Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times . Previous editions are available from the 1994 , 1995 , 1996 , 1997 , and 1998 News Archives.

Wednesday, July 3, 1996

Java applet targets DSP

Intel flashes its Miniature Card

EDAC comes out with industry 'report card'

Rockwell courts Brooktree with a $275M offer

Mietec embraces ARM core

Tuesday, July 2, 1996

Fuzzy logic is proven stable

Ethernet system allows data acquisition over local nets

3-D simulator can model ferrites

I-Cube flips LANSwitch

Ethernet controllers roll

Monday, July 1, 1996

Cable, Internet factions collide

Synclink DRAM finds new support

Comm world prepares for home delivery

Standards effort aims to link CAD to CAM

Internet taxes are hot topic at ITAA confab

Headlines and summaries from the pages of Electronic Engineering Times . Previous editions from 1994 , 1995 , and 1996 are in the News Archive on the News page .

Other news sources on Techweb .

Wednesday, July 3, 1996

Java applet targets DSP

WALTHAM, Mass. -- TechOnLine , a virtual-engineering "technology mall" on the World Wide Web, is using the Java prog ramming language to help designers evaluate development tools for digital-signal-processing (DSP) systems over the Internet.

TechOnLine's proprietary Java applet, which loads and executes automatically from the mall's VirtuaLab, emulates the Internet tool Telnet. The applet allows engineers to evaluate DSP development tools over the Net, freeing them from configuring Telnet client software into their browser.

While most e-mail, FTP, Gopher and IRC sites are already being phased into the Web's dominant interface via powerful browser configurations, Telnet has long been the holdout, due to the complexity of the Unix-based program. Since many engineering libraries and software models are based in Telnet, the new applet could open the way for the Web to play a bigger role in DSP design.

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Intel flashes its Miniature Card

FOLSOM, Calif. -- Intel Cor p. last week unveiled the first versions of the Miniature Card, the small-form-factor memory card it has proposed as a standard. The postage-stamp-sized cards will first be available in 2- and 4-Mbyte densities. They are designed to replace the relatively clunky PCMCIA cards and fend off competition from at least three other new small-form-factor memory-card designs.

Intel's Series 100 flash-memory cards, at 38 mm x 33 mm x 3.5 mm, are 73 percent smaller than PCMCIA type II cards and offer support for 3.3 V, 5 V and "x.xV" (industry consensus on the next standard voltage level for portable applications has yet to be achieved).

"In this market, you need programmability, endurance and small size; after that, you need the lowest possible cost," said Steve Rotz, Intel's product-line manager for flash-memory cards.

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EDAC comes out with industry 'report card'

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Claiming to offer accurate quarterly reporting of worldwide EDA market data in various technology segments, the Electronic Design Automation Companies (EDAC) has released its 1995 Market Statistics Service (MSS) report. The study spotlights such trends as a nearly twofold increase in Verilog unit prices, a 37-percent jump in IC-CAD revenues, and a surprising 13 percent decline in FPGA/PLD synthesis revenues.

The report, which covers 1994 and 1995, differs from market numbers provided by Dataquest and others in several respects. It uses data provided directly by the EDA vendors and is audited by the Arthur Andersen consulting firm. It provides a quarterly breakdown and looks at unit shipments as well as overall revenues. Most importantly, perhaps, the report has the blessing of the EDA vendors themselves. "This is an excellent report card for the EDA industry," said Alain Hanover, CEO of Viewlogic Systems Inc. and vice chair of EDAC. "We get a fantastic collection of data, and you know it's dead accurate. It mirrors what the SIA [Semiconductor Industry Association] does with their numbers."

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Rockwell courts Brooktree with a $275M offer

SEAL BEACH, Calif. -- Rockwell International Corp. has made a $275 million cash offer to acquire Brooktree Corp. and run it as a division of Rockwell's Semiconductor Systems Division. The deal would give Rockwell an immediate presence in such digital communications markets as digital-subscriber-line (DSL) transceivers, asynchronous-transfer-mode chip sets and voice compression. It would also put the company back into T1 framers, a business it sold to Brooktree four years ago.

Brooktree, based in San Diego, also has a significant presence in multimedia-graphics accelerators and was beginning to expand its video-encoder and audio-processor base. However, "Brooktree does not yet have a true codec for videoconferencing," said Will Strauss, principal at Forward Concepts Inc. (Tempe, Ariz.).

Still, the combination of digital communication and graphics expertise meshes well with Rockwell's position as the top supplier of single-chip modems for analog phone lines.

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Mietec embraces ARM core

OUDENAARDE, Belgium -- Alcatel Mietec, the mixed-signal ASIC supplier and semiconductor arm of European telecommunications giant Alcatel, is preparing a series of product announcements based on the ARM 32-bit RISC core. The moves are part of an internal campaign to refocus the company on core competencies.

Alcatel Mietec licensed the Thumb variant of the core, which can use 16-bit-wide instructions, from Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. (ARM; Cambridge, England) earlier this year to complement an 8-bit RISC microcontroller core licensed in 1994 from Nordic VLSI AS (Flatasen, Norway).

Vincent Roland, sales and marketing director at Alcatel Mietec, said the ARM core "will be used in most of the standard products we will announce at Electronica in November."

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Tuesday, July 2, 1996

Fuzzy logic is proven stable

BERKELEY, Calif. -- Widespread acceptance of fuzzy logic and other "model free" techniques for implementing machine learning is being blocked by the inability to prove the stability of such systems, according to experts who spoke here at the recent biennial Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Society (NAFIPS'96). But new developments described at the conference may put to rest the perennial mathematical-stability problem, possibly leading to new, robust fuzzy applications.

On a prac tical, engineering level, companies in Japan and Europe have already proved the stability of fuzzy systems by flooding the commercial market with viable fuzzy-based products. In the United States, however, engineering managers prefer to have solid mathematical proofs of stability on file before they deploy end-user applications.

To address the stability problem, Lawrence National Labs researcher Masoud Nikravesh described a method of proving the stability of many non-linear systems, including neural networks and fuzzy systems. First the non-linear system is translated into a state-space model; then the mathematical Liapunov method is applied and simulated for stability.

Reasoning that if the state-space version is stable, the original must be as well, Nikravesh performed some experiments to test that hypothesis. The initial work confirmed it. Nonetheless, Nikravesh warned his conference audience that Liapunov stability analysis requires considerable experience and expertise to be used effectively.

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Ethernet system allows data acquisition over local nets

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Intelligent Instrumentation, a Burr-Brown company, brings real-time interactive access to plant-wide data over Ethernet with its Ethernet Data Acquisition Systems (Edas). Because of the open nature of the environment, proprietary interfaces or networks are not needed in integrating a variety of hardware and software solutions.

Remote I/O applications can include monitoring and control of processes, machines or environments. Communications take place over the LAN (10 Base T) -- or over the Internet, with TCP/IP serving as the open protocol, and almost any platform as the host.

Edas units function as application servers, providing I/O functions to clients on the network. Operation is either synchronous or asynchronous. In the former mode, a client polls the unit for di gital input values and counter values or to set output values. In the latter mode, the unit sends data based on change-of-state or alarm conditions.

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3-D simulator can model ferrites

SAN FRANCISCO -- A field solver from Ansoft Corp. (Pittsburgh), demonstrated at the recent Microwave Theory and Techniques (MTT) International Symposium here, offers practical 3-D simulation of ferrite devices. The Maxwell 3D Field Simulator is an option to the Maxwell Eminence tool set.

Ferrite devices are widely used on antenna designs and high-frequency designs, especially in the defense and commercial communications area, noted Ansoft vice president of marketing Prem Premkumar. They allow designers to bias a magnetic field and therefore control the direction of power. Thus, ferrites may be important elements on monolithic microwave ICs (MMIC).

Until now, howev er, designers have either had to resort to rough 2-D approximations or build prototypes and make lab measurements. The latter alternative is very expensive, Premkumar said, and could take six months to a year. The 3-D field-solver development was partially funded by the Darpa-backed Ferrite Development Consortium, which includes Trans Tech, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, EMS Technologies, Lincoln Laboratories and Naval Research Laboratories.

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I-Cube flips LANSwitch

The compa ny has defined a reference design called Raptor, which it will deliver to OEMs later this year, combining its 24-port switching element and quad-port switch interface with a special content-addressable cache memory from Aptos Semiconductor Inc.

The crossbar switching matrix at the heart of the LANSwitch architecture will arrive in two levels of granularity. The first samples to be shipped will be the LS101, a 24-port switching element that integrates a PCI bus interface for carrying control signals from the host, and a multicast bus for IP multicasting. Later, a 48-port LS102 will allow single workgroup switch systems to scale to 64 ports. While intended primarily for Fast Ethernet, the speed of the architecture -- 125 Mbits/s per port -- can support token-ring and FDDI switching as well as Fast Ethernet.

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Ethernet controllers roll

SUNNYVALE, Cal if. -- Fast Ethernet controllers remain a hot item for semiconductor manufacturers, as evidenced by recent products announced by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Via Technologies Inc. (Taipei, Taiwan). Companies have continued to unveil Ethernet products while waiting for the transition to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. Though ATM is considered a better technology, most networks were built with Ethernet, which requires different hardware and software.

"There's a big existing infrastructure and investment" in Ethernet, said Bob Wheeler, AMD marketing manager for networking products.

Fast Ethernet, which can transfer data at 100 Mbits/second as opposed to the standard 10 Mbits/s, has allowed the older technology to match ATM's speed without supplanting Ethernet equipment.

The result is a rapidly growing market. Research firm In-Stat Inc. (Scottsdale, Ariz.) is predicting 82 percent annual growth for the Fast Ethernet market through 1999.

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Monday, July 1, 1996

Cable, Internet factions collide

Montreal -- The converging worlds of cable TV and the Internet collided last week in a contentious debate at the 36th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), here. The IETF disclosed that it will forge standards to define the interface between the Internet and cable-TV systems. However, the cable industry has specs of its own in the works, and experts said it's not clear whether portions of the two efforts will conflict.

Moreover, Internet gurus raised concerns that, as cable systems plug into cyberspace, their millions of customers could collectively become bandwidth hogs, with the potential to bring the Internet to its knees.

The flurry of activity highlights the technological transformation that's catapulting cable and the Net out of the separate spheres they occupied in the 1980s, and turning them into an intricately interconnected, mixed-mode data environment where video signals and bit streams fight for bandwidth. The result, which experts here expect to see before the end of the decade, will be e-mail, Web pages and Java applets riding over cable-TV systems into consumersý homes. "Weýre in this to put ourselves out of the video business and into the broadband-data business," David Fellows, senior vice president of engineering at Continental Cablevision, a New England CATV service provider, told the IETF.

On the other side of the equation, video will take to the Internet in a big way, now that services like Mbone multicasting stand poised to move from experimental to production status.

From evidence at the meeting, however, the changes will be anything but smooth.

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Synclink DRAM finds new support

Kawasak i, Japan -- The proposed Synclink high-bandwidth DRAM is picking up important new support from Samsung Electronics and IBM Microelectronics--partly, proponents claim, as a backlash against the royalties required by Rambus Inc. for the high-bandwidth Rambus DRAM (RDRAM).

Though Rambus (Mountain View, Calif.), with its RDRAM, provides a "here today" solution for high-bandwidth-memory requirements, the Synclink camp claims its multibank memories will be a natural evolution to synchronous DRAM (SDRAM)--without the proprietary control exerted by Rambus.

"There is a movement toward Synclink within the DRAM industry because the Rambus royalties are more than the market will bear,' said a manager for IBM Microelectronics, which joined the Synclink consortium last week during a meeting of the group at the University of California at Santa Clara. IBM earlier had licensed the Rambus-access cell (RAC) required to develop ASICs and other logic products that adhere to the Rambus-interface protocol.

Samsun g Electronics (Seoul, South Korea), is developing a Synclink DRAM at its Kihung R&D center. A spokesman said Samsung also is concerned about the "very high" license fees required by Rambus, though Samsung isnýt scrapping its Rambus development program.

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Comm world prepares for home delivery

Dallas -- The Supercomm/IEEE Conference on Communications (ICC) was filled with turmoil here last week, as a host of technology providers raced toward the huge revenues promised by home Internet delivery.

While some attendees said the Internet may be on the verge of choking, may lack a viable business model, and may be a passing fad, it has triggered a stampede to open high-bandwidth connections over that critical half mile between the end of commercial fiber lines and the wall of the residential subscriber. The digital subscriber line (DSL) is becoming the battlefield to claim whatever revenue the Internet can produce.

The struggle over who will provide that critical link expressed itself in technical terms last week as contenders maneuvered for position on which technology will be used to blast bits into the home.

Each DSL was being pitched by someone as the ideal candidate for home and small-office Internet access, as vendors argued whether patterns of user Web-browsing will favor one or another DSL.

The most dramatic activity involved the as-yet-unformulated very-high-bit- rate DSL (VDSL) approach. Unlike asymmetric approaches that offer moderate speed in only one direction, VDSL can offer speeds of 12 to 60 Mbits/second over copper wire at distances of 1,000 to 6,000 feet. But inexpensive silicon for VDSL doesnýt exist. Last week, communications theorists jockeyed to be in bed with the right silicon vendor when the spec was ready.

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Stan dards effort aims to link CAD to CAM

Washington -- One of the most troubled gaps in electronic design--between pc-board computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)--may soon be closed, as a result of a standards effort launched by two industry groups and Intermetrics Inc. The project, which received Darpa-funding approval last week, promises a single standard that can represent all board-manufacturing data.

Dubbed the Electronic CAD-CAM Exchange (Ecce), the project is a two-year, $5 million effort, with 40 percent of funding to come from Darpa. Through the Electronic Industries Association (EIA) and its EDIF group, Ecce weds the EDA community with board makers, represented by the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC). The standard will be administered by Cambridge, Mass.-based Intermetrics. "The inability to efficiently and seamlessly transfer manufacturing data costs U.S. electronic companies $150 million a year," said Tom Dammrich, president of the IPC. "We are intending to create a real standard that the industry can salute and that people will use."

The project will use the EDIF 4 0 0 standard to represent pc-board design information, build a new CAM information model and neutral format, and then map that format with the EDIF. The result will be a bidirectional, joint IPC/EIA standard that can handle board fabrication, assembly and test.

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Internet taxes are hot topic at ITAA confab

Washington -- The concept of collecting taxes from transactions over the Internet took center stage at an Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) conference here last week.

While none of the proposals being floated here are as radical as the "bit tax" scheme recently proposed by the European Commission, observers said the coming jurisdictional battl es over who, if anyone, will tax electronic commerce will shape the way public and private networks evolve.

For engineers, questions being raised about global collaboration and the rise of virtual companies loom as large as how to tax transactions. If two people form a joint venture over the Net, for example, can they be taxed like any other venture?

Itýs not a matter of when, but "how do we develop a reporting and payment system that doesnýt kill these transactions?" Paull Mines, general counsel for the Washington-based Multistate Tax Commission, asked at the ITAA conference. "Electronic commerce is making geography and goods less important and services and intangibles much more important."

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