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To: BillyG who wrote (38988)	2/19/1999 1:07:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Fast-growing NeoMagic aims at DVD and digital cameras semibiznews.com Semiconductor Business News (02/19/99, 10:59 a.m. EDT) SANTA CLARA, Calif. — NeoMagic Corp. has plans to expand into the digital video disk and digital still camera markets through a pair of acquisitions. The news announced yesterday (2/18) comes as the company posts net income of $9.0 million for its fiscal fourth quarter, and continuing sales increases. "We are pursuing a multi-market strategy extending beyond the notebook arena and into other markets and applications," said Prakash Agarwal, president and CEO. NeoMagic has acquired the optical drive development group from Mitel Semiconductor, including 16 employees and associated intellectual property, based in Manchester, England. The group will complement NeoMagic's ongoing efforts to bring embedded DRAM to DVD technology. "As Internet bandwidth grows, end-users are demanding more multimedia content in their web experience. DVD is the technology of choice for the storage of multimedia content in the Internet age, and so is a significant market opportunity." In a separate deal, NeoMagic is acquiring the assets and intellectual property of Tel Aviv, Israel-based ACL, which is known for its complex image processing algorithms. "Growth in the popularity of the Internet is driving consumer demand for images and videos to make engaging web experiences," Agarwal said. "This in turn fuels the need for small, highly portable still and video cameras that capture digital multimedia content in convenient formats." Terms for neither deal were released. The company reported today total fourth quarter sales of $$72.0 million for the period ending Jan. 31. That's a gain of 61 percent from the $44.7 million reported in the same period last year, and up 7 percent from the preceding quarter's $67.4 million total. That led to net income of $9.0 million, compared to $8.2 million in last year's fourth quarter. "We are quite pleased with our results for the fourth quarter, and we take great pride in what NeoMagic has accomplished over the fiscal year," said Agarwal. Total sales for the year were $240.5 million, up 93 percent from revenue of $124.7 million last year. This led to net income of $31.2 million, up from 20.8 million last year. "We are firmly embarked upon new product development activities for these two new markets: DVD and digital cameras," Agarwal said. "These acquisitions are complementary to our own activities in these new market areas."

To: BillyG who wrote (38988)	2/19/1999 1:43:00 PM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 50808

BRCM says it needs better design tools to get a single chip set top... ynoters Scope Out Challenges Of High-Bandwidth Systems (02/16/99, 3:22 p.m. ET) By Rick Boyd-Merritt, EE Times SAN FRANCISCO -- High-bandwidth systems will drive the electronics industry forward, said keynoters at the International Solid State Circuit Conference here in San Francisco Monday. But these emerging consumer and communications systems will stretch the complexity of both digital and analog semiconductor design to provide the kind of performance and price characteristics such systems will require. "We will see bandwidth to the home increase from tens of kilobits per second to tens of megabits per second over the next few years as cable modems and xDSL connections emerge, and broadband transceivers will be at the heart of those systems," said Henry Samueli, chief technical officer at Broadcom, in Irvine, Calif., one of three keynoters at the conference. Samueli cited two classic hurdles in delivering next-generation set-top boxes, cable modems, and DSL connections. Design tools are not ready to handle ASIC parts approaching 10 million transistors and beyond. Analog designers, struggling with lowering voltage requirements for each new process technology step, are finding their component blocks do not scale down from one generation to the next. "Even the chips we design today break most of the digital design tools we use, and we are forced to develop patches for them," he said. In addition, analog components are not shrinking in size as designers migrate then to 3.3 volts and lower supplies, he said. Theo Claasen, chief technology officer of Philips Semiconductors, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, argued for a new metric for efficient silicon based on millions of operations per Watt. "If you look at the Semiconductor Industry Association's road map, you will see they describe 50-nanometer devices running at 0.6 volt that will require 175 watts and 290 amps. That will require more power than what you need to start your car," he said. "Cranking up performance by means of speed alone has a lot of hidden costs," he said, arguing for his metric he said is more computationally efficient than measuring raw megahertz. Haruo Nakatsuka, chief research director of Toshiba, in Kawasaki, Japan, said the chief challenge designers face is simply delivering the raw silicon power tomorrow's consumer electronics systems will require. Nakatsuka described consumer systems that will blend broadcast feed that combine live digital video with 3-D graphics to create whole new applications in areas such as gaming that could require processors with a 700 GFLOPS punch. He also described a futuristic TV programming guide based on a real-time video recognition and indexing engine that could require 900 GFLOPS. Nakatsuka held out hopes through a combination of faster clock speeds, higher transistor densities, and parallel techniques such as SIMD and VLIW, semiconductors could offer performance increases perhaps greater than two times a year. Samueli was similarly upbeat on the expanding opportunities in communications. He previewed papers Broadcom engineers will deliver here on four separate integrated transceivers including a DSL chip that will deliver data at up to 52 megabits per second, enabling video over 4,000-foot copper lines in a fibre-to-the-neighborhood scheme. The company will also detail new silicon for integrated transcievrs for high bandwidth direct broadcast satellite, cable model, and set-top box applications. "The single chip set-top box is not all that far off," said Samueli. "We can design this with something under 10 million logic transistors." OK, CUBE don't stop now....