IN THE NEWS

Business and technology news from the semiconductor and design tool industries.

In the News

RNS (Santa Barbara, CA), a division of Meret Communications (Santa Monica, CA), announced a purchasing arrangement with Motorola Computer Group (Phoenix, AZ) to supply FDDI and Fast Ethernet network interface cards for VME and PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) architectures. These cards will be embedded in Motorola's board and system-level products or sold as options to the company's existing host boards. The agreement also calls for software drivers from RNS that support Windows NT and AIX operating systems, with plans for adding a VxWorks driver.

Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, CA) announced that it has signed a multimillion-dollar royalty-bearing license agreement with VLSI Technology (San Jose, CA). The agreement enables VLSI to develop, manufacture, and sell CDMA (IS-95) ASICs to Qualcomm's subscriber equipment licensees for digital cellular, personal communications services (PCS), and wireless local-loop applications around the globe.

EDA Today (Phoenix, AZ) now offers a monthly newsletter service called "the EDA Today Summary Report" on the Internet. The site is located at www.edat.com.

QuickLogic Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) announced the shipment of its one millionth semiconductor device. The millionth part was purchased by Steve Gumm, engineering manager for Texas Instruments' Professional Digital Light Processor Products Group (Dallas, TX).

National Semiconductor Corp. announced it is reducing its work force by 170 people, primarily at its Santa Clara headquarters. National announced in June it would take a restructuring charge in the current quarter, partly to cover the costs of work-force reductions.

Market research firm VLSI Research Inc. (San Jose, CA) is predicting that August's worldwide semiconductor production equipment and U.S. IC component book-to-bill ratios will continue to show growth when it is released this September. The increase should help cut the downward pressure on IC prices.

Movers and Shakers

Rimas J. Karklys has joined Escalade Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) as director of North American sales.

Synopsys .com/isdweb/&lf=isd-sendtolog"> Synopsys Inc. (Mountain View, CA) added two senior members to its Design Reuse Group: Faysal Sohail has been promoted to vice president of marketing, and Chris Rowen has joined the company as vice president of engineering.

Kent Jaeger has joined Synplicity Inc. (Mountain View, CA) as vice president of marketing. He will be in charge of all marketing functions, including strategic vendor relationships. In addition, Dennis Watts has joined Synplicity as eastern-area sales manager located in their new Boston, MA office. Also, Mike Holyfield has joined Synplicity as central-area sales manager in the new Dallas, TX office.

PRI Automation Inc. (Billerica, MA) appointed Brian Doherty vice president of engineering.

Money Bits

Credence Systems Corp. (Fremont, CA) reported results for Q3 of 1996 with net sales of $67.2 million, a 46 percent increase over the $46.1 million for the comparable quarter of fiscal 1995. Net income for Q2 rose 45 percent to $11.5 million, compared to $8 million for the comparable period last year. Earnings per share were $0.53 per share, up from $0.38 per share for Q2 of the prior year.

Zycad Corp. (Fremont, CA) reported a net loss of $3.52 million, or $0.18 per share on revenues of $9.55 million for the quarter ended June 30, 1996. For the comparable quarter in 1995, net income was $741,000, or $0.04 per share, on revenues of $12.65 million, including revenues of $1.14 million related to a third-party product that is part of a joint venture in 1996. *

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integrated system design  October 1996