AT&T licenses Neuhaus circuit; agreement covers PCMCIA interface

Electronic News, July 6, 1992

Agreement Covers PCMCIA Interface

New York -- AT&T signed an agreement to license PCMCIA bus interface technology from Dr. Neuhaus, a 13-year-old communications component manufacturer based in Hamburg, Germany (Data Net, June 22).

The non-exclusive license covers AT&T's use of a Dr. Neuhaus circuit design in future PCMCIA-compliant V.32 bis modem chip sets. AT&T, however, said the deal does not mean it will immediately incorporate the Dr. Neuhaus interface component in its chip set designs, despite a statement by the German company that said AT&T "will use Dr. Neuhaus' PCM-CIA-complaints bus interface chip design in its newest chipset for PCMCIA-compatible V.32bis modems."

Asked to elaborate, an AT&T Microelectronics spokesman said the license "lets us check out the circuit design and whether it will work in a chip set. The statement that ATT will use the circuit design in its newest chipset is premature, but it is a neat circuit and we intend to check it out."

A subsequent inquiry to Dr. Neuhaus headquarters in Hamburg was answered with a statement by company president Gottfried Neuhaus, which said the license "entitles AT&T to produce our PCMCIA chip themselves or wherever they want, to print the AT&T logo on it (and) to sell it as a package together with their V.32bis data pump and never as a standalone device, because we do not want competition in the open market from AT&T."

The statement did not outline specific AT&T product plans, however, and the AT&T Microelectronics spokesman declined comment when asked about the company's product intentions for V.32bis PCMCIA modem cards. Dr. Neuhaus said he did not know whether AT&T looked at other suppliers of PCMCIA bus interface technology, and the AT&T Microelectronics spokesman would not say whether internal or external alternatives to Dr. Neuhaus were evaluated.

In a separate development, AT&T Microelectronics revealed an across-the-board price cut averaging approximately one-third on its ATT3000 line of field-programmable gate arrays. The cut, which affects five gate ranges with varying speed and packaging options, resulted from an effort to reduce manufacturing costs so the FPGAs could compete more effectively with mask-programmed devices, according to AT&T.

The company gave as pricing examples two of the 3000 line's more popular configurations, the ATT3042 in an 84-pin PLCC with 4,200 available gates and the ATT3090 in 160-pin QFP with 9,000 available gates. The 3042 pricing examples are more representative of the 33 percent across-the-board price cut than the 3090 tags, which averaged closer to a 25 percent reduction.

In 100-unit quantities, a 70-MHz version of the 3042 was cut from $43.10 to $28.90 while a 100-MHz configuration was reduced from $51.70 to $33.30 and a 125-MHz style was cut from $65.90 to $43.30. Hundred-unit quantities of the 70-MHz 3090 were reduced from $144.60 to $109.30 each while a 100-MHz model was cut from $169.70 to $125.80 and a 125-MHz unit was dropped from $211.90 to $163.50.