EET-i Top of the News
Week of 11/06/95
- 11/06/95
 Here come real-time phone calls via Internet
- Two giants, Cadence and Mentor, make waves in PC-based EDA
- Rockwell pushes into digital cordless phone business
- NEC to sell 143-MHz SDRAMs complying with SSTL standard
- Hyundai signs to use Wind River's real-time tools
- Cypress continues PLD push with two entries
- Sun to break new ground with Ultra 1 and 2 desktops
What's new(s) at EE Times-interactive
 Here come real-time phone calls via Internet
By Larry Lange
BOSTON -- If the jampacked house at a demonstration of real-time phone calls over the Internet means anything, big changes may lie ahead in how we communicate over the telephone. That was the picture at the Internet World conference in Boston, where new groundbreaking Internet technologies left many of the 26,000 visitors unfazed even as they flocked to the phone demo.
In f
act, as the two participants in a Net phone shootout succeeded in displaying their wares--by conversing with people in Florida and Israel over IBM PCs and 14.4-kbit/second modems--one almost could hear Sprint's trademark pin drop.
The two digi-telephony software companies that presented--VocalTec Inc. of Northvale, N.J., (with R&D facilities in Israel) and the Internet Telephone Co. (ITEL), out of Boca Raton, Fla.--also announced developments in their products that look to position Internet phone communications as the next phase in Net-related communication popularity.
Though it was originally thought that competition to long-distance carriers or local phone companies would be from cable companies, it turns out that the Internet protocols, Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), work well with audio getting sent back in one continuous stream via the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a connectionless transport-layer protocol. Hence, any software that allows geographically distant
users to set up a phone call bypasses any telco's long-distance charges.
Two giants, Cadence and Mentor, make waves in PC-based EDA
By Richard Goering
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The PC-based EDA market will undergo a fundamental shift as the two largest Unix-based EDA vendors, Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.), announce major moves this week and next. Cadence this week is unveiling Allegro for Windows, its first PC-based product, while Mentor next week is expected to spin out its Model Technology and Exemplar subsidiaries into a new Windows-based company called Antares.
These moves by two, both of which have annual revenues in the $400-million range, could pose a threat to the considerably smaller vendors that now make up the deeply fragmented but rapidly growing PC-based-EDA marketplace. Although DOS and Windows tools traditionally have accounted for about
10 percent of EDA software revenues, some observers believe Windows-based software could rise to 50 percent by the end of the decade.
Rockwell pushes into digital cordless phone business
By Ashok Bindra
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- Leveraging its strengths in RF technology and digital communications, Rockwell Semiconductor Systems has crafted a new line that signals the company's entry into the rising digital cordless telephony (DCT) market. Rockwell said that the focus of the newly named and consolidated Semiconductor Systems is to deliver system-level chip-set solutions for the fast-growing wireless and multimedia communications marketplace.
The new entity combines Rockwell strengths in signal conversion, signal-processing algorithms, communications protocols and RF devices with advanced packaging and process technologies (CMOS, bipolar and GaAs) to integrate system level chip sets.
The modem giant has created a five-chip set that provides an entire system-level solution for 900-MHz digital spread-spectrum cordless telephones. This includes a baseband SIC, voice codec, RF transmitter, RF receiver and synthesizer.
"We have designed a total system solution for a spread-spectrum telephone, instead of applying a spread-spectrum device to a cordless telephone application," said Anne Wilke, product line manager for Semiconductor Systems' cordless products. It is aimed at the residential market, and is designed for the 902 to 928 ISM band.
NEC to sell 143-MHz SDRAMs complying with SSTL standard
By David Lammers
KAWASAKI, Japan -- Early next year, NEC Corp. will begin shipping samples of synchronous DRAMs, operating at 143 MHz, that will comply with the SSTL (serial stub-terminated transceiver logic) interface now being finalized by members of the Jedec standards group
.
The push to faster devices based on that standard is the latest salvo in what promises to be a lengthy competition for memory sockets between synchronous DRAMs (SDRAMs) and Rambus DRAMs (RDRAMs).
Shigeru Koshimaru, engineering manager of the SDRAM development group at NEC Corp., said engineering samples of the by-4- and by-8-configured 16-Mbit SDRAMs will be sent to several workstation companies in January or February. A by-16 device will be ready for evaluation about two months later.
"The by-16 SDRAM at 143 Mhz it will be able to come close to a 1.2-Gbit/second transfer rate to a 64-bit graphics bus," he said.
The SSTL standard will be voted on in December at a Jedec meeting in Las Vegas, Nev., and several managers at Japanese memory manufacturers said they expect the standard to be adopted then. However, discussion continues about how the test conditions on the device will be determined.
Hyundai signs to use Wind River's real-time tools
By Terry Costlow
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Wind River Systems Inc. has entered the multimedia market by signing an agreement to supply Hyundai Electronics America with real-time software and development tools. The arrangement, which begins with set top boxes, highlights a new focus by real-time-software providers on what could become a huge market.
Under the agreement, Hyundai Digital Video Systems will use Wind River's VxWorks and related development tools in a number of products. By entering the market with a large firm that is involved in the consumer electronics industry, Wind River has increased its chances of becoming a player in this nascent market.
"Set top boxes have been a bit slow. They're not this year's technology, and maybe not next year's technology,' said Paul Zorfass, senior analyst at International Data Corp. (Framingham, Mass.). "But the fact that Wind River has teamed up with Hyundai gets them into multimedia in a big
ger way. The fact that Hyundai is a customer tends to be a validation of Wind River's philosophy in terms of tools, being able to reach out to multiple processors and operating systems."
Cypress continues PLD push with two entries
By Brian Fuller
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Cypress Semiconductor Corp. will unveil in the next two quarters a beefed-up version of its VHDL-based programmable logic design tools and a denser line of complex PLD as it continues an aggressive bid to gain share in the PLD market, EE Times has learned.
The strategy is two-pronged. On the IC side, the effort addresses system designers' increasing demands for denser programmable logic that bumps into the low-end gate array territory. On the tools side, Cypress continues to position itself as a vendor of tools that make such complex designs relatively easy to handle.
Sun to break new ground with Ultra 1 and 2 desktops
By Loring Wirbel
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- When Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. unveils the Ultra 1 and 2 desktop platforms, there will be many more firsts involved in the architecture than the use of the new 64-bit UltraSparc processor. The introduction of a crossbar-switch successor to the Mbus, and the use of a new Visual Instruction Set and new design of frame buffer will combine to vault Sun past graphic platforms from Silicon Graphics Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Digital Equipment Corp.
The Ultra rollouts actually represent the convergence of several development threads that have been months in gestation. Sun's new UltraPort Architecture, or UPA, is a bit-slice crossbar switch that replaces a conventional backplane bus in a workstation. Sun first provided details of UPA when it announced its "Net.core" UltraSparc reference platform last spring.
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