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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RocketMan who wrote (3444)	1/26/1999 6:15:00 PM
From: Tunica Albuginea	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

RocketMan there is every reason for CNBC to bash AOL: 1) AOL selected CNBC to partner with. 2)AOL is rushing to provide WEB TV for easy www cruising from the ease of your living room. 3)The PC will be turned into a TV so that PC addicts can watch the future CNBC equivalent (won't be hard to replicate ), from their desktop, TA. interactive.wsj.com January 26, 1999 Tech Center Microtune Creates TV Tuner on a Chip, Considered a Leap in Technical Design By EVAN RAMSTAD Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL A start-up company has created a TV tuner on a computer chip, an achievement pursued by giant electronics companies in hopes of simplifying TV sets, cable-set-top boxes and computers that receive television signals. The company, Microtune Inc. of Plano, Texas, overcame signal interference, distortion and other problems to produce the thumbnail-size chip. A TV tuner -- the part of a TV that selects a channel and filters out others -- commonly is made of a few dozen components, including several chips, linked on a circuit card several square inches in size. Microtune's chip will work for analog or digital TV signals sent over the air or a cable, the company said. It may later produce a chip for satellite reception. While a leap in technical design, Microtune's chip will initially cost about twice as much as existing tuners, which range from $6 to $10 each. "What we want to do is come down to that price point over time but deliver additional performance," says John Norsworthy, the company's founder and chief technical officer. Closely held Microtune is backed by powerful investors, including the George Soros management team and Quantum Industrial Fund, Intel Corp. and Institutional Venture Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm. The company aims to sell its chip to makers of cable-set-top boxes, said Mr. Norsworthy, a former engineering vice president at Cirrus Logic Inc. Eventually, he said, the chip may allow TV makers to close factories devoted to tuners and, instead, rely on semiconductor firms to produce the key part. But Microtune may first have to show its chip can be integrated with a TV set's other chips. A long-term goal for TV makers is to reduce the number of chips and combine functions, not just the tuner, onto one chip. Nonetheless, an engineer at a major TV-set maker said, "To a lot of companies that make chips for TV, the silicon tuner is the holy grail to complete their portfolio of components. I didn't think anybody was this far along."