(6:19 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
NEC Corp. has garnered support for its virtual-channel-memory (VCM) SDRAMs from three of Taiwan's top PC-core-logic makers, and the first motherboard prototypes supporting the new architecture are in the offing. The development poses a threat at the low end to the plans of Intel Corp. and Rambus Inc. to drive Direct Rambus as the PC memory of choice starting next year.
(3:50 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
Motorola Inc. is reorganizing its Advanced System Technology Laboratory (ASTL), which was set up only months ago as a repository for the company's intellectual-property cores and as the heart of the company's emerging system-on-a-chip design business. The changes prompted the resignation of Mark McDermott, director of system-on-a-chip (SOC) design technology at the laboratory, who had been charged with developing a cohesive SOC technology strategy for Motorola's $8 billion semiconductor operation.
(10:05 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
In a move awaited by many observers, Viewlogic Systems spun out of Synopsys Inc. today (Oct. 2), in a management buy-out valued at $58.75 million. The spinout creates a new, streamlined EDA company focused on FPGA, board, and "enterprise" design tools.
(5:57 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
With the first electronic book set to debut this month, developers, display makers, software providers, traditional book publishers and academics will convene for a two-day workshop on the emerging technology this coming week in Gaithersburg, Md., hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
(5:59 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
How do "real" publishers see electronic books? According to Carol Risher, an executive with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) who has followed the development of electronic books for 15 years, "functionality and portability are what will make electronic books successful."
(4:44 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
IBM Corp. and Toshiba Corp. have agreed to license their thin film transistor (TFT) LCD production technology to China National Electronics Import and Export Jilin Co. and Jilin Electronics Co. Ltd. (Changchun, China).
(6:04 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
A deadline and court date set for Oct. 6 will be crucial to Quickturn Design Systems Inc.'s defense against the ongoing hostile takeover attempt by Mentor Graphics Corp.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
Two competing formats for digital still cameras — Exif and the Camera Image File Format (CIFF) — will be unified by the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association (JEIDA).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
Intel Corp. will kick its workstation and server CPU strategy up a notch next Tuesday when it debuts the 450-MHz version of its Xeon processor. The new device will join the 400-MHz Xeon that debuted in June.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
Members of the EDA industry sounded a note of agreement on industry basics in a panel discussion this week, and disagreement on almost everything else.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
PMC-Sierra Inc. is trying to stay ahead of the number of telecom OEM customers asking for packet-over-Sonet functions by working with the Saturn (Sonet/ATM User Network) coalition to draft a physical-layer (PHY) extension to existing Saturn specs for ATM (asynchronous transfer mode).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/02/98)
Looking to become the first EDA vendor with a full register-transfer level tool suite for ASIC sign-off, Avant! Corp. said it has acquired ACEO Technology Inc., a synthesis startup, and has signed a letter of intent to acquire InterHDL Inc., front-end tool company.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
Texas Instruments Inc. will take the wraps off a power-supply controller next week that will support Intel Corp.'s upcoming Merced processor. The TPS5210 breaks new ground in transient response and current-handling capability, and is being released as details emerge of Merced's power requirements and architecture.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
Two competing U.S. wireless specs proposed for a next-generation global communications network will be merged into a single proposal.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
The Slot 2 connectors that Molex Inc. will roll out next week for Intel Corp.'s Pentium II Xeon processor will employ novel techniques to satisfy requirements set by Intel and Molex when they began working together in 1994. The connectors borrow circuit board techniques to handle higher speeds while increasing contact density.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
Fourteen software, electronics and technology systems companies have made Working Mother magazine's annual list of "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers."
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
Gordon Moore, cofounder and now chairman emeritus of Intel Corp., and his wife will give $12.5 million to Cambridge University to establish an advanced science and technology library.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
Hope for intellectual-property (IP) companies might be short-lived, based on the views of a panel of analysts who convened here this week. Commodity IP isn't a sustainable business model, and only a rarefied few IP companies will be blessed with large-scale success in the future, speakers said.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
The Amoco Foundation is launching a $2.5 million initiative to increase the percentage of minority students in engineering programs and to keep them in those programs. Under the Minority Engineering Recruitment and Retention Initiative, the foundation is issuing grants of $15,000 to $50,000 a year to organizations, schools and colleges with programs designed to boost minority participation in engineering.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 10/01/98)
A European research program is starting work on designs in the areas of digital video broadcasting and industrial control. The program also plays a key role in helping Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) develop tools to handle codesign of hardware and software under its Felix initiative.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
More than anything, dual-career couples want flexibility in their workplaces and careers, according to a new survey by Catalyst (New York).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
Two major disk-player suppliers, Sony Corp. and Pioneer Electronic Corp., have joined the race to develop a blue laser based on gallium nitride. Both trail the current leader, Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. Blue lasers or shorter wavelength violet lasers will be in big demand for next-generation storage and communications systems.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
Philsar Electronics, an RF- and DSP-design house, plans to move into the merchant semiconductor market by year's end. The five-year-old company is using sigma-delta conversion technology to develop novel bandpass A/D and D/A converters, as well as fractional-N frequency synthesizers, to apply "software-defined radio" concepts to RF/IF chains.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
Cable Web Services Inc. is bucking industry trends as it sets out to provide broadband Internet-access services for cable-TV multiple-system operators (MSOs). To begin with, the company is ignoring the two-way Data Over Cable System Interface Spec (Docsis) developed by CableLabs for defining a subscriber cable modem used with a hybrid fiber/coax infrastructure.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has launched a new Web site designed to attract more young girls and women to the engineering profession.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
The push for a de facto standard for devices that put flash memory and SRAM in the same package has divided suppliers into separate camps supporting two largely incompatible formats: a stacked chip-scale package (CSP) and a stacked multichip package (MCP). Both specify an 0.8-mm pin pitch, but otherwise have little in common.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
"The lid on starting salaries was off" during the spring recruitment season for BSEEs and computer-science grads, according to a report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Entry-level salaries for those groups logged double-digit increases over last year's salaries, NACE reported.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
Competitive battle lines are being drawn in the nascent fingerprint recognition systems market. Startup Veridicom Inc. is joining four other semiconductor suppliers who have announced plans to manufacture chip-based fingerprint scanners and to pursue similar markets.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
Working with a major unidentified micropro-cessor manufacture — most likely, Intel Corp. — Schlumberger Automated Test Equipment has come up with a breakthrough in measuring flip-chip signals through the backside of a silicon device.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/30/98)
Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. has leaped into the market for virtual surround sound with a proprietary algorithm named Virtual Acoustic Surround Image Localizer (Vasil).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
Philips Semiconductors and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) have agreed to build a joint-venture logic IC fabrication facility here, slated to run at full production in 2003.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
MIPS Technologies Inc. and Lexra Inc. (Waltham, Mass.), a provider of IP cores, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that settles their existing legal disputes.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
Novas Software Inc. has introduced Windows NT versions of its various Debussy debugging modules, including nTrace, nSchema, nWave and nState. The company has also added support for VHDL. Debussy was previously available for Verilog on Unix platforms.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
After years of solid but less than inspiring performance, Burr-Brown Corp. is making the transition from a general-purpose to a market-focused IC supplier, with amplifiers, line drivers and analog front ends for digital subscriber line (DSL) circuits leading the charge into communications ICs.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
Eastman Kodak Co. essentially hit the reset button on its digital consumer imaging business on Monday when it relaunched a CD-ROM-based consumer photo service with its new development partner, Intel Corp.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
Hitachi Cable Ltd. has developed a tape automated bonding (TAB) tape carrier that's been optimized for Direct Rambus-memory chip-scale packages (CSPs).
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/29/98)
New versions of two DSP simulators promise dramatically faster results in predicting the behavior of DSP algorithms and hardware.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Superior process technology and a strong presence in the PC market no longer guarantee good profits for semiconductor suppliers in Japan, according to Thomas Engibous, chief executive officer of Texas Instruments Inc., speaking in Tokyo on Monday.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Telepresence over the Internet will soon be available with a live, remotely operated, 360° panoramic camera system devised at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories. The panoramic video camera, called FullView, will be operated over BowieNet with a mouse to control views of concerts.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
The Design Automation group at ICL is separating the extensions within its VHDL+ language from VHDL and promoting them as a stand-alone interface-specification language. The company, the U.K. computing subsidiary of Fujitsu Ltd., is pitching what is effectively a new language it calls <+> as a contribution to the development of the next-generation Systems-Level Design Language (SLDL).
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Optical correlators could become a cheap, off-the-shelf component if a new design by Displaytech Inc. makes it to the commercial stage.
(9:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Frontier Design, based here, has introduced its A/RT (Algorithm to Register Transfer) Library and A/RT Builder, a family of EDA tools that can be used together to automate the conversion of floating-point C and C++ language algorithms to bit-accurate, fixed-point VHDL and Verilog descriptions.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Refreshing almost its entire product portfolio, Xilinx Inc. has announced it will begin shipping by mid-1999 its highest-density FPGA with 500,000 system gates, as well as a 3.3-V FPGA with 40,000-gates that will sell for less than $10 in volumes. The company will have 21 new devices ready by year's end.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
The latest additions to Texas Instruments Inc.'s popular TMS320C5000 series of DSPs take advantage of the compact structures made possible by 0.18-micron CMOS processing. In one case, that results in the C5420, a dual-processor core for space-constrained telecommunications applications. In another case, it produces the C5402, a 100-Mips device that sells for less than $5.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Calling itself the first silicon vendor to sell and support a "complete" HDL-based design system, Vantis Corp. this week is announcing OEM agreements with Model Technology Inc. and Exemplar Logic Inc. Vantis will resell Model Technology's ModelSim simulator and Exemplar's Leonardo Spectrum synthesis tool in a new tool suite slated for fourth-quarter introduction.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Sharp Microelectronics will deploy the ARM7 Thumb as a standard microcontroller to target portable applications and the consumer and industrial markets.
(3:00 p.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Claiming to have reached a new, third "stage" in IC routing, Cadence Design Systems Inc. this week will announce the integration of RC (resistance-capacitance) extraction and analysis into its IC Craftsman product. Cadence claims such a step is crucial for 0.18-micron design.
(9:00 a.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Extremely high levels of design reuse will become crucial if chip-design costs are to be kept reasonable, according to a new study written by Michael Keating, director of engineering at Synopsys Inc. The paper represents one of the first attempts to create a financial model for design reuse.
(9:00 a.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Most major PC makers have decided to put 1394 on the shelf for a while and use the next generation of the venerable ATA interface in future-generation systems. The Ultra ATA/66 interface provides the speed needed for next-generation disk drives, which will give the committees grappling with 1394 time to complete a specification that is fast enough to support disk drives in the next decade.
(9:00 a.m., EDT, 9/28/98)
Silicon Graphics Inc. and three development partners will roll out a wide-screen LCD monitor this week that will open a new front in the battle to define a standard digital interface for flat-panel monitors. The product, which serves as a launch vehicle for a new SGI business in PC monitors, adopts the low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) interface, as opposed to the transmission-minimized differential signaling (TMDS) schemes that are the focus of a standards effort among PC makers.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
As the first digital TVs roll off the delivery trucks and into people's homes, installers are likely to find geographical pockets — many, at first — with no DTV reception. That's just one of the snafus dogging DTV in the final weeks before digital broadcasts go live in the United States, somewhere around Nov. 1.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
A de facto alliance of two air-interface coalitions has indirectly denounced efforts by Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego) to influence code-division multiple-access standards efforts. The North American GSM Alliance LLC and the Universal Wireless Communications Consortium (UWCC) issued a joint warning to Congress not to try to influence the International Telecommunications Union's standards process for third-generation (3G) digital wireless systems. Qualcomm has been heavily lobbying Congress to pass resolutions supporting CDMA.
(11:45 p.m., EDT, 9/25/98)
A surprise merger between Summit Design Inc. and OrCAD Inc. and what may be an imminent spinout of Viewlogic Systems Inc. from Synopsys Inc. are reshaping the market tiers that divide the EDA industry. The moves may lay the foundation for what Dataquest Inc. has begun to call the "enterprise" EDA market.
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