A JOINT STUDY by Internet Profiles Corp. (Redwood City, Calif.) and Media Metrix (Port Washington, N.Y.) reveals that the average Web site grew by 130 percent in usage last year.

Approximately 40 percent of Web growth can be attributed to users accessing the Web from home, the study shows, and another 15 percent can be linked to increased frequency, or more usage among existing users. The remaining gr owth is a result of increased usage at work and burgeoning non-U.S.-based traffic.

Another report, by the company LibraryLink (Washington), found that the number of people who accessed the Internet from their public library increased by 86 percent since January 1997. The report also found that use of a public library for Internet access increased at an even higher rate, growing by more than 500 percent overall since 1996.

SOURCE ELECTRONICS CORP. (Hollis, N.H.), which provides value-added services for integrated circuits, has added an online order-status system to its site. The system gives customers real-time access to all orders through the entire manufacturing process.

SYNOPSYS offers an online "Intellectual-Property Challenge." Break the code in the Verilog Model Compiler/Logic Modeling compiler model and win a Humvee, or cash equivalent of $75,000. Or re-create HDL source code functionally equivalent to the contest model's, and synthesizable using Synopsys' design compiler, and get a chance to win a lease on the Humvee, or $18,000.

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS has registration and info on its embedded-system design seminars. Next: "Migrating MCU-based control systems," an overview on DSPs in MCU apps.

COMMERCE SECRETARY William Daley discusses "The Emerging Digital Economy" in briefing transcripts offering information on e-commerce and its impact on the CAD and CAM industries.

VIDEOJET SUSTEMS INTERNATIONAL INC. (Wood Dale, Ill.), a manufacturer of industrial, graphics and postal marketing and coding systems and fluids, has a new site. The company, owned by the General Electric Co. of the U.K., offers more than 200 pages of corporate, product and services information and an online "university" .

"NOW YOU HAVE THE ABILITY, with a network computer, to download all this information from the mainframe, bringing information to the NC to do things locally, then send it back to the mainframe. All the computing paradigms still exist with the mainframe; it's just a very large server.

"IBM has taken 'mainframe' out of their language, and they want to eventually take 'proprietary' out of their language. They're also talking network computing.

"If yo u're going to talk network-centric computing, you've got to talk Internet/intranet/extranet. If you are going to talk that, you have to talk TCP/IP."

- Brian Reaves, chief executive officer of Beyond Software

INTEL has put together the first leg of an online training course for designers that's quite possibly one of the most significant engineering-based sites to appear.

Featuring RealAudio clips, an easily navigable syllabus, an online chat room and an actual person overseeing the whole thing-the "Pentium Processor Architecture for Embedded Design" course feels just like the first day of college-you get a locker, there's orientation, and you meet the prof.

A high-level designer can finish this first introductory-lev el course fairly easily, but what's important are the growth possibilities for future in-depth tutorials.

The site uses the Web's potential: It's self-paced; you never have to take notes-it's all archived-(even the RealAudio clips have been transcribed to text for searchability); and it's open 24/7.

This first course can be run through in an hour-and it covers the evolution of the Intel architecture leading to the Pentium; discussions on superscalar architecture; the floating-point and the branch target prediction units; and also cache organization.

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