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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DiViT who wrote (49535)	6/17/2000 10:39:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Optical drive parts shortage............................. techweb.com Optical storage: caught in the middle The supply-chain knot is proving to be almost Gordian in its complexity. Consider the case of Plextor Corp., a manufacturer of the rewritable and write-only DVD drives that ATI and Sigma executives said were in short supply. Plextor said soaring growth in the cell-phone market is eating up supplies of high-profile flash memory and RF components, as well as more mundane parts like the Hitachi H8 microprocessor that Plextor uses as a system controller. "In our latest 12X[read]/4X[write]/32X [CD-ROM] products, we can't get enough components to satisfy demand," said Howard Wing, vice president of sales and marketing at the Santa Clara company. Over the last six months, "as soon as we took care of one supply problem, another would crop up." Wang estimated that the supply problems have affected only about 10% of Plextor's product portfolio, and that the situation should improve in June through increased production at Hitachi and better supply-chain practices. A spokeswoman for Hitachi Semiconductor (America) Inc., San Jose, said that H8 production had increased from an average of 15 million units per month during 1999 to about 17.5 million units a month so far this year. Still, analyst Mary Craig of Dataquest Inc., San Jose, estimated that shortages-especially of RF amplifiers single-sourced from AKM Corp. in Japan-will cap CD-RW shipments at 28.7 million units this year. Demand is expected to climb to 30 million units, she said. DVD-ROM shipments also are being constrained by a shortage of DSPs, according to Kathy Longfellow, senior product manager at the Storage Device Division of Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc., Irvine, Calif. According to Dataquest, total DVD-ROM shipments during 2000 will be about 23 million units, while mainstay CD-ROM shipments will total about 124 million units. -Additional reporting by Jennifer Baljko Shah ebnonline.com Copyright © 2000 CMP Media Inc.

To: DiViT who wrote (49535)	6/18/2000 3:56:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

LG markets set tops under the Zenith name, a C-Cube customer............................. koreaherald.co.kr LG develops HDTV set-top box for data broadcast LG Electronics has developed a high-definition TV set-top box for digital data broadcasting via the Internet. The company said it has unveiled the device, the world's first of its kind, at the Model Station Committee Meeting, an international broadcast industry forum recently held in Washington. Some 70 major broadcasting companies including PBS, NBC and CBS attended the forum that discusses the standard and solutions for digital broadcasting. LG's new set-top box is designed to offer interactive data broadcast service by just adding a new software, without changing major hardware, to receive digital data service coming in all formats including satellite and cable broadcast. Data broadcast service allows viewers to access a wide variety of additional contents, including news, stock information and weather forecasts, while watching TV. LG is the world's first firm to offer the data service on HD-quality displays, the company said. LG's data broadcast system employs the specification required by the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF), an alliance of U.S. broadcast and cable networks, TV transports, consumer electronics and PC industries. Participants include LG, Intel, Microsoft, CNN and Sony. The forum has established its digital TV standard including HTML 4.0 and Java Script 1.1 in January. In addition to technologies for chipsets and TV sets, LG has secured key solutions for the ATVEF-standard data broadcasting service including content writing tools and data generators, establishing a major foothold in the next generation broadcast market in the world. The company has applied for an international patent for some 30 related technologies. For the first time in the world, the company, jointly with PBS, successfully demonstrated digital data broadcasting in the United States last October. Digital data broadcast service is set to start in Korea in 2002. (HJJ) Updated: 06/19/2000