Techweb stories for next week.................
techweb.cmp.com
Some excerpts:
The war between DSP & MCU
On Monday, Texas Instruments will take the wraps
off its new DSP architecture, which it claims will
"render microcontrollers obsolete." At stake are
100s of millions of sockets in high-volume markets
such as disk drives, cameras, DVD players,
phones, printers, and auto engines. "There's a war
out there," says Forward Concepts' Will Strauss.
"Everyone making MCUs is desperately trying to
add DSP capabilities, and everybody in DSP is
trying to add more MCU functions."
Cirrus busy changing focus
Cirrus Logic's marketing VP, George Alexy, was
in Tokyo this past week, in a marketing push by
the company "to move beyond the PC" and apply
its mixed-signal technology to integrated solutions
for emerging markets, David Lammers reports in
EE Times.
Japanese OEMs buy 18% of Cirrus output. Cirrus
is busy changing its product development focus and
designing single-chip ICs for digital still cameras,
DVD drives, and digital audio in a drive to build
these sales and make up for declining sales of PC
graphics accelerators. "The handwriting is on the
wall; PC graphics absolutely will be an
Intel-dominated domain," says Alexy. In late
March, Cirrus will unveil a DVD controller {NOTE: Not a decoder] that
incorporates PRML (partial-response,
maximum-likelihood) technology. FY98 sales
(ending Mar. 31) will run $900M, with its final
quarter "flat to down."
Dust hasn't settled in DVD
The slow takeoff of DVD-ROMs opened the door
to a host of upstart rewritable-drive formats, all
looking to become a standard rewritable
mass-storage peripheral for next-generation
computers. The industry's DVD Forum had plotted
a scenario in which DVD-RAM, approved as a
standard last summer, would go hand-in-hand with
DVD-ROM as the officially sanctioned rewritable
follow-on to the read-only platform, Yoshiko Hara
writes in EE Times.
While DVD-RAM still has the lead, the challenger
formats all offer advantages. But Koji Hase, who
heads Toshiba's DVD unit, says '98 will be "the 1st
year of DVD-ROM," '99 "the year of 2.6-Gbyte
DVD-RAM," and 2000 "the year the 4.7-gigabyte
DVD-RAM will debut."
But DVD-RAM drive rolling
External DVD-RAM drives were unveiled this past
week by Hitachi and Matsushita Electric that will
hit the Japanese and U.S. markets this spring. The
products are expected to help DVD-RAM drives
take the lead over other gigabyte-rewritable
formats, Yoshiko Hara reports in EE Times.
Both new drives carry a $775 retail price. Hitachi's
drive has two lasers and lenses so that it can read
such CD-family disks as CD-ROM, CD-R, and
CD-RW at an 8x speed and DVD-ROM and
DVD-R at 2x speed. For the U.S. market, both
companies intend to market the new drives by
concentrating on PC vendors.
Smart-TV ICs take Analog route
This next week is show time for two competing
Silicon Valley startups that are both run by
graphics and digital-video gurus. TeraLogic,
digital-TV silicon developer, on Monday will take
the wraps off its first single-chip
graphics/video-processing IC for bringing
graphics-rich data services to analog or digital
TVs. And TeleCruz is gearing up to sample its first
single-chip Internet TV solution. Both firms are
trying to gauge the demand for new smart TVs,
which is driven by Web browsing, data
broadcasting, and e-mail, Junko Yoshida reports in
EE Times. Both startups seem to have chose a
realistic, evolutionary approach; both are betting
their first silicon products mostly on analog TV. |
