(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
Top Pentagon officials today ordered a department-wide review of all of its public Internet sites, fearing that the copious information on Department of Defense Web sites could be pieced together to endanger military personnel and operations.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
Reversing a statement made public in March, General Instrument Corp. has acknowledged that Quantum Effect Design Inc. (QED), a high-speed, high-performance MIPS RISC design house based in Santa Clara, Calif., may be losing out on a huge design win for a key CPU in millions of GI's advanced interactive digital cable set-top boxes.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
Electronics companies hailed and engineering groups decried a congressional compromise bill that passed the House on Thursday permitting U.S. high-tech companies to hire substantially higher numbers of foreign programmers and other information-technology workers over the next three years under the H-1B visa program.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
National Semiconductor Corp. and IBM Corp. have agreed to end the wafer manufacturing and marketing agreement IBM has with Cyrix, National's wholly owned subsidiary.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
California Microwave Inc. has purchased Adaptive Broadband Ltd., a spin-off of Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL), for $11 million in cash.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
The five developers of the Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) method announced on Wednesday that DTCP licenses are now available to interested parties through a formally established, independent licensing authority called the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
A debate over which supplier is able to deliver the fastest read-channel ICs for hard-disk drives flared at this week's Discon conference. The debate is focused on, but not limited to, a dicsussion of process technology.
(10:30 a.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
Stung by lingering overcapacity and the collapse of once-promising businesses, Cirrus Logic Inc. is remaking itself by trimming product lines and rethinking its fab ventures in the hope of improving profits quickly.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
Craig Barrett, president and chief executive officer of Intel Corp., emphasized the importance of the StrongARM processor architecture to Intel this week and said it would be used to address two of the company's three target markets.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
The rift between Intel Corp. and high-end computer makers seemed to widen this week as the Tandem division of Compaq Computer Corp. said it will use the next-generation Alpha processor in its future fault-tolerant NonStop Himalaya systems.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
In pursuit of the volume consumer digital TV market, Siemens Microelectronics Inc. has rolled out a scan rate conversion IC designed to convert NTSC interlaced images into progressive scan output.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
Once 16 bits of dynamic range and a 44.1-kHz sampling rate was the best technology audio engineers could muster to digitize a musical waveform, but advances in semiconductor technology have given professional audio-mixing consoles the benefit a 24-bit dynamic range and 96-kHz sampling rates. New parts scheduled for introduction at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention next week will undoubtedly drive that assumption home.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
Intel Corp. has hired Mark McDermott, who formerly ran Motorola Inc.'s Somerset design center, to head up its newly formed Texas Development Center.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. Ltd. (Yokohama, Japan), has developed a DVD-based car-navigation system that also features a DVD-video playback capability.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
Reacting to a barrage of criticism from the EDA community about starting yet another standards organization, the Frequency Technology-backed Open SIPPs Initiative (OSI) is now seeking to join an existing standards body. The organization was launched earlier this week to develop a standard way to model IC interconnect.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/24/98)
Not enough is known about specific neurotransmitters' effects to enable engineers to build electronic brains. As a result, blueprints of the brain have been meticulously dissected and cataloged, but no one knows how to read these blueprints. However, researchers at Stanford University have begun to determine precisely what circuits neurotransmitters enable in the brain, thereby permitting engineers to read the brain's blueprint and eventually emulate it electronically.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
Craig Barrett criticized the French government and repeated warnings made by Andrew Grove, his predecessor as president and chief executive of Intel Corp., in an address to a European audience this week.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) have agreed to collaborate on basic technology research in the computer and telecommunications arena.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
A silver lining in the erratic job market is that it's producing rare opportunities for companies to hire entire groups of engineers in one bold move.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
The financial and political crisis in Russia is creating a dilemma for U.S. companies doing business there: Do they continue to invest in the business relationships that may mean write-offs for another year or more, or do they risk losing partners by suspending operations until the business climate improves?
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
Harris Corp. is in the middle of restructuring several microwave-communications operations into a new unified sector, while the communication division of its semiconductor sector retains its focus on wireless data. Harris Semi is using its Prism architecture as the key to bringing down costs for direct-sequence spread-spectrum radio.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
International Rectifier Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) is expected to announce plans for an electronic module assembly plant at a site in south Wales. If the company proceeds, the plant could employ about 500 people when fully operational.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/23/98)
Chinese startups and overseas suppliers of digital compression chips are gearing up to do battle in China as the market for MPEG-2 decoders heats up.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
TRW Inc. (Redondo Beach, Calif.) will develop military receivers and signal-processing gear based on indium-phosphide technology under a three-year, $5.2 million contract awarded by the U.S. Air Force's Wright Laboratories.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Applied Science Fiction (Austin, Texas) has unveiled a "photo-repair" software technology that restores faded photographs to their original colors, the company said.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Quickturn Design Systems Inc. has stepped up its defenses against a hostile takeover attempt by Mentor Graphics Corp. by mailing a proxy solicitation to shareholders this week. The solicitation asks shareholders to state their resistance to Mentor's proposals by returning a blue proxy card to Mentor.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Protel International Pty. Ltd. has acquired MicroCode Engineering Inc. (Orem, Utah), an eight-man Spice simulator startup. Terms were not disclosed.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
A key lawmaker has blasted NASA's proposal to seek $660 million in additional funding to pay the Russian Space Agency for components that will be needed for the International Space Station.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
As it strengthens its ties to Sega Enterprises Ltd., NEC Electronics Inc. is preparing its PowerVR 3-D architecture for an assault later this year on the fiercely competitive market for PC graphics controllers. The move is part of a strategy to drive the company's 0.25-micron PowerVR into volume production by spinning out PowerVR chips that are identical at their core, varying only in peripheral interfaces and control functions.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are finally beginning to crack some high-volume markets, but the technology still needs some serious infrastructure building to fulfill its potential, said organizers of the Commercialization of Microsystems '98 conference.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Three-Five Systems Inc. and Motorola Inc. have started selective sampling of miniature-display monitors to OEMs. The unique characteristics of tiny, high-resolution minidisplays offer designers opportunities for innovation, coupled with integration challenges. The full-fledged minimonitor simplifies the integration chore, giving the designer an out-of-the-box display platform to build on, rather than a disattached component.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
NEC Corp. said it will raise prices on 64-Mbit DRAMs by 10 percent this month and cap its output volume by December to prevent further losses in the oversupplied memory market. Analysts said the move could spur a chain reaction among DRAM suppliers.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Billed as a "merger of equals," the joining of Summit Design Inc. and OrCAD Inc. brings together two very different EDA companies serving different markets, and foreshadows a possible convergence between the market's traditionally disparate "high-end" and "shrink-wrapped" segments.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
Despite the European Telecommunication Standards Institute's strong support of Wideband CDMA for a third-generation (3G) digital cellular air interface, backers of Time Division Multiple Access standards aren't folding up their tents and going home. The Universal Wireless Communications Consortium (UWCC) that backs TDMA kicked off the Personal Communications Showcase '98 conference on Tuesday with expanded efforts to harmonize its broadband proposals with those of ETSI's Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (Edge) proposals.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
VLSI Technology Inc. and Macronix International Co said on Monday that they will cooperatively design and produce system-on-a-chip products that utilize embedded flash memory. Initial production is set to begin in early 1999.
(7:00 a.m., EDT, 9/22/98)
In a push into the notebook computing market, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has rolled out the AMD-K6/300 microprocessor and a mobile processor road map that extends through the first half of 1999.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/21/98)
Materials scientists, chemists and engineers at Molecular Opto Electronics Corp. (MOEC) have discovered a new form of plastic that could offer a cheap substitute for more expensive non-linear optical materials.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/21/98)
Though it's difficult to estimate power at the behavioral level, Synopsys Inc. has added power optimization to its existing Behavioral Compiler synthesis tool. The new feature, based on clock gating, promises power savings on the order of 20 percent to 25 percent with "minimal" area impact.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/21/98)
The VMEbus community's resistance to paying patent-licensing fees and royalties to Nortel for what that company calls patented technology came to a head last week at a meeting of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/21/98)
Acorn Group plc has cancelled its "Phoebe" RISC PC2 project as part of a restructuring effort, effectively signaling the end of its involvement in the computer systems market. The company will also be laying off about 75 of its 175 workers.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/21/98)
Researchers at Toshiba Corp. have borrowed two ideas — one fairly well understood, the other new and unorthodox — to develop a process that protects delicate 0.1-micron transistors from potentially ruinous damage by high-temperature process steps.
(7:30 a.m., EDT, 9/21/98)
A new industry organization, Open SIPPs International (OSI), will debut this week with a promise to forge a standard approach for modeling IC interconnect. Spearheaded by EDA vendor Frequency Technology Inc. and using that company's modeling technology as a starting point, the alliance intends to enlist EDA, systems and semiconductor vendors to hammer out standard interconnect performance parameters (SIPPs).
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
Intel Corp. demonstrated the first Merced software ever booted up in public when it showcased a 64-bit version of Windows NT in a presentation at the Intel Developer Forum. The demo ran on a sophisticated software emulator that mimics the complete Merced instruction set, the chip's firmware-processor interface, and its multiprocessing interrupts.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
Technology for the Internet's backbone took two steps forward this past week when one startup unveiled its long-awaited terabit router and another showed movement toward an all-optical switch. But the debate raged on at the National Fiber Optics Engineering Conference over how to streamline thickening software layers supporting Internet Protocol over ATM, Sonet and wavelength-division multiplexing.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
A component failure in a missile-seeker system could delay further testing of the Theater High-Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) system, the Pentagon said on Friday.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
The apparent demise of active-matrix-LCD maker OIS Optical Imaging Systems Inc. has put a spotlight on the Defense Department's long-running struggle to sustain domestic suppliers of key technologies.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
Formal links are being proposed between the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Europe's three official electronics-related standard's bodies, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), based here, Centre d'European Normalization (CEN; Brussels) and electrotechnical standards body Cenelec.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
Motorola Inc. has postponed indefinitely its West Creek "megasite" here, saying that restarting development of the research and manufacturing complex would depend on improvements in semiconductor demand. The facility was to have made systems-solution ICs, using 300-mm wafers.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/18/98)
The Semiconductor Industry Association has endorsed a compromise legislative plan for handling year-2000 disclosure issues that encourages businesses to share vital problem-solving information about bugs.
RSS
