    |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
|
 
Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times . Previous editions are available from the 1994 , 1995 , 1996 , 1997 , and 1998 News Archives.
Friday, March 13, 1998SIA report flaunts chip industry's economic import(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/13/98)The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) plans to release a report next week that portrays the chip industry as a major engine of growth for the U.S. economy. Japan and Europe map plans for extreme-ultraviolet lithography(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/13/98)Both Japan and the European Community are laying the groundwork for separate cooperative-research programs into extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, according to participants at the inaugural International Forum on Semiconductor Technology in Kyoto, Japan. Cadence joins European consortium's RF circuit design effort(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/13/98)Cadence Design Systems GmbH, the German subsidiary of Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), has joined a consorti um of European electronics companies attempting to improve design methods for wireless system architectures and RF circuit design. Apple to show prototype copper-based PowerPC(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/12/98)Apple Computer Inc. is preparing to demonstrate the first CPU built in copper-metalization technology, sources have told EE Times . At the Seybold Seminars scheduled for March 16-20 in New York , Apple's interim chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, will show a Macintosh computer running at 400-MHz with a prototype PowerPC chip from IBM Microelectronics, according to industry insiders. FCC approves V-chip requirements(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/12/98)The Federal Communications Commission has adopted technical rules for implementing "V-chip" blocking technology on new television sets. Thursday, Mar ch 12, 1998HDTV backers seek to head off congressional scrutiny(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/12/98)Backers of the U.S. HDTV standard have launched a counteroffensive aimed at blunting congressional concerns about the transition to digital TV later this year. Technical conference gets serious about virtual reality(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/12/98)Virtual reality will be the subject of serious discussion at a technical conference that starts Saturday, March 14, and runs through Wednesday, March 18. The 1998 IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS '98) will be held at Sheraton Colony Square in Atlanta. Tektronix to show first instrument to employ Java(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/12/98)Tektronix Inc. will bring the world's first instrument that implements Java technology to JavaOne, the Worldwide Developer Conference that begins March 24 in San Francisco. The instrument is Tektronix's response to consistent customer demand for application-specific measurement functions. Worker shortages prompt companies to dig deeper(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/11/98)Technology corporations are reaching ever deeper into the nation's pool of potential workers to fill the need for information technologists. MEMS accelerometer designed into consumer applications(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/11/98)With the introduction of its fourth-generation two-axis accelerometer, Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) becomes the first company to push microelectronic machines (MEMS) into consumer realms. The ADXL202 motion-sensing device has been designed into computer-game pads, said Ja mes Doscher, marketing manager of the company's micromachined-products division in Cambridge, Mass. The new application will be demo'd at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E 3 ) show in Atlanta in May, said Doscher. Give-and-take(11:30 a.m. EST, 3/12/98)As Silicon Valley executives continue to whine in Washington about the engineering-labor shortage, the lament seems disingenuous at best and calculated at worst. Many of those same executives are rabid "free market" idealogues who are otherwise quick to tell government, no matter how well-intentioned its initiatives, to butt out of industry matters. Wednesday, March 11, 1998Startup promises embedded DRAM compiler(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/11/98)Taking aim at a major bottleneck for systems-on-silicon designs, a new provider of intellectual property (IP) promises to deliver a compiler later this year that can gene rate embedded DRAM for 0.25-micron and finer process technologies. If successful, Silicon Access Inc. will revolutionize what is today a painstaking, handcrafted process. EDA tool puts power analysis on the Web(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/11/98)Power analysis will soon be Web-enabled when Sente Inc. releases an EDA tool called W5 (for Watt Watcher World Wide Web) next week. An extension of the company's Watt Watcher suite, W5 will generate a representation of an IC directly on a Web browser, over an intranet, for engineering analysis. SIA ponders whether to take its road map global(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/11/98)At its board meeting next week in Washington, the Semiconductor Industry Association is expected to take up the issue of how to internationalize its influential road map. Widely quoted throughout the worldwide industry, the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors and its detailed time lines have become the global industry's metronome, setting the tempo for an increasingly fast-paced and complicated orchestration. ATM-stack specialist shifts to integrated code development(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/11/98)Harris & Jeffries Inc., a specialist in asynchronous-transfer-mode stack and signaling software, will launch an integrated business model later this month that will port code on behalf of semiconductor partners and OEMs. The FastStart project will be a template for an upcoming software-development and joint-marketing program with telecom-IC maker TranSwitch Corp. (Shelton, Conn.) that will transform the way both companies do business Integral, developer of the 1.8-inch disk drive, drops the line(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)Integral Peripherals Inc. has stopped making 1.8-inch disk drives and is now looking to sell the technology. The eight-year-old company that worked to create a market for the small drive it had developed is currently undergoing a reorganization, said president Steve Volk. "We are working with an investor group and will focus on 3.0-inch drives," he said. Video design simplified by oversampling technique(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)While working on specialized infrared sensors, Amain Electronics Co. Inc. has hit on a general approach to electronic imaging that could simplify both camera and video-display technology. The scheme uses a multiplexed version of oversampled analog-to-digital conversion as an integrated detection and readout system for image sensors, bringing onto the focal plane signal-processing functions that would normally be performed after an image is acquired. Environmentalist tells electronics firms that 'green' strategy saves greenbacks(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)Amory Lovins, the founder of the Rocky Mountain Instit ute environmental think tank and a well-known fixture of the conservation and alternative-energy movement, no longer talks about environmental costs as an adder that must be factored in to the full cost of electronics manufacturing. Today, Lovins' presentations focus on the positive, making a powerful case to industry that conserving energy can yield manufacturing economies and marketing advantages that ultimately increase profitability. Tuesday, March 10, 1998Xfuzzy freeware handles hardware/software synthesis(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)Fuzzy-control-development environments have evolved as specialized systems for specific digital microcontrollers or fuzzy coprocessors, but a group at the University of Seville's Instituto de Microelectronica has plans to change that. Mentor shuns pc-board benchmark(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)Ten companies will participate in a bench mark scheduled for the PCB Design Conference 1998 opening here on March 23, but Mentor Graphics Corp. will not be among them. Mentor (Wilsonville, Ore.), which is ranked by Dataquest Inc. as the world's second largest pc-board CAD vendor, "has chosen to focus its resources on working with customers rather than the benchmark," said John Isaac, director of marketing for Mentor's System Design Division. Dataquest's top-ranked supplier, Zuken-Redac, has agreed to participate. Startup shifts focus to intellectual-property cores(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)Virtual IP Group Inc. will jump into the increasingly competitive market for midrange cores next week, touting high-performance cores and system-level design expertise. Simple transistor may yield dense, high-speed circuits(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/10/98)Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory are homing in on a device architecture that co uld pack high functionality into dense circuits running at record speeds. Called a Double Electron Layer Tunneling Transistor (DELTT), the device uses a simple vertical, double quantum-well transistor to implement a mode of operation known as resonant tunneling. SRAM makers move to strengthen their positions(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)Hard hit by persistently low sales revenue for SRAMs, Silicon Valley-based Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Paradigm Technology Inc. have announced that they will take draconian measures to become profitable again with memory devices. System-on-a-chip ASICs present new design hurdles(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)ASIC designers have a new rallying cry: craftsmanship. That's because the job of the ASIC engineer is becoming less a known science and more a fine art of selecting and molding intellectual-property (IP) cores and new software capabilities to fill rapi dly expanding transistor budgets with the objective of piecing together systems-on-a-chip. Systems-on-a-chip call for a narrow focus(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)A stronger focus on specific market segments and a closer working relationship with system designers will become ever-more critical as silicon vendors pursue the system-on-a-chip business. Experts say that Japan's ASICs vendors will have to abandon the idea they can succeed across the entire marketplace, from telecommunications to computers to consumer and automotive. Lucent to merge FPGA, standard-cell macros(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)Downplaying the need to develop FPGAs with a million or more gates, Lucent Technologies has opted to leverage its new 0.25-micron process technology to create FPGAs combined with its standard-cell hard macros. The company announced in early March a new FPGA architecture that will take it down th at path while also providing features to ease system-level integration. The first products will appear by the middle of this year. Boundaries fade with architecture changes(9:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)Walls are tumbling down all over the microcontroller business, as 8-, 16- and 32-bit parts swap jobs and chip designers broach the boundaries between architectures. Microcontroller and microprocessor; microcomputer vs. system-on-a-chip; RISC and CISC -- all the definitions are open to second thoughts, in a free-for-all that holds both peril and promise. Monday, March 9, 1998Board matches latest DSPs with CompactPCI(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)With its Barcelona DSP board, Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. has moved to a new local-bus architecture that melds Texas Instruments Inc.'s latest TMS320C6X digital signal processor chips and the CompactPCI system bus. TI sees small effect from Asian fiscal crisis(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)Despite the softness in certain Asian currencies, Texas Instruments Inc. told financial analysts in Dallas last week that the semiconductor industry will see continued growth in 1998. Acer Labs, Via challenge Intel with chip sets for Socket-7(3:00 p.m. EST, 3/9/98)PC core-logic chip sets from two suppliers are jumping in to compete with Intel Corp. in powering systems that use a 100-MHz processor bus. But the push to faster systems raises significant design issues, and it's not clear whether developers will be able to keep pace with Intel's strides in speed. Gigabit bus carries Intel into communications territory(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)Even as Intel Corp. prepares to roll out its first silicon supporting the 64-bit, 66-MHz version of the Peripheral Compone nt Interconnect (PCI), it has foreseen the end of the line for PCI in its highest-end systems. But the processor giant hopes to parlay PCI's phaseout into an opportunity to design an interconnect that would not only push its PC servers deeper into the territory of high-performance computing but could also open Intel processors and server subsystems to new market realms. Intel reveals how Merced will retain X86 compatibility(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)A just-issued patent and new information from Intel Corp. provide fresh insight into a technical mystery surrounding the company's upcoming Merced microprocessor. The question: how Intel plans to ensure that the 64-bit Merced CPU can also run 32-bit software written for X86 chips like Pentium. After a long wait, ferroelectric RAMs head for volume production(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)It's taken a decade, but ferroelectric technology might finally be ready to make good on a promise to rewrite the rules of the memory industry. Symetrix Corp., a Colorado Springs, Colo., materials-research firm that for years has championed the technology at the Integrated Ferroelectric Symposium, reported at this year's sessions that volume production of the parts is expected from at least three suppliers before year's end. Wireless-network debate hits home(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)A consortium of PC industry heavyweights, communications and chip companies used the Computer Telephony conference, held here, to announce their intent to write a standard for home wireless networks. Silvestri out at Sun Microelectronics(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)Less than a week after he inked a big licensing pact with IBM Corp., Chet Silvestri is out as president of Sun Microelectronics. Vic e president of operations Mel Friedman was picked to succeed Silvestri as head of the company. Japan's broadcasters air complaints about terrestrial digital TV(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)Gloomily predicting the impact of digital terrestrial television on its business, the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters fought this week against government efforts to install the technology in Japan. NEC to supply large displays to Thomson(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)NEC Corp. and Thomson Multimedia soon will announce an agreement involving their large-size plasma-display businesses. Fifteen companies endorse PXI spec(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)Fifteen companies have endorsed the PXI modular instrumentation specification and said they will produce gear based on the spec, which was unveiled last year by National Instruments. NEC licenses Vicor's switcher technology(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)NEC Corp. (Tokyo) has taken a license on an "active clamp" patented by Vicor Corp. Called "Core Reset" by its advocates at Vicor, the technique minimizes power losses in a dc/dc converter. The technique can increase efficiency on switching regulators by 5 percent or more on designs that already approach 90 percent efficiency. Siemens launches core design center(11:45 p.m. EST, 3/6/98)Siemens Semiconductors has opened a new R&D center here that will focus on product development and core generation for the mobile communications and telecommunications markets. The center will also work on design methodology and development software. |
||||||||||||||
RSS
 |
Home | About | Editorial Calendar | Feedback | Subscriptions | Newsletter | Media Kit | Contact | Reprints|  RSS| 
Digital|  Mobile |
|
| Network Websites |
|
|
International |
|
|
Network Features |
|
|
|
All materials on this site Copyright © 2009 TechInsights, a Division of United Business Media LLC All rights reserved. Privacy Statement | Terms of Service | About |
