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Coverification "Stars" Coverification takes center stage at conference Welcome 12-Inch Wafer Industry readies fabs for next-generation wafers EDA Rumble in Japan Cadence and Avant! figure in Japan tangle, too OnTrak On the Lam Lam buys OnTrak to secure foothold in wafer polishers Battery Talk Portable debate turns to batteries Oracle NCs Oracle rolls out StrongArm X86-based network computers

Coverification "Stars" Coverification takes center stage at conference By Richard Goering, EE Times Santa Clara, Calif. -- With major introductions from Simulation Technologies and Ikos Systems Inc., hardware/software coverification promises to be a dominant theme at the combined International Verilog Conference-VHDL International Users Forum (IVC-VIUF) here. Meanwhile, several new EDA companies will make their first public appearance, and Viewlogic and Cadence will renew their Verilog-simulation speed race. Jointly located for the second time, IVC-VIUF has become the second biggest EDA conference of the year, with roughly 60 exhibitors and a two-day technical program. Simulation Technologies (St. Paul, Minn.) will announce V-CPU, a product that lets embedded systems designers develop software on a hardware "virtual prototype" through a link to logic simulation. Ikos Systems (Cupertino, Calif. ) is taking a different route with Avatar, a lower-priced version of its VirtuaLogic emulation system focused on software designers. With Chronologic VCS version 4.0, Viewlogic Systems Inc. (Marlboro, Mass.) is claiming a two- to threefold speed increase due to its "Roadrunner" technology. Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) is taking its fastest Verilog simulator, NC Verilog, and adding timing features needed for ASIC-vendor sign-off. New EDA companies at IVC-VIUF include Novas Software and Interra Inc. (see March 24, page 16). Also making introductions are the Advanced Technology Center's CoverMeter division (Laguna Hills, Calif.), which provides a new Verilog coverage tool; FTL Systems (Rochester, Minn.), which offers hardware-description-language (HDL) analyzers, compilers and simulators; and Simpod Inc. (Santa Clara), which makes a desktop verification tool that can serve as a low-cost functional tester. Simulation Technologies' V-CPU is based on the same general concept as the Seamless CVE product from Mentor Graphics and Eaglei from Viewlogic. Such products link software debuggers or instruction-set simulators to HDL simulation and provide fast processor models. Software designers can thus start writing code before hardware exists, and ASIC designers can use embedded software code as stimulus for simulation. Since Simulation Technologies already offers Verilog debugging and code-coverage tools, V-CPU is a natural extension of its mission, said president Rich Davenport. The product was developed and used initially by Cisco Systems Inc., and has been purchased and upgraded by Simulation Technologies. It was described in a paper given by Cisco engineers at last year's Design Automation Conference. On the software side, V-CPU supports host-mode execution, in which software is compiled for a host platform and analyzed with a debugger, or target-mode execution, in which software is cross-compiled for the target and analyzed with an instruction-set simulator. The host mode yields faster performance but less detail. V-CPU also provides C language CPU resource models and high-level functional models. The idea here is to model as much as possible outside the HDL simulator, which slows the process considerably. On the hardware side, V-CPU uses bus-functional rather than full-functional HDL processor models. At present, V-CPU supports MIPS, PowerPC, Motorola 68000, X86, ARM and Intel i960 CPUs, as well as the PCI bus. Simulators supported are Cadence's Verilog-XL, Viewlogic's VCS and Avant!'s Polaris. V-CPU is now available for $40,000 on Unix platforms. Compared with Mentor and Viewlogic products, Davenport said, V-CPU requires fewer changes to embedded software, and has had longer use in production due to its Cisco heritage. Though V-CPU promises speeds many times faster than logic simulation, hardware emulation gets even closer to real-time speeds. With Avatar, Ikos is seeking to propagate "clones" of its VirtuaLogic emulation system, without hardware debugging features and at a lower cost, to embedded software designers. "We eliminate anything that has a hardware look and feel," said Larry Melling, vice president of marketing at Ikos. "This should look just like a workstation to the software designers." Otherwise, all the specifications are the same, including the 500-kHz to 2-MHz speed range and capacities of over a million gates. Producing reliable replicates is harder than it sounds, said Melling. "Our system is 100 percent reproducible," he said. "Once we load it into a VirtuaLogic emulator we can load it onto 100 Avatars and it will work, guaranteed." Other emulator vendors can't match that pledge, Melling said, because their software doesn't account for timing differences that occur even between identical FPGA devices. Further, he noted, Avatar has the same performance and capacity as VirtuaLogic. Companies can buy any number of Avatars but must have at least one VirtuaLogic for the initial download. Avatar incremental pricing is around 40 cents/gate beyond the base configuration, compared with 56 cents/gate for VirtuaLogic and more than $1/gate for many competing systems. Avatar is available now starting at $100,000 for 200,000 usable gates. The product has already been used in the design of a 3-D multimedia accelerator from Nvidia Corp. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). In addition to new coverification products, IVC-VIUF attendees will hear competing performance claims from the two primary vendors of Verilog simulators, Viewlogic and Cadence. Viewlogic's VCS 4.0 is the first version of that product to incorporate Roadrunner, previously announced as a standalone Verilog simulator. Designed to compete with cycle-based simulation, Roadrunner offers a two-state simulation option and claims to provide efficient evaluation of sequential logic, event reduction between sequential logic blocks, global data-flow optimization and more comprehensive module and function in-lining. The result, said Ghulam Nurie, Viewlogic's director of ASIC-verification marketing, is a two- to threefold increase in speed over the current VCS 3.1. Also new with VCS 4.0 are negative timing checks, which are important for deep-submicron designs. VCS 4.0 will ship in June on Unix platforms for $40,000, with no extra charge for Roadrunner. Viewlogic and Cadence have an intense rivalry over simulation speed, and Nurie said VCS 3.1 is already three times faster than Cadence's NC Verilog, and uses four times less memory. But Dave Kelf, Verilog product manager at Cadence, has customer benchmarks that claim NC Verilog 1.0 runs as fast as VCS 3.1, and the new 1.1 release claims to double simulation speed. More significantly, NC Verilog is adding timing features required for ASIC-vendor sign-off, such as Standard Delay Format (SDF) annotation. That means the simulator now has all the timing features of Cadence's widely used Verilog-XL product. NC Verilog costs $40,000 on Unix platforms; version 1.1 is available now, and version 1.2 is due to arrive in June. (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. 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Welcome 12-Inch Wafer Industry readies fabs for next-generation wafers By Brian Santo, EE Times Portland, Ore. -- Despite tepid support in 1996 for its emergence, the shift to 300-mm (12-inch) wafers is moving slowly but inexorably forward. As many as eight 300-mm production fabs are tentatively planned to come online by the end of 1999, according to Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI). Meanwhile, a "philosophical" difference between Japan and the rest of the world on the subject of wafer-handling could become a serious snag once manufacturing-equipment suppliers start developing products. Causing a problem right now is the lack of device-grade 300-mm wafers, which is holding back development, reported SEMI's Global 300-mm Initiative director George Lee last week. Lee said that SEMI compiled confidential information from IC manufacturers that indicates as many as nine pilot lines might be in operation by the end of 1998 and another five by the end of 1999. Two low-volume production lines based on 300-mm wafers and equipment might be ramped by the end of 1998 and five low-volume and one medium-volume fab by the end of 1999. Despite the intention of IC companies to shift from 200-mm (8-inch) wafers to 300-mm wafers, several problems could impede an orderly transition. Japanese IC manufacturers are investigating a wafer-handling scheme that differs from the one favored by chip makers elsewhere. Japanese companies are looking at using an open cassette, while their competitors want to keep wafers in an enclosed environment. The ramifications are serious enough to prompt the Japanese to be willing to set up their own 300-mm evaluation and development support corporation, Selete (Yokohama), rather than join the I300I (International 300 Initiative; a Sematech spin-off in Austin, Texas) in which most of the other IC companies are participating. In essence, Lee explained, the different approaches are the result of beliefs about the major sources of microcontamination. It is unlikely that there will be any effect on big-ticket machinery such as lithography and deposition systems, but the rift might result in an inefficient split in the equipment industry in terms of carriers, transportation systems such as overhead loaders, and the configurations of the vacuum load locks on manufacturing equipment. Lee said that another point of international contention--where to put load locks--was recently settled. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment will be side-loading. Mechanical-grade 300-mm wafers are available but still very expensive, Lee reported. Used primarily for equipment evaluation, the quantities that may be obtained have doubled from 100 to 200 per month to 200 to 400 per month. There is a small number of device-quality wafers available anywhere. Furnace-quality wafers are just now being delivered to some equipment companies. "The problem for the transition from 200-mm to 300-mm is now affordability," Lee said, noting that I300I is actually reprocessing used evaluation wafers in an attempt to reduce per-disk evaluation costs. Another possible impediment is the question of whether suitable lithography tools for evaluation purposes can be delivered on time. Selete is reported to have ordered a deep-UV stepper from Canon. I300I expects to have a similar machine (from an as-yet unidentified manufacturer) installed by the end of this year. The industry slowdown is also having a negative effect. Individual companies have been forced to reassess their capacity needs and long-term plans. Though confidential SEMI reports indicate that several pilot lines will be up and running in 1998, and a number of fabs will be online in 1999, Lee said pilot production is more likely for late 1998, "and full fab production is likely to be pushed back to 2000." Nevertheless, the total number of 300-mm pilot lines and 300-mm fabs seems to be holding steady as some companies call off plans to build new 300-mm fabs, and others decide to go ahead with them. Siemens, Intel, NEC and Mosel-Vitelic are among the companies that have publicly discussed moving to 300-mm wafer fabs. Ron Dornsief, principal analyst at Dataquest, said that the number of new fabs being planned--200-mm and 300-mm-- is too high. Plans call for 47 new manufacturing facilities, according to Dataquest, but the sustainable number is 33. Meanwhile, the industry faces a continuing downturn and an increasing excess in capacity. Dataquest projects it will take up to two years for the capacity situation to stabilize. Dornsief described 1997 and 1998 as "pause" years. The slowdown in the chip business does seem to have one salutary side effect on the move to 300-mm wafers, however, in that it is allowing equipment manufacturers to redirect resources from 200-mm products to 300-mm development. Lee said that equipment manufacturers expect that the price of individual production systems for 300-mm wafers may go up 25 percent to 40 percent in comparison with systems that handle 200-mm wafers. Fab size is likely to increase, along with fab power and water consumption. Applied Materials earlier this year announced a rapid thermal processing system capable of handling 300-mm wafers, but Lee said he was not aware of any orders for machinery capable of handling wafers that size. (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. 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EDA Rumble in Japan Cadence and Avant! figure in Japan tangle, too By David Lammers, EE Times Yokohama, Japan -- While Avant! and Cadence Design have battled bitterly in the U.S. courts, they have also been entangled in Japan in a bizarre business relationship. It is a story--told by knowledgeable sources still working at the companies involved who wish to remain unnamed--that begins in 1986, when the semiconductor market crashed and Minoru (Larry) Yoshida was ousted from the presidency of Tokyo Electron Ltd. (TEL), the second-largest semiconductor equipment company worldwide and a distributor for dozens of foreign semiconductor and technology companies. Seeking vindication, Yoshida set up Innotech Corp., a Yokohama-based trading company, and vowed to create a company bigger than TEL. Well-connected with the top Japanese semiconductor managers, Yoshida began selling the IC design software developed by SDA Corp., the progenitor of Cadence. After mergers with Ecad Corp. and then Tangent, fast-growing Cadence stuck with Innotech, and for good reason. Yoshida, tapping his contacts, took Cadence's sales from $4.5 million in 1987 to $29 million in 1989. More importantly, he created a team of EDA-savvy sales and support engineers which now exceeds 70 people. As Cadence's sales in Japan grew, Yoshida began to worry. Distributors who do poorly are replaced. But distributors who do well, in Japan and elsewhere, also put themselves in a precarious position, because the OEM may "go direct," set up its own sales force, and leave the distributor pounding sand. In Japan, an employer has social responsibilities to employees, and firing a large number of people is unacceptable. Though Innotech handled all of Cadence's IC CAD tools in the Japan market (leaving Cadence's Japan subsidiary with the system-design tool sales and other responsibilities), people wondered how long Cadence would stand by Innotech. Yoshida, according to several sources, in September 1994 opted to protect himself by secretly setting up a separate company, named Design Solutions Inc. (Yokohama), which immediately took on Avant! as its main customer. A core group of Innotech's technical sales managers moved from Innotech to Design Solutions. Tsuneo Suzuki, who ran the Japan operations of Mentor Graphics for about 10 years, was hired to head Design Solutions. Those who asked Innotech managers about the Innotech relationship to Design Solutions were answered with a wink, a wave of the hand and the smiling response, "Don't ask." It is almost certain, these sources say, that Design Solutions was the creation of Innotech, which was prevented from taking on the Avant! line because it conflicted directly with Cadence. Suzuki said "there have been a lot of rumors like that going around." He said Naoshi Sugiyama, the second-ranking executive at Innotech until recently, helped Design Solutions find clients "because he was my friend for a long time." Suzuki said several technical people did join Design Solutions at the outset. He said the financial backing of Design Solutions came not from Innotech, but from "friends." Gerry Hsu, during his years in charge of Cadence's IC CAD operations, visited Japan often and formed close relations with many people at Innotech. He also befriended a number of Japanese IC CAD managers, who admired his "can-do" approach to technical problems. Hsu would personally make sure that the complaints and suggestions from Japan received top priority within the Cadence bureaucracy. Hsu decided he needed "a personal emissary" to his Japanese business associates. He put an advertisement in a newspaper and hired Noriko Ando, a former airline stewardess. Hsu decreed that Ando would be the person to deal with Toshiba Corp. After she went to Toshiba to announce herself as Cadence's representative, an astonished Toshiba engineering manager called Cadence Japan to ask what was going on. The manager in charge of Cadence's business at Toshiba phoned Joseph Costello and threatened to quit. Costello managed to smooth--temporarily--the ruffled feathers, both at Toshiba and at Cadence Japan. But significantly, Ando stayed on the Cadence payroll, and Hsu continued to deal directly with Cadence's key Japan customers, using Ando as his information conduit. When Hsu quit Cadence to form Avant!, Ando was put in charge of Avant! Japan, and supervised the two main distributors: Design Solutions, which had grown to about 20 people, and Marubeni Hytech, a much larger, Tokyo-based electronics trading company affiliated with giant Marubeni Trading Corp. Having two distributors in the Japan market is not unusual, but dividing up the sales territory is tricky nevertheless. Hsu, working through Ando, managed to play one distributor off against another. Design Solutions handled sales to Sharp, NEC, Rohm and Matsushita (believed to be Avant!'s biggest customer, signing a multiyear contract last year that was cited in Avant!'s stock offering information). Marubeni Hytech handled most of the other major accounts, but on those occasions when Hsu was unhappy with sales at one account or another, he would give the order to Ando to yank the account from Marubeni Hytech and give it to Design Solutions, or vice versa. The distributors were instructed to talk only to Ando, and not to Hsu directly. Avant!'s sales grew rapidly, to about $30 million in 1996, and revenues are expected to increase sharply this year as well. Engineering managers who shake their heads at the unusual business practices also are quick to say that Avant! has excellent place-and-route software. Last September, Avant! went on its own acquisition binge, taking over MetaSoft, Anagram and Frontline, each of which had its own network of distributors in Japan. Shortly thereafter, Hsu came to Japan and announced that all of the distributors would be rolled into one. The new company recently started operations in Yokohama as Maingate Electronics Corp., with Ando in charge. Hsu took the unusual step of asking each of the existing distributors to invest in Maingate, and to transfer the technical support people who had been handling the Avant! products to Maingate as well. One person involved with the changeover said that "back in October, people doubted that Hsu would actually do it. They didn't believe him. But he has a very strong management style. And in a way, the relationship he has with Ando is working well for him. She doesn't make her own decisions, and she is an excellent translator of information back to Gerry himself. If she was supposed to make decisions on her own, it wouldn't work, but as it stands now he has good control over everything through her." Not that everyone is happy. Marubeni Hytech lost 10 sales engineers to Maingate, and five people left Design Solutions, which derived most of its revenues from Avant! sales. But in the modern-day business world, where survival takes precedence over loyalty, the entire affair is viewed with a surprising amount of equanimity. Yoshida, who amassed great personal wealth as he built Innotech into a diversified trading company with several hundred million dollars in annual revenues, is on the verge of signing a multiyear contract with Cadence that will tie the two companies even closer together. One source said "you have to understand Larry's position. He had a large number of people on his payroll, Cadence sales were getting big enough in Japan to go direct, and so Design Solutions was set up partly to cover his rear. "Japan is not the kind of place where you can lay off 70 people with a few weeks' severance pay. And if you look at the history of how foreign companies have treated their distributors here, it is completely understandable." Joseph Costello, chief executive officer of Cadence, was kept informed of the situation as it developed but took a pragmatic approach as well. Getting confrontational with Yoshida could have resulted in losing a valuable group of technical sales people in Japan, where non-Japanese companies have difficulty hiring engineers. The pending agreement between Innotech and Cadence, according to reliable sources, includes provisions that will put an end to the practice of referring Cadence rivals to Design Solutions. And revenues at Cadence are growing rapidly as Costello's gamble on the consulting business has paid off handsomely, with Japanese customers gradually warming to the idea. Suzuki, the president of Design Solutions, said the loss of the Avant! line to Maingate Electronics is "a headache, but I am not particularly upset about it. When companies get to a certain size they want to set up their own sales subsidiary. I did the same thing when I worked at Mentor, and trading companies can't avoid these kinds of changes. Now we at Design Solutions just have to go out and look for new business, and in the fast-changing world of electronics, we will find it." Another source with direct knowledge of the situation said the people at Design Solutions need not worry too much about their paychecks. Innotech, the company which helped set up Design Solutions two and half years ago, will continue to support them until new lines of business are developed, this source said. (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

OnTrak On the Lam Lam buys OnTrak to secure foothold in wafer polishers By Margaret Ryan, EE Times Fremont, Calif. -- Lam Research Corp. disclosed plans to acquire OnTrak Systems Inc., a supplier of wafer-polishing equipment, in an exchange of stock valued at $225 million. For Lam, the acquisition creates a foothold in the chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) cleaning systems market, the most rapidly growing segment of the $21 billion semiconductor-equipment industry. The CMP market is expected to grow at a rate of 31 percent through 2001, according to Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). The deal also calls for OnTrak Systems chairman and chief executive James W. Bagley to become Lam's chief executive officer and to join Lam chairman Roger Emerick in the newly created Office of the Chairman. Bagley had been chief operating officer and vice chairman of Applied Materials Inc. before joining OnTrak in June 1996; with Lam, he will take the helm of one of Applied's top rivals. Way Tu, president of Lam, will report to Bagley. In a separate announcement last week, Lam said it would report a loss of about $1.40 per share, or about $42.8 million, for the quarter ending March 31. The loss is related to customers' pushing back orders for equipment and to a faster-than-expected move to the next generation of etching tools; the shift left Lam with an excess inventory of older products. (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

Battery Talk Portable debate turns to batteries By Ron Wilson, EE Times Santa Clara, Calif. -- Batteries and battery management pushed the envelope at Portable by Design, as vendors described several new chemistries, each of which could make important contributions to portable equipment. Additional papers discussed the latest in battery management technology, often based on the Intel/Duracell Smart Battery Data Specification. The shift from NiCd and Ni-metal-hydride batteries to lithium-based cells was virtually a given for the conference. One presenter claimed that nearly all the new notebook computers introduced in 1997 would use some sort of lithium battery system. But the new lithium cells, while offering advantages in operating life for the space and weight, have brought their own problems, some papers warned. The cells require careful supervision by a microcontroller or dedicated battery management IC to achieve their potential. In the extreme, intelligent battery management is necessary in lithium-ion batteries to prevent fire or explosion. In answer to this challenge, papers discussed a host of battery-management strategies based around the Intel System Management bus (SMbus) and the SBDS. Dedicated ICs, such as those described by Benchmarq Microelectronics Inc., can be integrated into a battery pack to provide a full range of management features, disconnecting the battery from an overcharge, protecting it from exhaustion, controlling the charging process in conjunction with a smart charger and providing an accurate capacity gauge. Other papers, notably one from Upal Sengupta, principal engineer at Rayovac Corp., argued in favor of a microcontroller-based rather than dedicated approach. Sengupta pointed out that microcontroller firmware could be altered to take into account the needs and behaviors of multiple battery chemistries. Even within a particular group, such as lithium batteries, the charging and discharge characteristics can vary widely. Whatever approach was taken, there was general agreement that safety and accurate capacity measurement were vital. The safety issue spoke for itself, particularly in light of Li-ion batteries' ability to grow tiny slivers of metallic lithium, which could then short out a cell, resulting in fire. But capacity measurement emerged as an equally important issue. Speakers from SystemSoft Corp. pointed out that with typical battery measurement systems today, capacity is only measured within about 10 percent. By having a more accurate knowledge of the remaining energy in the battery, and by carefully choosing a power-management scheme in the computer to best use the remaining power, the paper estimated that operating life could be extended by as much as 20 percent with the same hardware. But the greatest changes in portable equipment life may come from the batteries themselves. Despite the current wave of enthusiasm over Li-ion batteries, several competing technologies--some recent and some not yet ready for production--spoke their piece. They focused not only on energy density but also on manageability and safe disposal. Perhaps the most familiar of the competing technologies was RAM--a rechargeable alkaline battery developed by Battery Technologies Inc. and marketed by several major companies. RAM cells, according to a paper, offer discharge rates in the hundreds of milliamps, hundreds of useful recharge cycles under modest operating conditions and extremely low self-discharge. They are used primarily to replace conventional alkaline cells in consumer applications, but they also have OEM uses. A more unusual approach came from AER Energy Resources Inc., which described a unique Zinc-air battery design: the cell essentially respires, giving off oxygen during charging and absorbing it during discharge. A Zinc-air battery uses a combination of air tubes and a fan to provide or remove air when the battery is in use and to isolate the battery from air when it is not in use. Zinc-air technology, according to AER, offers much lighter weight per Watt-hour than even Li-ion batteries, at about the same volume. The batteries are also potentially much less expensive than lithium solutions, and can be disposed of as household waste. This latter point is important because, unlike Li-ion batteries that provide hundreds of recharge cycles in even heavy operation, Zinc-air batteries are reduced to half capacity by about the 50th deep discharge. AER marketing manager Tim Cutler estimated that in practice, the Zinc-air battery in a notebook computer would have to be replaced every couple of months. Other new and promising technologies used lithium ions, but in different ways. Li-ion polymer batteries, discussed by Powerdex division of Gould Electronics Inc., offer essentially the same performance as liquid-electrolyte Li-ion batteries. But because the electrolyte is a flexible polymer instead of a liquid, cells can be made in virtually any shape, from millimeter-thick sheets the size of a notebook-computer LCD panel to complex curved surfaces. Another emerging technology came from Battery Engineering Inc. The company has devised a Li-ion cell in which both anode and cathode are carbon, and in which the electrolyte is an inorganic material containing sulfur dioxide. A sacrificial electrode of metallic Lithium is placed in the cell, and over the first few operating cycles, the metal is transported into the carbon electrodes. This gives the cell the remarkable characteristic of actually increasing its energy capacity during the first 100 or so cycles. The cell shows an initial capacity of about 90 mA-hours, which degrades only slightly over 250 cycles. More important, the cell exhibits one very valuable characteristic of previous sulfur-dioxide/lithium cells--it is chemically resistant to overcharging. Cells overcharged to many times their capacity would show no abnormal behavior on discharge. But previous sulfur-dioxide cells had the unfortunate habit of exploding violently during operation. Replacing the lithium anodes in these cells with the carbon anode, and inserting the sacrificial lithium plate, eliminated the growth of Lithium dendrites and the explosions. The new battery technologies promise greater energy density, greater safety, more flexible packaging and less need for battery management. But none offers an enormous increase in operating time for portable equipment. As one speaker commented, "We have made big advances in energy density. But the systems vendors will find ways to use more current, so the operating hours have stayed about the same." (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

Oracle NCs Oracle rolls out StrongArm X86-based network computers By Rick Boyd-Merrit, EE Times Maynard, Mass.-- Oracle Corp. will drive its concept of the network computer (NC) forward at its Open World conference in Japan next month when it launches two NC reference designs: one based on Digital Equipment Corp.'s StrongARM implementation and another on the Intel X86. Though Oracle is keeping the X86 design under wraps until the April 16 event in Tokyo, it went public with the StrongARM reference platform last week. It's pitching the Digital Network Appliance a more powerful, more standards-complaint upgrade of the ARM 7500FE-based reference design, created by U.K.-based Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. and unveiled by Oracle in the summer. Oracle claims 11 companies licensed and built systems around that earlier design but that the reference platform's relatively low performance and ARM-specific nature limited its appeal. The 7500FE "had everything from a 28.8 kbit/second modem to 25-Mbit/s ATM interfaces, but they were not industry-standard interfaces," said Jim Lynch, vice president of business development for Network Computer Inc. (NCI), an Oracle spinoff that designs NC software. Systems based on the 7500FE, Lynch said, were suitable for "low-end browsing and light applications" on consumer NCs but not for "substantial Java applications " in a business environment." In that earlier reference design, the 33-MHz 7500FE integrated chip acted as central processor, video accelerator, memory manager and I/O controller. It ran ARM's RiscOS, used ARM-specific firmware and employed a unified memory architecture that relied on systems memory for frame buffer chores. By contrast, Digital's design uses the 233-MHz StrongARM and supports PCI and ISA peripherals, including Iomega's Zip drives, which have proved popular in some NC designs. The reference platform runs a version of public-domain NetBSD Unix that has been tailored for NCs by NCI and uses firmware compliant with the Open Firmware Initiative. It contains 8 to 64 Mbytes of system memory plus a separate Cirrus Logic graphics chip supporting both TV and SVGA displays and its own frame buffer. Bill-of-materials costs for the Digital design are said to range from $150 to $250, depending on the configuration. Digital Equipment will provide the full electric and mechanical specification for the design free as part of its Strong-ARM sales program. The company intends to rely on outside manufacturers to build the StrongARM NCs; those companies, in turn, will source through Digital's systems business. "We want to have these NCs built by a company whose business is high-volume, low-cost manufacturing," said Bob Supnik, vice president of research and advanced design for Digital. Supnik said his group worked with NCI for nine months on the StrongARM NC. He said the business model is similar to one employed by IBM Corp. in that IBM makes and sells a variety of servers, PCs and networking gear but sources its IBM Network Station from terminal maker NCD. On the software side, NCI's April launch in Tokyo will include its NC Access software suite, a bundle of systems and applications-level programs designed to act as a complete NC environment. Based on NetBSD, the package includes Oracle's own Web browser, e-mail client and productivity applications as well as support for Java. NetAccess is expected to ship in volume later this year, Lynch said. Lynch positioned NCI's switch from its hardware dependence on ARM to its relationships with Digital and Intel as a planned upgrade and expansion. "We selected the ARM environment in part because of the StrongARM," Lynch said. "When we started talking to ARM, we also started talking to Digital. The reference design from Digital is part of an evolution. "We will have an Intel reference design as well [at the April event]," Lynch said. "And we will support other hardware architectures as our users demand them." Two companies have already announced plans to build network computers based on the Digital StrongARM design. Funai Electric Company Ltd. (Osaka, Japan) will build consumer-oriented devices; Aranex Inc. (Bedford, Mass.) will build business-class NCs. Both companies had licensed the earlier, ARM 7500FE-based reference design. (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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