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

To: J Fieb who wrote (36993)	11/1/1998 9:41:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

If this is why CUBE went up on Friday what does it suggest will happen for the rest of NOV.? Friday October 30, 12:50 am Eastern Time U.S. OPTIONS/Semiconductors draw renewed interest CHICAGO, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Options on several semiconductor stocks were active on Thursday after Micron Technology Inc. (NYSE:MU - news) made upbeat comments, sending its shares to a new high for the year and lending support to the entire sector. Micron official Kipp Bedard, speaking to investors at SG Cowen's annual electronics conference in La Quinta, Calif., said the computer memory chip maker expected pricing for its products to remain firm through the holiday season's personal computer building boom. Trading in Micro options was brisk, especially on the Pacific Exchange, where several put and call contracts were listed among the most actively traded. A market maker noted big out-of-the-money call sellers early on, and buyers of out-of-the-money calls late in the session. Implied volatility, a key factor in determining options prices, dipped to around 54 percent for the November 40 contracts, he said. The stock finished up 4-1/16 at 39-15/16 on heavy volume of 9.7 million shares, making it the second most actively traded stock on the Big Board after Citigroup (NYSE:CCI - news). Options on Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE:TXN - news) drew good trading volume, with the November 50 calls and puts topping the most active list on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. A market maker there said traders on the floor sold the calls, bought the puts and bought the stock in equal numbers. Texas Instrument stock rallied 2-15/16 to 63-15/16. Elsewhere in the sector, the November 20 calls on Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE:AMD - news) were among the most heavily traded on the Pacific Exchange, with almost 3,000 contracts changing hands. Traders linked most of the volume to speculative call buying on the back of comments from Micron. Advanced Micro stock advanced 1-3/16 to 20 in active dealings. SIGH. Can't anyone differentiate DRAM from other silicon?

To: J Fieb who wrote (36993)	11/1/1998 11:00:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

DVxpress.............................. kipinet.com In the Chip One of the year's biggest developments in the area of MPEG-2 editing is the release of the DVxpress family of chips by C-Cube Microsystems. A DVxpress card, in fact, forms the basis of 601's MPEG-2 capabilities. With DVxpress, C-Cube has put a programmable video-compression engine on a single add-in board. The card, according to the company, contains a micro-SPARC RISC core and offers special hardware for video I/O, motion estimation and compensation, DCT, IDCTs, variable-length encoding and decoding, video scaling and compositing, and audio capture. "The benefits of digital video are obvious and well known," says Joe Sutherland, product marketing manager at C-Cube. "But you need compression to make digital video work." One of the major drawbacks to MPEG-2, he notes, has been the high cost of the encoding and decoding hardware. C-Cube's single-chip architecture has brought this cost down; moreover, MPEG-2-compressed video provides a serious savings in bandwidth over M-JPEG. This, in turn, will allow nonlinear vendors to offer multiple-stream editing, real-time special effects and other features now found only on the big-ticket systems in nonlinear editors selling for $1,000 to $2,000, he says. C-Cube offers the DVxpress 7110 for the high-level consumer market (this chip is expected to form the basis of those "$1,000 to $2,000" systems); the DVxpress 7112, a professional version for systems that will sell in the $10,000-and-higher range; and the newly released DVxpress-MX, which provides transcoding between the DV and MPEG-2 formats. "We see the market migrating to two formats-DV on the acquisition side and MPEG-2 on the distribution side,"Sutherland says. "These are the formats that are becoming dominant for their applications. What is driving us is the need to provide a seamless bridge for end-to-end digital production, allowing users to mix the formats together or make a transition between them." DV Everywhere

To: J Fieb who wrote (36993)	11/3/1998 9:01:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 50808

Startup says photonic solution provides greater bandwidth (This is "wow" news if true and viable. I wonder what Gilder has to say about it?) By Margaret Quan EE Times (11/03/98, 11:48 a.m. EDT) NEW YORK — Silk Road Inc. (San Diego), a startup, will demonstrate on Tuesday (Nov. 3) a photonically derived solution that enables the transmission of voice, video and data signals on a single wavelength at the speed of light through fiber optic cable. In its technology demo, Silk Road will transmit 144 distinct TV programming signals from a video wall with 144 monitors to a second video wall through a strand of fiber optic cable at 93 gigabits per second. Silk Road's technology simultaneously carries voice, video and data signals over long distances on the backs of photons in a bidirectional laser beam that does not have to be replicated or amplified. Company executives said their photonics solution can be scaled from a network backbone down to a local area network. Silk Road plans to introduce its first transmitter and receiver products early next year. Silk Road (formerly SynComm Inc.) is promoting its photonics-based technology as an alternative to dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), a transmission technology that provides wide bandwidth across networks. Unlike WDM, which uses multiple wavelengths that must be reconditioned to eliminate crosstalk, Silk Road said its single-wavelength solution presents no chance for crosstalk or signal interruption. The technology allows information to be added or removed with a simple beam splitter, so information is available to all nodes in a network at any time and there is no need to disrupt a transmission to add or drop data. In Silk Road's signal-transmission scheme, light is generated from a source and photons that escape from a cavity form a laser beam. As the laser beam shoots down an optical fiber, an external optical modulator narrows the beam and enables electronic signals to be embedded into the beam. The embedded signals are tagged with proprietary frequency ID tags. These tags, which remain linked to the signals, travel down the fiber without interfering with one another. At the receiving end, a key for each tag is matched up with the correct transmission channel to unlock the data, voice or video to be received. Silk Toad calls the technology refractive synchronization communication, which refers to the behavior of the electromagnetic wave inside a crystal of the modulator. Silk Road's technology is broadly described in a U.S. patent, awarded on Oct. 6 to James R. Palmer, the founder and chief scientist for Silk Road, for a Stabilized Distributed Feedback Semiconductor Laser. The initial patent was deliberately obscure to protect the company's intellectual property, executives said. Silk Road has submitted 250 additional patent claims that further detail the company's work. Palmer has a distinguished career in optics. He served as chief optical scientist on the Strategic Defense Initiative project of the U.S. government, held a professorship at Trinity College, and received the Rudolph Kingslake Award in 1984 for his work in optics. Asked why other companies haven't pursued similar technology to obtain greater bandwidth, Robert Freeman, vice president of operations for Silk Road, said others have focused their money and resources on WDM technology. SilkRoad has met with Lucent, Ciena, Nortel and Siemens, Freeman said. Those companies were "dumbfounded" by the technology, he said. eet.com