The Circuit

Electronic News, Nov 30, 1998 by Jim DeTar, Peter Brown

National Semiconductor will today introduce a PCI audio accelerator, the LM4560, targeted at multimedia PC and add-in card vendors looking to move from ISA audio-based systems to PCI audio systems. National says that it now offers the entire PC audio IC chain from CPU to amplifier. The LM4560 is a single chip 64-voice wavetable engine with per voice effect processing capabilities. It supports 32 simultaneous digital audio channels and allows for Doppler effects in video games. The chip also supports the PCI bus power management interface, a 3.3-volt operation, full legacy compatibility with SoundBlaster and DMA, MIDI port support, I2S input/output support and a digital/analog game port interface. The LM4560 is available now priced at $8 in 1,000-unit quantities.

Frontier Design and Taiwanese EDA distributor Maojet Technology will today sign an agreement under which Maojet will have exclusive rights to distribute and support Design's line of intellectual property (IP) cores, EDA tools and design services in Taiwan. The tools and IP are used in systems-on-a-chip for multimedia, consumer audio, telecommunications, wireless and portable applications. Frontier's ART library of tools and cores are used to create bit-accurate, fixed-point representations of floating point algorithms, an initial step in implementing these algorithms into silicon. Frontier is looking to expand its presence outside of Europe and the U.S. where the company has made most of its impact thus far.

ATI Technologies has completed its acquisition of Chromatic Research for $67 million, or 100 percent of all outstanding shares of Chromatic's stock. ATI has assumed the net liabilities of the company in gaining its intellectual property core blocks and engineers. Chromatic, with its Mpact architecture, shipped next generation system-on-a-chip technology in the form of a media processor to only a few PC OEMs. The technology combined multiple functions into a single chip including graphics, system logic, DVD video, audio and other components. Chromatic was said to be working on a next generation media accelerator targeted at the emerging sub-$500 PC market.

Acer Inc. announced that its new Microsoft Windows-based terminals will incorporate M-Systems' Flash Pioneers' DiskOnChip technology, a single-chip flash disk. The DiskOnChip family includes the recently announced DiskOnChip Millennium, claimed to be the industry's first monolithic flash disk. DiskOnChip products offer hard disk emulation and are available in a 32-pin dual inline package (DIP) or TSOP surface mount technology (SMT) package. Acer's Windows-based terminals boot and run Windows CE from the DiskOnChip Millennium. " 'M-Systems' DiskOnChip technology is a drop-in replacement for a hard disk. No other storage media is required," said Barry Doong, president of M-Systems Asia. Samples of DiskOnChip Millennium 8MB (64Mbit) are available now with volume quantities scheduled for 1Q99 production.

Even as various market research firms and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) predict a modest recovery in the semiconductor industry next year, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Integrated Circuit Engineering (ICE) is taking a contrarian view, predicting "virtually no semiconductor revenue growth for 1999." In addition, in a soon-to-be-released report, ICE is also projecting that there will be only modest unit volume growth in 1999 with continued downward pressure on average selling prices for MPUs and only modest memory price recovery. Capital spending by semiconductor companies will be virtually flat next year, according to ICE, when compared to the down year of 1998. In addition, the analyst house is predicting there will be a restructuring of the semiconductor business model, "following the traditional semiconductor company having significant consequences from a competitive standpoint, from a capital expenditure standpoint and from a business focus standpoint." ICE foresees what it terms a "significant shift" in product focus toward system-on-a chip products by "virtually every major manufacturer.