EET-i Top of the News

Week of June 5, 1995

June 8, 1995

Tek tackles Fluke in DMMs

VLSI to fab Amulet-2e

Chip makers aim for $1,000 home PC

Isochronous-services alliance set up

Verilog jumps IEEE hurdle

Computex: P6, Powe rPC enthrall Taiwanese

Pentagon sends commercial signals
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive

June 7, 1995

Invisible code tags electronic images

VR, cyberworlds merge at conference

THz waves see through objects

IMEC creates RAM-based image-sensor ics

NAS assesses international flow of engineering talent

CMOS wafer shortage helps Samsung's ASIC business

NEC eyes DRAM capacity

June 6, 1995

Sturdy 486 is still going strong

Chronologic support group forms

Darwinism is dead: traditional neural nets are all wrong

World's first evolution of real robotic hardware

Trident sampling 3-D chip

Strobe puts PDP-11 on coprocessor board

June 5, 1995

American chip chiefs to make nice-nice at meetings with Japanese

HDTV to include a subset that may not be so high

Scientists warn about possible dangers of virtual reality headgear

Quest for 'magic bullet' leads to object software

Patent Office tips rules for software

Sony stands firm on its DVD format

Other news sources on Techweb:

• Interactive Age
• Information Week
• Electronic Buyer's News

Tek tackles Fluke in DMMs

By Stan Runyon

BEAVERTON, Ore. -- Two industry giants, Tektronix Inc. and Fluke Corp., have squared off in a battle to dominate the burgeoning handheld-instrument market, one of the hottest sectors of test and measurement.

Though Tektronix is the leader in traditional benchtop oscilloscopes, Fluke almost single-handedly created and rose to the top of the portable, battery-operated scope market. Fluke already held a huge lead in handheld digital multimeters (DMM), the most prominent of portable instruments.

Tek believes that the market for handheld scopes is greater than 10 percent of the overall w orldwide scope market, which test-research firm Prime Data (Cupertino, Calif.) pegs at more than $600 million for digital units. Fluke has not revealed its share of the handheld portion, which is believed to be considerable in a limited field that also includes Hitachi Denshi America and Leader Instruments Corp.

In handheld DMMs, Fluke may envelop 60 percent of a world market put at $200 million by Prime Data.

VLSI to fab Amulet-2e

By Peter Clarke

LONDON -- VLSI Technology Inc. has offered its 0.5-micron CMOS process for manufacture of the second-generation Amulet, Manchester University's asynchronous take on the Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) 32-bit RISC processor. Design of the Amulet-2e should be completed by August and realized in silicon by year's end.

Steve Furber, a professor of computer engineering at Manchester University's Depa rtment of Computer Science and one of the creators of the ARM processor architecture in the early 1980s, provided a status report on Amulet at a conference on asynchronous design methodologies held here at South Bank University.

Asynchronous ICs differ from conventional ICs in that they do not use a clock to synchronize operations. Instead, the fine-grained logic units activate each other as soon as a partial operation has been completed. Individual units operate as quickly as the basic transistor and gate designs allow. Power is saved because no clock signal has to be distributed over the whole chip and because inactive units do not dissipate energy. That can result in a power savings of as much as 80 percent for some functions.

Chip makers aim for $1,000 home PC

By Ron Wilson

RICHARDSON, Texas -- With major announcements last week, CPU a nd core-logic makers drew a bead on a new and elusive target-- the $1,000 home multimedia PC. Cyrix Corp. officially unveiled the M1sc, the first of its Pentium-class CPUs, with a 486 bus and a 486 price. And Pico Power, the Cirrus Logic-owned core-logic vendor, showed a chip set optimized for low-cost, super-486-based multimedia systems.

Both the CPU and the core logic hit a commodity-market 486 price point with the kind of performance necessary for home multimedia. That reflects new thinking by many systems vendors that $2,000, Pentium-90 systems are missing the point.

"Right now $2,000 is the going price for a desktop Pentium system tuned for multimedia," said Michael Ham, product marketing manager at Pico Power. "But that's not where the sweet spot in the home market is. The challenge of the home market is $1,000 retail for a complete system."

To hit that price, systems vendors are turning back to ideas Intel would rather forget: the 486 CPUs, the 486 bus and VL-bus, rather than PCI-bus, I/O.

Isochronous-services alliance set up

By Loring Wirbel

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Backers of isochronous Ethernet, which recently won approval as the IEEE 802.9a standard, are uniting with supporters of client-side ISDN products and continuous bit rate (CBR) Asynchronous Transfer Mode equipment to create an industry coalition dedicated to isochronous services. The argument of the Isochronous Networking Communications Alliance, or IncAlliance, is that neither packet-prioritization schemes in traditional LANs nor ATM in available-bit-rate (ABR) mode, will offer adequate voice or video services for the emerging models of computer-telephony integration (CTI).

At first glance, the effort could be interpreted as a bid to win wider acceptance of isochronous Ethernet, or IsoENET, a concept developed by National Semiconductor Corp. to link a 10-Mbit Ethern et channel with 96 ISDN B channels within a single unshielded twisted-pair wire. National has won interest from players ranging from Apple Computer Inc. to Dialogic Corp. for IsoENET, yet the LAN still is considered to be a minority player within the debate among Fast Ethernet, VG-AnyLAN, FDDI and private ATM camps. The IncAlliance is bringing in ISDN players such as Primary Rate Inc., PBX vendors such as Siemens Rolm, and public carriers such as Pacific Bell to promote isochronicity, or any form of networking requiring time-bounded services with low latency.

But there is more to the alliance than the broadening of an IsoENET base. Operating-system vendors are touting CTI through common telephony applications programming interfaces (API), such as Microsoft's TAPI and Novell's TSAPI, which allow clients to manage voice calls from a PC, while allowing servers to perform call control and distribution in a standard network OS. In theory, a CTI server could replace many PBX functions. In practice, local network s are not ready for voice or video services with acceptable quality-of-service parameters, said Richard Brand, National's director of strategic marketing in the interactive-multimedia division.

Verilog jumps IEEE hurdle

By Richard Goering

LOS GATOS, Calif. -- Verilog has cleared the last major hurdle on the road to IEEE standardization: a first-round ballot in favor of the IEEE 1364 specification. The final step is a routine formal approval by the IEEE's RevCom, which is expected to take place in September.

The ballot virtually guarantees that Verilog this fall will be declared an official IEEE standard-- a step that culminates several years of intensive effort initiated by Open Verilog International (OVI). According to OVI chairman Bill Fuchs, "The concern that Verilog is controlled by one group or one company is now gone."

Though the Verilog marketplace has remained strong, the lack of IEEE standardization has been a handicap in some markets, particularly Europe. A common justification for choosing VHDL over Verilog has been VHDL's status as an IEEE standard, while Verilog originated as a proprietary language developed by one vendor.

Computex: P6, PowerPC enthrall Taiwanese

By Mark Carroll

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The intense interest of Asian OEMs in the P6 and PowerPC microprocessors dominated last week's Computex, Taiwan's biggest computer show.

Intel's Albert Yu, senior vice president of the company's microprocessor product group, drew crowds demonstrating a P6-based desktop system. Meanwhile, First International Computer (FIC) was displaying a P6 board at its booth, though the FIC board did not have a P6 CPU on board. It did have a socket 8 and Intel's eight-chip Orio n chip set. Many other first- and second- tier mainboard manufacturers were also showing their P6- based boards either in private suites or in the sales rooms of their trade-show booths.

Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola were on hand with the PowerPC CPU. Since November 1993, 30 Taiwanese information-technology companies, under the Taiwan New PowerPC Consortium (TNPC) label, have been developing PowerPC products. So far, though, only a few hundred have been produced by the TNPC, with these systems going to software developers.

Motorola's booth featured PowerPC-based Taiwanese desktop and notebook systems running Windows NT. Gary Griffiths, director of business development at IBM, said the company will introduce IBM-branded PowerPC systems in two weeks. Griffiths said, however, that a PowerPC version of OS/2 is still in beta testing and will not be ready to ship with these new systems.

Pentagon s ends commercial signals

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- Signal processing is emerging as an early recruit in the Pentagon's forced march toward greater use of commercial technologies.

A number of computer upgrades already under way were on display here last week at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association show. Most revisions attempt to integrate what the military considers open architectures such as VMEbus with commercial DSP chips and modules as well as real-time operating systems. Sonars, airborne radars and other processing-intensive systems are the early candidates for performance upgrades.

Despite the successful migration of commercial hardware into weapons systems, however, defense officials warn that the military lags far behind industry in terms of software reliability and development costs.

Typical of the effort to replace costly military-standard components with less-expensive, more- powerful commercial electr onics is a performance upgrade to a Navy sonar called the UYS-1 advanced signal processor. More than 1,800 identify and track submarines. Prime contractor Loral Federal Systems (Manassas, Va.) enlisted several companies, including CSPI (Billerica, Mass.) and Wind River Systems Inc. (Alameda, Calif.), to supply commercial technology projected to deliver a twenty-fold increase in the acoustic signal processor's performance.

Invisible code tags electronic images

By Peter Clarke

HAYES, England -- A means of identifying the origin of audio recordings by embedding silent codes has been extended to still and moving images by CRL, formerly the Central Research Laboratories of Thorn EMI. The new technique, which allows codes that are undetectable to the human ear or eye to be deciphered digitally, could be used to prosecute and deter copyright pir acy.

CRL is designing the video coding system based on its Identification Code Embedded (ICE) system. By placing subaudible codes as tones in audio-spectrum notches repeatedly throughout a piece of music or a sound track, identification of even small clips is possible. The technique also works with audio that has been digitized and compressed, according to the company. CRL now has applied an analogous code to the visual spectrum to extend the technique to still and moving images.

VR, cyberworlds merge at conference

By R. Colin Johnson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The notion of cyberspace began to take on a more concrete form at the recent VRWorld'95 with the emergence of Internet-based virtual-reality (VR) tools.

On display in San Jose was a virtual potpourri, from electronic gloves and goggles to head tracking units and development softwar e-- all the pieces a developer needs to design end-user virtual reality. And a way to link all those new and easy-to-design-and-use VR systems over the Internet was introduced with the WebSpace browser from graphic-supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI, Mountain View, Calif.).

Like the popular Mosaic World Wide Web browser, WebSpace allows the user to jump to different Internet sites around the world with the touch of a button. The important difference is the interface. Rather than viewing a screen, the user is immersed in full three-dimensional virtual reality, navigating through the Internet by manipulating a small globe in the foreground. Like a mouse, the globe allows the user to click and drag on virtual objects. WebSpace automatically detects the speed of the computer being used and adjusts the level of detail it renders to match. Designers can add fixed-location views on a menu and a panic button to return the user to home.

The key component of any VR system is the head-mounted display, or HMD. They were shown at VRWorld by 10 vendors, plus two more that demonstrated wall-mounted display units into which the user walks.

The lightest weight of the HMDs was from newcomer Virtual i-O Inc. (Seattle, Wash.) Its i-glasses were billed by the company as the world's first low-cost HMD that is guaranteed not to cause motion sickness. The i-glasses were the only model that fit right over normal eyeglasses. The company worked with Polaroid to come up with all-plastic optics, which reflect the image off an LCD into the eye with a mirror.

At the other end of the spectrum of experience was the Vision Immersion Module. or VIM, from longtime military- headgear maker Kaiser Electro-Optics Inc. (Carlsbad, Calif.) The VIM virtual reality display unit is housed in a 13-ounce headset with 100ý horizontal visual field coverage by its LCDs. The VIM wraps around the head to supply stereo audio to each ear in a single sleek unit. VIMs with up to eight LCDs tiled together for ever greater fields of view are being designed by Kaiser Electro-Optics.

IBM was also showing its Immersive Virtual Reality System (IRV)designed in conjunction with Virtuality Entertainment Inc. (Irving, Texas). The IRV consisted of an HMD, 3-D mouse, V-Space development software package and an IBM PC.

THz waves see through objects

By Ashok Bindra

BALTIMORE -- Just as X-rays are used to see into materials, terahertz electromagnetic waves are being exploited in an innovative imaging system to identify materials, reveal substances' chemical composition and monitor environments. The approach, under development by AT&T Bell Laboratories, uses the absorption, dispersion and reflection characteristics of electromagnetic pulses as they pass through materials.

The imaging system was demonstrated at the recent International Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (Cleo' 95) and was described in a joint paper presented at the conference by M.D. Binbin Hu and Martin Nuss. The pair devised the system at AT&T's Advanced Photonics Research Department.

"Though THz time-domain spectroscopy has been done experimentally in the past, it has never been used in an imaging system," said David A.R. Miller, head of advanced photonics research at AT&T. The company's experimental imager combines frequency-dependent absorption in the THz range with time-domain spectroscopy and digital signal processing (DSP) to characterize materials. Nuss said potential applications range from biomedical imaging to materials inspection, fault detection and profiling of doping and defects in semiconductors, as well as inspection of IC packages.

IMEC creates RAM-based image-sensor ics

By Peter Clarke

LEUVEN, Belgium -- The Inter universities Microelectronics Center (Imec) has produced a series of monochrome and color-image-sensor ICs based on conventional CMOS technology. Optimized for industrial use and machine vision, the devices, dubbed Fuga, have a RAM-addressing structure similar to that of conventional memory chips.

The flexible addressing structure allows a subset of the image-- for example, a 30- x 30-pixel window-- to be targeted and read out. Since the entire image array is read out at conventional video rates, critical areas of interest can be isolated in real-time industrial imaging tasks.

The CMOS RAM design of the new chips breaks with tradition in electronic imaging. Most commercial silicon camera-sensor ICs are based on arrays of charge-coupled devices. But recent research is turning to photodiode arrays built in conventional CMOS. Startup VLSI Vision Ltd. (VVL, Edinburgh, Scotland), in fact, has based its business on Edinburgh research into the technology, and AT&T Bell Laboratories (Holmdel, N.J.) recently produced a random-access readout CMOS device.

NAS assesses international flow of engineering talent

By Robert Bellinger

The international flow of engineering personnel, students and services was the focus of a wide-ranging preliminary hearing in Washington earlier this week at the National Academy of Sciences.

At the core of the meeting was the impact on the nation's scientific and engineering communities of such trends as immigration, outsourcing of work overseas, the influx of foreign students and the multinational focus of U.S.-based corporations.

Opinions ranged all over the globe.

Executive director Lawrence Richards of SoftPac, an advocacy group for U.S. programmers, said he believes the United States is suffering a "brain drain of American engineering talent" because of abuses of visas and the immigration law.

The vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform described the U.S. immigration system as a "swamp" but noted that only one-fourth of the 1 million to 1.2 million immigrants who come into the country are illegal.

Meanwhile, a professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology applauded what he called the "leveling of the world in terms of science and technology. That's what we wanted to happen." He urged the committee not to tinker with the present education system.

CMOS wafer shortage helps Samsung's ASIC business

By Ron Wilson

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The submicron CMOS wafer shortage that has bedeviled fabless semiconductor companies in recent years is proving a boon to Samsung Semiconductor's ASIC business.

Samsung is shifting 35,000 wafers per month of 0.6-micron CMOS production from 4-Mbit DRAMs to ASICs. And the customers f or those wafers are coming from an unusual source, according to senior marketing manager Peter Richmond.

"We've been seeing the tide shift in the industry in the last few months," Richmond said. "The capacity shortage in 0.6-micron has really been hitting the fabless companies hard. Many of these companies used to be ASIC customers, but in the last few years they have shifted to customer-owned tooling (COT) and have become foundry customers. "Now, they are seeing no wafers, or very long lead times, from their foundries. We have spoken to a lot of companies that have asked us to act as a foundry for them. But foundry work isn't in Samsung's business model-- we don't just sell silicon. Instead, we have suggested that the fabless companies move back to ASIC design, and use our gate-array capabilities. In increasing numbers, they are doing it."

NEC eyes DRAM capacity

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- Despite question marks about the sustainability of Japan's domestic recovery, strong DRAM demand assures continued strong growth for Japan's semiconductor makers, said Hajime Sasaki, executive vice president in charge of NEC's semiconductor division.

The challenge now is to boost production capacity. "From 1989 to 1992 the worldwide semiconductor industry had fairly steady sales of about $4 billion per month. In mid-1992 we started to see a sharp increase, and now that amount has almost tripled," Sasaki noted. Getting enough equipment installed and training staff have become the challenges of the day.

The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) council projects that the worldwide industry will grow by about 39 percent this year, but Sasaki said "I'm wondering if it is possible to achieve 39-percent growth. The potential may be there, but not the production capacity. The actual result for this year may be something closer to 30 percent because of the supply limit."

A recent forecast by the WSTS council estimated that, despite the rapid shift of manufacturing overseas, Japan's share of the worldwide semiconductor market will remain stable, going from 28.9 percent in 1994 to 27.3 percent in calendar year 1998.

Sturdy 486 is still going strong

By Ron Wilson

AUSTIN, Texas -- Despite Intel Corp.'s pledge to drive the 486 from the personal-computer market and make the 75-MHz Pentium the entry-level CPU of choice, the veteran 32-bit processor is doing very well, thank you. Analysts indicate that 486s will outsell Pentium-class chips at least through the end of 1995. And even Windows 95--the alleged doom of anything less than a full-blown Pentium processor--appears ready to extend 486-demand rather than extinguish it.

"There has been a perception that Windows 95 will only work with Pentiu m CPUs," said Robert Fuller, product marketing manager at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. "That is simply false; our 486 CPUs are certified Windows-compatible. In fact, on integer operations, our 486DX4-100 benchmarks faster than a Pentium-60 MHz."

AMD itself is announcing its industry-leading speed grade: a 120-MHz DX4. The company is also getting back into mobile computing after a rather self-imposed absence, with a pair of slower parts--at 80 MHz and 100 MHz but in 208-pin SQFP packaging. All the parts are clock-tripled.

Texas Instruments is announcing an 80-MHz DX2, a clock-doubled part. And Cyrix, now focused on its next-generation M1 architecture, this week will roll out the first of those products: the M1SC. Significantly, the stripped-down scalar version of the M1 uses a 486 bus.

Chronologic support group forms

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Twelve former employees of Chronologic Simulat ion, including John Sanguinetti, former president, have launched a consulting firm to assist users of the Chronologic VCS simulator during the legal battle between the ex-Chronologic employees and Viewlogic Systems Inc.

The new organization, Verilog Consulting Services, is available to answer questions about VCS. The ex-Chronologic employees will also provide general Verilog-related consulting and training. Verilog Consulting Services can be reached through the VCS web site , or at e-mail address VCS-info@webnexus.com .

Darwinism is dead: traditional neural nets are all wrong

By R. Colin Johnson

GRANADA, Spain--Darwin is obsolete, and vendors who have been patterning their neural networks on Darwinian principles are pursuing an evolutionary dead-end of their own, according to opening day report s here at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL).

Darwin has been superseded by a more general evolutionary theory that applies to both living things and inanimate objects such as computers, according to Peter Schuster, a professor at the Institut fur Molekulare Biotechnologie, Jena, Germany.

"Evolutionary adaptation is no longer the exclusive domain of living organisms...I now create toy universes to study these more general evolutionary dynamics," Schuster said on Friday.

His toy universes enable him to search through all the possible ways of wiring together the computers of the future to find the best ones--an undertaking so huge, that only one other scientist has even attempted it, namely Santa Fe Institute professor, Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman, however, was only equipped with Darwinian evolutionary principles, not the generalized versions invented by Schuster.

Separately, Domenico Parisi, of the National Research Council in Rome, proposed a move from neural networks' current "pa ssive" learning, as he characterized it, to a new "active" learning mode whereby neural networks will also be allowed to reach outside themselves to experimentally change their environment.

"We are limiting the kinds of things that neural networks can learn by not allowing them to act on their environment, instead we need to view neural networks from the perspective of artificial life--ALNNs can learn to predict the consequences of their actions," Parisi said, speaking of artificial life neural networks (ALNNs).

Parisi gave three convincing examples of the kinds of things today's neural networks cannot learn. First, was the concept of weight. "Weight is a hidden attribute, until an object is actually picked up in the environment," Parisi said. Likewise, the abstract concept of quantity can only be learned by today's neural networks with respect to a specific fixed-sized container. Third, learning by imitating others can only occur when the neural network is allows to try out scenarios in the environme nt and observe their outcomes.

World's first evolution of real robotic hardware

By R. Colin Johnson

GRANADA, Spain--Claim to the world's first robot to evolve its own hardware was laid by University of Sussex researcher Adrian Thompson here at the European Conference on Artificial Life. Thompson used field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) under the control of a genetic algorithm to evolve the hardware configuration of his mobile robot.

"I am investigating how brains could evolve if, instead of proteins, they had available to them transistors, resistors, capacitors and wires," Thompson said. There was no programmable software within Thompson's robot, rather its sonar sensors were hardwired to the FPGA's inputs and correspondingly its outputs were hardwired to the wheeled robot's effectors. Then a genetic algorithm evolved different FPGA inter nal configurations, at each step measuring the results and keeping improvements while removing changes that made the robot's performance worse.

Thompson explained that his hardware evolution method was superior to software simulations which necessarily simplify real world scenarios to make their execution-time reasonable.

"When you perform simulations in software, you must constrain the design to just the text-book aspects of the circuits you will use to build your robot, but these constraints are removed when using artificial evolution, thereby releasing huge potential even from small circuits," Thompson said.

Thompson also found that by removing the clock to the FPGA, an even richer set of possible behaviors are unleashed, albeit at the expense of not being able to analyze the final evolved circuit very well.

"Removing the clock incredibly enriched the robots behavior and made even simple circuitry perform tasks that would require much more complex clocked circuitry," Thompson said.

These kin ds of non-finite-state asynchronous circuits can not be analyzed with the traditional laws of logic, since they contain states with internal contradictions. The only tools available to analyze such circuits are the little known alternatives to the laws of logic in Cambridge University professor George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.

Separately from his robot, Thompson also demonstrated how asynchronous circuits could solve common problems that are typically performed with clocked circuits today. In particular, he evolved a 4kHz oscillator, accomplishing its task with 68 gates.

Trident sampling 3-D chip

By Junko Yoshida

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Trident Microsystems will jump on the emerging 3-D graphics bandwagon with a 64-bit chip that combines GUI, video and 3-D-graphics acceleration on a single die.

The T3D2000, sampling now and due for volume production in October, is the first in a family of graphics chips that Trident is planning to launch into 1996, said Pier Del Frate, assistant vice president of strategic marketing at Trident.

Priced at $60 each, the IC provides not only a 3-D rendering engine, but also features "a very fast, state-of-the-art 2-D GUI accelerator," said Rick Allen, product marketing manager at Trident.

Strobe puts PDP-11 on coprocessor board

By David Lieberman

REDMOND, Wash. --The innumerable OEMs that have built their equipment on top of a Digital Equipment PDP-11 minicomputer can now move their applications over to a PC platform without modification, using the Osprey coprocessor board from Strobe Data Inc. The board runs any of the PDP-11 operating systems, such as RSTS, RSX and RT-11, and an optional Qbus interface board brings legacy Qbus device s into the new PC-based environment.

Based on an 18-MHz DCJ-11 CPU chip from Digital with 4 Mbytes of DRAM, the Osprey achieves performance comparable to a PDP-11/93 on a single board, using the same closely coupled memory architecture, according to market vice president Jerry Kenned.

American chip chiefs to make nice-nice at meetings with Japanese

By David Lammers

TOKYO -- As U.S. and Japanese carmakers prepare to march into trade battle, the acrimony that has bedeviled much of the semiconductor industry's history has been replaced by "cooperation, partnership and friendship."

That's the official theme for the summit meeting between leaders of the Semiconductor Industry Association and Japanese executives representing the Electronic Industries Association of Japan. Veterans of the long semiconductor trade dispute such as Pat Weber of Texa s Instruments, Jerry Sanders of AMD and Craig Barrett of Intel are among the SIA leadership going to Tokyo for the annual SIA-EIAJ joint meeting, marked in past years by table thumping and a U.S. walkout.

As recently as May 1992, the SIA--backed up by a letter to then U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills signed by CEOs from the 12 biggest U.S. computer companies--made veiled threats of U.S. trade sanctions unless foreign chip share improved. Three years later, the biggest problem is not market access but fab capacity: nearly every systems company is crying out for more components.

Even Japan's auto industry, a sore spot until recently, is starting to buy significant quantities of U.S. electronics, reports Roger Mathus, executive director of the SIA's Japan office. For all four quarters of 1994 the U.S. semiconductor industry exceeded its 20 percent "expectation" for foreign share of the Japan market, and Mathus said he expects "a pleasant atmosphere" at this meeting.

HDTV to include a subset that may not be so high

By George Leopold and Junko Yoshida

WASHINGTON -- Advanced TV in the United States, originally envisioned as analogous to digital High-Definition TV, will now incorporate an appendix called Standard Definition TV, a lower-resolution digital format designed to allow broadcasters to fudge a little on the definition of high definition.

A government advisory panel is completing revisions to the proposed digital HDTV standard by adding Standard Definition TV (SDTV) specifications, according to officials involved in the rewrite.

According to James McKinney, chairman of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), the pending SDTV format, now agreed upon as "a subset of HDTV," will use 8 vestigial sideband (VSB) modulation for transmission, MPEG-2 for transport, employing MPEG-2 main lev el, main profile for digital video decoding and Dolby Laboratories' AC-3 for digital audio.

Still, a few critical questions remain unanswered for industry executives who must make decisions on building key components and boxes for SDTV/HDTV:How much programming would terrestrial broadcasters devote for SDTV broadcast and HDTV broadcast? Would broadcasters be allowed to carry just SDTV programming for a long period of time, ignoring HDTV?

And what kind of designs would it take for making a reasonably-priced HDTV/SDTV decoder or a digital TV set?

Scientists warn about possible dangers of virtual reality headgear

By R. Colin Johnson

PORTLAND, Ore. -- As virtual reality moves from the lab to the living room, scientists are beginning to sound the alarm for human-safety standards to protect consumers against VR gear that could cause a variety o f illnesses, up to and including permanent brain damage.

About a dozen head-mounted displays (HMDs)--devices that plug synchronized sensory input to a user's ears and eyes--are now available to developers. They offer a fully immersive VR experience, but their effects on the body are still largely unknown.

"In the near future, many of the VR headlines we are likely to see will be made by lawyers," said Thomas Furness, director of the Human Interface Technology (HIT) Laboratory at the University of Washington, Seattle. Furness is considered the father of the HMD, first developed for the Air Force in the 1960s and widely used during the Gulf War.

The HIT Lab has introduced more than 4,000 schoolchildren to VR with no ill effects, Furness said. But there's a big difference between lab's $50,000 prototypes and the low-cost HMDs popping up on the burgeoning commercial market.

"If you do VR right, then it is not just safe, but a healthy experience for students bored with traditional teaching methods. If you don't do it right, people can suffer `simulator sickness' and even experience flashbacks days or months afterwards," Furness warned.

Quest for 'magic bullet' leads to object software

By Alexander Wolfe

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- An industry-wide upheaval in favor of object-oriented (OO) programming languages is reshaping the software landscape. The movement is driven by the quest for a software "magic bullet" that will speed the tedious task of coding up complex engineering, multimedia and networking applications.

Taking up the OO mantle, Apple Computer Inc. is set to launch a programming language called Dylan . The news has sparked intense interest in recent weeks on Usenet and the World Wide Web.

Meanwhile, C++--which has emerged as the lingua franca of engineering programming

-- is finally about to become an ANSI standard, and is now available in draft form . The move, C++ proponents said, will allay rising concerns about incompatible compilers and development environments.

What's more, Ada--long derided as an unpopular language artificially propped up by the Defense Department-is getting a surprising boost as the new, object-oriented Ada95 implementation moves out into the marketplace.

The release of a new programming language isn't in and of itself a significant event. Indeed, some 2,000 languages currently exist, though only about 10 are in widespread usage. But with Dylan, Apple claims it has fashioned a full-blown OO language that incorporates robust memory-management features --something that's long been a bugaboo for C++ programmers. Dylan proponents also deride C++ as a set of object-oriented extensions tacked onto the existing C language.

"We've tried very hard not to make Dylan a 'feature-itis' type of language," said Rick Fleischman, Dy lan product manager at Apple.

Also, information on the Ada GNAT compiler.

Patent Office tips rules for software

By George Leopold

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will seek comments until July 31 on proposed software-patent guidelines released by the office last week that will expand patent protection to algorithms and processes encoded on floppy disks.

The 13-page request for comments also describes the proposed internal guidelines to be used by patent examiners in reviewing patent applications for "computer-implemented inventions." The procedures include determining "what the applicant has invented by reviewing the written description and the claims [and] if the claimed invention is novel and non-obvious" under current patent law.

The pat ent office said the guidelines are a response to recent court decisions "that suggest a trend toward increasing the eligibility of computer software-based innovations for protection under U.S. patent laws, while decreasing the availability of protection for certain aspects of computer programs under the copyright process."

In releasing the proposed guidelines, the office also announced it is "reconsidering its position" in several pending appeals, including a case in which IBM Corp. is seeking a patent on a CAD/CAM process encoded on a floppy disk. Legal experts say the case prompted the patent office to issue the guidelines.

Sony stands firm on its DVD format

TOKYO -- Sony chairman Norio Ohga said the company will stand behind its digital-video-disk (DVD) format, despite calls for a common standard between the Sony/Philips and Toshiba-led groups.

The two digital-video-disk formats should compete, with the final choice "the consumer's," said Ohga, speaking at his first news conference as chairman of the Electronic Industries Association of Japan.

Toshiba's SD (Super Density) format and the Sony/Philips high-density multimedia CD are seeking to be the next-generation DVD. SD has gathered more than a dozen participants; the Sony/Philips alliance has three supporters in Japan.

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