip for the new G1.9 version of the Flex paging standard. The chip also represents the first attempt at integrating a Flex decoder with a microcontroller, Motorola officials said.
(5:30 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
A Bell Labs scientist here at Lucent Technologies has unveiled a "particle blaster" that detects and analyzes contaminants in real-time during semiconductor fabrication.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
Altera Corp.'s next-generation PLD architecture will ratchet up the competition between programmable logic and hardwired ASICs to the next level: the 100,000- to million-gate battlefield. "This is programmable logic taken to the next level—the system level," said Altera marketing vice president Erik Cleage.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/31/98)
Extending its mission from pc-board CAD to manufacturing, PADS Software is acquiring Advanced CAM Technologies (ACT; Los Gatos, Calif.), a major provider of PC-based computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) tools. The purchase brings the promise of a tighter link among design, fabrication and assembly.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
New digital signal-processing architectures are on the way from two major industry powers. DSP Group is coming out with its long-expected Palm core, a multiple-multiply-accumulator core targeted at cellular-telephone applications. Later this month, at DSP World in Toronto, Philips Semiconductors is scheduled to roll out a pair of architectures under the umbrella name R.E.A.L. DSP.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
Despite pressure from federal regulators to resolve problems in connecting cable set-top boxes to digital TV receivers, industry officials concede that first-generation sets will not be equipped to receive DTV broadcasts via cable. The lack of digital interfaces will force early adopters this Christmas to install the '90s version of rabbit ears on their sets to capture digital signals.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
The EDA verification market has become a battlefield when Quickturn Design Systems moved to resist a takeover attempt by rival Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.). The future of logic emulation, an increasingly vital technology for deep-submicron IC design, may well rest on what's turning into a bitter fight for shareholders' votes.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
The U.S. wireless industry and the government agencies that oversee it are gearing up for battle with European rivals over the technical outlines of a future data-driven communications network.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
Adding significantly to its resources in verification, Cadence Design Systems has announced plans to acquire Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs Design Automation (BLDA) unit. The purchase, which had been expected for several weeks, is part of a deal that includes outsourcing of Cadence design services to Lucent, and a joint development program between Cadence Berkeley Labs and Bell Labs research organizations.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
As the Universal Serial Bus (USB) gains ground in desktop PCs, makers of modem chip sets are maneuvering to take advantage of the flight from PCI and ISA. Lucent Technologies Microelectronics Group and STMicroelectronics (Lexington, Mass.) both have unveiled modem chip setsthat directly attach to the USB.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
NEC Corp. will soon announce a MIPS-based processor core that the company claims can be readily integrated into a system LSI without the painstaking hand-crafting that usually comes with the territory, a company official told EE Times.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 8/28/98)
Spar Aerospace Ltd. announced it would sell its San Diego subsidiary, ComStream Holdings Inc., to Radyne Corp. for $17 million. The deal involves $10 million cash and a $7 million convertible promissory note. Radyne, a member of the Singapore Technologies Group based in Phoenix, expects to take an R&D assumption one-time charge of $6 million, as well as a restructuring charge of $2.5 million. Radyne manufactures digital video modulators and satellite modems.
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