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To: DiViT who wrote (31260)	3/20/1998 10:55:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

Tiawan enters the DVD market place. Acer, Acer Peripherals, Asustek Computer, Lite-On Technology, Tatung, and other Taiwanese companies will roll out DVD players as soon as the third quarter of this year. Local companies will sell these DVD players under their own logo as well as to foreign original equipment manufacturers. Taiwan's move into the DVD business could put some competitive pressure on their rivals in Japan and South Korea -- events that will ultimately bring down product prices rapidly, analysts said. techweb.com

To: DiViT who wrote (31260)	3/20/1998 11:40:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

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.