NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR CORP. has launched a three-year, $2.5 million program to provide teachers access to free Internet training and to encourage Internet use in the classroom.

Called Global Connections, the program consists of an Internet training course designed to equip teachers with the knowledge, skills and support necessary to integrate the Internet into their curricula. An interactive online versi on provides Internet training to educators with access to the Internet.

"National views its use of the Internet as a competitive advantage," said CEO Brian L. Halla, "and we believe that students entering the work force with the ability to access and discover information on the Internet will have an advantage when competing for jobs in the information age."

The company estimates that during the next three years, more than 6,000 educators will be trained.

"WE'RE GOING TO BE SEEING a big impact of Web technologies on EDA system architectures. The connectivity revolution is a total revolution-it is happening, and it will only accelerate. Assume the number of everything of interest here is extremely large, infinite-for instance, servers.

"In the use of networks in EDA integration there are a fe w good examples-for software support there's Synopsys' SOLV-IT! [extranet site]. But basically, we are way behind other industries-and very few dollars are being spent on R&D in this area."

- A. Richard Newton, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley

MAY 12-14: Get a jump on info about the Electronic Distribution Show and Conference, an annual meeting for manufacturers and distributors of electronic components. Find info on the exhibits, programs and meetings at this year's event at the Las Vegas Hilton.

SINANET.COM (Taipei, Taiwan) now offers a Chinese/English Web-search engine. Called SinaSearch, it lets user s search the Net with English and simplified and traditional Chinese, bypassing language limitations. The site gets 40 million page views a month.

TECHONLINE'S e-zine covers embedded-systems design and DSP solutions, with an emphasis on software, especially debugging. This month find technical information from Lucent, Motorola and Texas Instruments. Registration is required.

PADS SOFTWARE INC. (Marlborough, Mass.), a supplier of interconnect-software solutions for the electronics market, has revamped its site with easier navigation. Find info on the company's tool set for solutions for circuit design, schematic capture, board layout, autorouting, post-layout simulation, design verification, documentation, fabrication, assembly, test, repair and quality management .

THE MICROELECTRONICS GROUP OF SHARP ELECTRONICS CORP. offers a redesigned site to better provide up-to-date product news, specifications and data sheets to customers and design engineers. There are now nine distinct areas, including a group profile and employment. Technical info is available on the group's flash memory, 32-bit processor, applications, products and search tools.

NEARLY TWO YEARS after the blockbuster film Independence Day made it a household word, the real-life SETI Institute (Mountain View, Calif.) is still going strong. SETI serves as a base for scientific and engineering research in the field of life in the universe, with an emphasis on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SET I).

The site, is a treasure trove of information on the nonprofit research organization with two dozen ongoing projects. Funding for these projects comes from government agencies, private foundations and individual donors.

Before you snicker, check out just who some of those donors are: William Hewlett, Gordon Moore and Paul Allen.

There's info on SETI signal-tracking methodologies; projects sponsored by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Jet Propulsion Lab; and a look at the group's use of the world's largest telescopes. There's also a profile of SETI astronomer Jill Tarter, the heroine upon whom last summer's Jodie Foster flick, Contact, was loosely based.

Has SETI detected a signal from ET? "Not yet," they say.

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