The WAVE Report
Issue #0207------------------3/4/02

The WAVE Report archive is available on http://www.wave-report.com

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0207.1 Hot Topics

0207.2 Story of the Issue

0207.3 3D

0207.4 Semiconductor

0207.5 Wireless

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0207.1 Hot Topics

***Computer History Museum Photo Coverage
(March 3)

The WAVE Report announces the release of our photo coverage of the
Computer History Museum (Story of the Issue, WAVE0206). The coverage
takes the form of a virtual tour, arranged according to topic. Hundreds
of photographs cover the artifacts of the museum, as they detail the
advancement of computing technology from analog statistic machines, to
tera-flop supercomputers. To begin your tour, please copy the link below
into the address window of your browser. As always we appreciate any
feedback you can give us. All comments can be e-mailed to
photos@wave-report.com.

http://www.wave-report.com/photopages/comp-history/

***Spatial Announces Release of 3D InterOp Version 3.0
(February 27)

Spatial Corp., a provider of 3D software components, today announced the
release of version 3.0 of their 3D InterOp line of translators.

The latest release includes seven translators, which are now available for
partner download on Spatial's website, www.spatial.com.

Spatial's InterOp suite allows transparent direct and indirect exchange of
solid, surface, and wireframe data via a variety of neutral and native 3D
formats, including CATIA V4, IGES, STEP, VDA-FS, Pro/ENGINEER, Parasolid,
and ACIS.

Designed using an architecture that allows direct connection to CAD
information, Spatial's 3D InterOp 3.0 release allows partners to add
translators as needed to increase data transfer capabilities. Each
component is regularly updated to ensure accurate 3D data
interoperability.

Translators available in the 3D InterOp 3.0 release:


-- 3D CATIA V4 Translator
-- 3D IGES Translator
-- 3D STEP Translator
-- 3D VDA-FS Translator
-- 3D Pro/ENGINEER Translator
-- 3D Parasolid Translator
-- 3D ACIS Translator

Supported Platforms

Hardware Operating System
-------- ----------------
AMD Athlon/Intel Pentium Win 98 and NT 4.0 SP5, Win 2000 SP1
Intel Pentium Red Hat Linux 7.0
HP HP/UX 11.0 32 bit
IBM AIX 4.3
SGI IRIX 6.5 32 bit
Sun Solaris 7

http://www.spatial.com

***SatCon Semiconductor Products Introduces New RF Wireless Amplifier
(February 26)

SatCon Technology Corporation, a provider of power products, today
announced that its Semiconductor Products business unit will introduce a
new high speed, 5.7 gigahertz, RF Power Amplifier for Wireless LAN
applications at the Wireless Systems Design Conference and Expo being held
from February 26th to the 28th in San Jose, California.

The new amplifier is designed to support the emerging 802.11A standard for
wireless communication applications with utility and wireless LAN
point-to-point communications, automotive telematics and a variety of
other short-range wireless applications. The amplifier offers +10dB gain,
4 watts of output power, with output power at 1dB compression (P1) of
+36dBm typical, and a price compatible with most commercial and industrial
applications.

http://www.satcon.com


0207.2 Story of the Issue

***U.S. House of Representatives Passes Tauzin-Dingell Bill
(February 28)

Following a full day of debate, the U.S. House of Representatives today
passed H.R. 1542,
"The Internet Freedom and Broadband Bill," better known as the
Tauzin-Dingell bill. The bill passed by a large majority, 273 to 157,
with many members voting across party lines. It is not expected to be
passed by the Senate this year, with several influential Senators voicing
strong opposition to the bill, including Senator Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.),
Chairman of the Commerce Committee.

Tauzin-Dingell has become a catchword for controversy, as the bill has
become the focal point of a battle with incumbent local exchange carriers
(ILECs, the regional Bell companies) on one side, and competitive and data
local exchange carriers (CLECs and DLECs), long distance providers, and
cable operators on the other. The background for the battle is the 1996
Telecommunications Act, which attempted to create competition in both
local and long distance telecomm markets, by linking the two. Under the
1996 Act, the ILECs would be allowed to enter the long distance voice and
data market, but only after they provided open access to elements of their
local networks to CLECs (a process called unbundling). As the broadband
market has developed over the last several years, encouraging its growth
has become a major goal of government regulators, with the 1996 Act
unbundling requirements an important tool.

Now many CLECs and DLECs have come and gone, broadband subscriber rates
are low, and few ILECs have qualified for entrance in long distance
markets. The fight is essentially, what went wrong and how can we fix it.
Tauzin-Dingell seeks to fix it by relieving the ILECs of their
requirements to provide network access to CLECs--supposedly removing an
impediment to investment, and stimulating competition with other broadband
providers, especially cable. Since under the 1996 Act CLECs can gain
access to any new network elements, the ILECs have argued that they
receive no competitive advantage or ROI from capital investment. They
argue that under the 1996 Act, there is no reason for them to invest in
new infrastructure and grow their business. CLECs retort that ILECs did
everything in their power to stall and limit the unbundling process,
thereby driving most CLECs into bankruptcy. They see Tauzin-Dingell as
unjustly rewarding the ILECs for failing to obey the 1996 Act.

Obviously this is a very simplified overview. The WAVE Report has covered
this story thoroughly over the last several months. The articles most
relevant are:

Tauzin-Dingell, Good Legislation or a Threat to the US Economy?

WAVE Issue #0137 8/15/2001
An overview of the bill, and summary of a report by Tech Central Station
analyzing its possible effects on the GDP. They conclude that if passed,
it could reduce the GDP by over $50 billion.

http://www.wave-report.com/other-html-files/TauzinDingell.htm


The Broadband Economy

WAVE Issue #0147, 11/02/01
Coverage of a one-day conference at the Columbia Business School's
Institute for Tele-Information, covering the economics of broadband, and
where the 1996 Telecomm Act has failed. Notable in that most presenters
strongly supported the concepts behind Tauzin-Dingell.

http://www.wave-report.com/other-html-files/BroadbandEc.htm


COMNET 2002

WAVE Issue #0203 2/2/02
Coverage of the COMNET 2002 conference in Washington DC. Two of the panel
discussions provided good insight into the issues of telecomm regulation,
and Tauzin-Dingell.

http://www.wave-report.com/other-html-files/Comnet2002.htm


We will continue to watch the story unfold with great interest. Two
concepts that have emerged as dominant factors in the success of the bill
so far are stimulating investment, and regulatory parity. In the House at
least, the ILECs seem to have successfully shifted debate from how they
failed to perform under the 1996 Act, to how the 1996 Act affected their
ability to receive a return on investment in new infrastructure. The
faltering telecomm and networking markets no doubt aided the shift, as
lawmakers are eager to find new ways to stimulate the economy. Part of
the new focus is a redefinition of competition in the broadband market,
from ILEC vs. CLEC, to ILEC vs. cable operator. Under this way of
thinking, the ILECs seek regulatory parity with their direct competitors
the cable operators--who are not required to unbundle their networks. In
this scenario CLECs are relatively unimportant players, more readily
sacrificed.

ILECs are in no hurry to get Tauzin-Dingell passed. As long as the bill
is under consideration, it creates regulatory uncertainty in the market.
Uncertainty serves the ILECs; in times of uncertainty customers tend to
look to the established market leaders, and avoid start-ups.


0207.3 3D

***IBM Chooses ATI's FIRE GL 8800 Workstation Graphics Boards To Power IBM
IntelliStation Workstations
(February 27)

The FIRE GL(TM) 8800, a graphics solution for digital designers and
artists, will be offered by IBM in IntelliStation E Pro and M Pro
professional workstation systems.

The FIRE GL 8800 uses OpenGL. Based on the same graphics architecture as
ATI's RADEON 8500, it also fully supports Microsoft's DirectX 8.1
specification, allowing developers to design a game in OpenGL and play it
back using ATI's TRUFORM and SMARTSHADER rendering technologies.

The FIRE GL 8800 comes standard in five IBM IntelliStation models:
IntelliStation E Pro model 621453U and IntelliStation M Pro models
622915U, 622925U, 622945U and 622955U. The systems represent a variety of
mid-range configurations ranging in price from $2,919 to $3,659.

Standard features of the FIRE GL 8800 include 128MB of DDR memory,
optimized Workstation OpenGL performance, DVD video playback, as well as
support for 3D resolutions (32-bit color) up to 2048 X 1536 pixels,
digital flat panel and various configurations of multiple displays. The
FIRE GL 8800 uses a 165 MHz integrated TMDS transmitter to support DVI up
to 1600 X 1200 pixels resolution.

http://www.ati.com
http://www.ibm.com


0207.4 Semiconductor

***Infineon Technologies Introduces 4-Band VDSL Chipset Family With
Support for Standards Compliant ATM Functionality and Packet Over VDSL
(February 28)

Infineon Technologies, a provider of integrated circuits for
communications systems, today introduced a 4-Band VDSL chipset family
featuring two distinct functionalities. The 4bVDSL chipset is a fully
standards compliant ATM over VDSL solution, and the PoVDSL chipset is the
industry's first Packet over VDSL solution. Infineon will introduce these
chipsets at the FS-VDSL meeting, March 4-6 in Denver, Colorado.

Development of standards-based 4-band VDSL supports an open environment
for multi-vendor solutions. The newly adopted VDSL standard allows for up
to three video channels and fast Internet access per each line, while
leaving legacy voice services unaffected.

The 4-Band VDSL chipset family is fully compliant with ETSI, ANSI and the
recently expanded ITU VDSL standards requirements. The Packet over VDSL
chipset goes beyond the ITU standard's definition and includes full
Ethernet MII layers above the packet transport interface.

With all functionalities integrated within the chipset, Infineon's 4-Band
VDSL solution reduces the number of required external components. This
integration can help to reduce total cost by lowering the overall bill of
material (BOM), reducing system footprint and lowering design complexity
at both ends of the network.

As with the 2-band chipset, the 4bVDSL and PoVDSL chipsets use Frequency
Division Duplexing (FDD) and are based on the widely deployed Quadrature
Amplitude Modulation (QAM). The chipsets support both the asymmetrically
optimized FSAN Plan 998 as well as symmetrically optimized FSAN Plan 997
and offer 2, 3 or 4-band standard as well as non-standard frequency
allocation schemes, providing flexibility in meeting carrier cost and
application requirements.

About the 4-band VDSL Chipsets

The chipsets feature "all-in-one" circuitry including embedded interleaver
memory, microprocessor, anti-aliasing filters, gain amplifier, DCXO, ADC
and DAC. Both chipsets fully support fast and slow channels, sleep and
wake up modes, power back off, blind acquisition and channel equalization.
The 4bVDSL and PoVDSL have an integrated controller and flexible software,
allowing for operation of the modem as a stand-alone VDSL PHY.

The 4bVDSL ATM based chipset features a dual-latency UTOPIA interface as
well as a built-in PCM interface -- and is able to transport up to four
E1/T1/J1 lines using the same twisted pair. The PCM transport is in
parallel to ATM traffic. The 4bVDSL can also operate in RFC-1483 mode,
allowing Ethernet traffic encapsulation over the ATM.

The PoVDSL features an MII interface (IEEE 802.3) supporting PTM-TC (HDLC)
as per ITU-T G.993.1 standard definition. A PCM transport is in parallel
to PTM traffic. The PoVDSL chipset extends Infineon's Ethernet service
delivery with functionality as a standards-compliant 2, 3, or 4-Band PHY
or MAC depending on the application, with backward compatibility support
for the existing base of 100s of thousands of 10BaseS(TM) VDSL ports.

Infineon's 4bVDSL and PoVDSL chipsets are optimized for DSLAM, switch, and
CPE applications.

Engineering Samples of Infineon's all-inclusive 4-Band VDSL chipset family
will be available at the start of Q2/2002.

http://www.infineon.com

***Amphion JPEG2000 Core with Hardware-Accelerated Wavelet Transform Now
Available
(February 28)

Amphion Semiconductor Ltd., a provider of semiconductor
intellectual-property for broadband, wireless and multimedia
communications, today announces availability of the first entirely
hardware-accelerated Wavelet Transform based JPEG2000 Encoder core for
advanced still- and motion-image compression applications, such as
`dual-mode' still/movie-clip multi-megapixel digital cameras, 3G/4G,
medical imaging, office equipment and surveillance. The Amphion CS6510
JPEG2000 hardware-accelerator core interfaces with any embedded host
processor to construct a complete JPEG2000 encoding system on a single
chip.

The Amphion CS6510 core is fully compliant with the ISO/IEC 15444-1
standard JPEG2000 image coding system and carries out
computationally-intensive tasks such as wavelet transform, entropy coding,
quantization, and data scheduling, leaving the system processor to handle
other tasks such as managing the user interface and output data
formatting. When implemented in 180nm CMOS process technology the CS6510
delivers data encoding rates up to 60 MegaSamples/second on 8-bit samples
with real-time 'lossy' image compression ratios up to 50:1. The core also
handles arbitrary image sizes up to 2(31) x 2(31) pixels, standard
'lossless' compression, flexible image input formats, and a wide variety
of grayscale and color imaging formats such as RGB, YUV, YCrCb, and CMYK.

JPEG2000 in the 4G infrastructure

Large telecommunications providers are planning to integrate CMOS image
sensors into tens of millions of next-generation mobile handsets to
facilitate new services. Even though some anticipate bandwidth in 4G
wireless infrastructure to be higher than 100 Mbits/second, the imaging
content from millions of users must be managed in order to achieve
acceptable quality of service. Amphion believes compression by JPEG2000
could reduce bandwidth loading and help recover from dropped packets in
transmission.

Flexible architecture for SoC applications

Amphion can configure the performance and power consumption of the
reference CS6510 JPEG2000 core to cover a variety of applications. For
example, in battery-powered mobile handsets where low power is generally
more crucial than high-resolution images, the core can trade some
performance to decrease power consumption down to 13 milliwatts. For
applications such as medical imaging, where real-time high-resolution
images are vital, the performance can be boosted to 480 Mbits/second.

Availability

The Amphion CS6510 JPEG2000 Encoder core will be available for license
from second quarter 2002 followed shortly by JPEG2000 decoder and codec
solutions. The Amphion CS6210 Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) core is
available separately for SoC/ASIC designers developing hybrid
software-hardware JPEG2000 sub-systems. Amphion has already licensed its
existing portfolio of silicon-proven JPEG cores for SoC/ASIC and FPGA/PLD
to multiple semiconductor and systems design customers.

http://www.jpeg.org
http://www.amphion.com

***Peregrine Semiconductor Announces Industry's First 10 Gbps QUAD VCSEL
Transceiver Optical Engine
(February 28)

Peregrine Semiconductor, a supplier of mixed-signal integrated circuits
for the optical networking, RF, and wireless communications markets, today
announced the PE7200, the industry's first 850nm VCSEL based Optical
Engine. The PE7200 is a low power 10 Gbps fully integrated parallel
optical Quad transceiver (TRX) component built using Peregrine's patented
UTSi (Ultra Thin Silicon on Sapphire) CMOS technology.

The PE7200 is the industry's first Optical Engine product containing all
opto-electronic functions required to create parallel optical
interconnects -- including thermal and mechanical interfaces -- in a
single BGA/CSP-like device. Using Peregrine's Photonic Enabling
Technologies (PETs), which include UTSi, FOCUTS, and FOCUTSpak
technologies, the PE7200 is fabricated using standard semiconductor
packaging equipment and processes, allowing high volume manufacturing. The
PE7200 can be incorporated into optical modules, or other high-speed
parallel optical interconnect products, to provide increased throughput in
communication systems.

The PE7200 is built using Peregrine's PETs, which are based on Peregrine's
UTSi Silicon on Sapphire CMOS IC technology and employ the patent-pending
FOCUTS and FOCUTSpak packaging and assembly technologies. FOCUTS utilizes
the transparent Sapphire substrate to flip-chip bond O-E devices onto the
UTSi circuitry to form the four transmitter (Tx) and four receiver (Rx)
data channels. The UTSi based Laser Diode Drivers (LDD) and integrated
Transimpedance Amplifier -- Limiting Amplifier (TIA/LA) are the industry's
first Tx and Rx PMD functions to be integrated onto a single IC. Peregrine
states that the assembly results in better channel-to-channel isolation,
less power consumption, and lower parasitics than bulk CMOS, or more
exotic technologies such as SiGe Bipolar and BiCMOS based devices, while
providing the performance required by today's communications systems.

The PE7200 consists of a Quad Tx section -- Quad LDD and Quad 850nm VCSEL
array and a Quad Rx section -- Quad TIA/LA and Quad PIN diode array.
Additionally, each LDD channel provides an Integrated Photo Detector (IPD)
to directly monitor each VCSEL channel's optical output. Using the IPDs
with an Automatic Power Control (APC) circuit reduces the variations in
output power associated with temperature changes and device aging. IPDs
are another important industry first. In traditional parallel modules,
compensation for changes in laser output is provided, indirectly, using
temperature compensation schemes that compensate for light output based on
the temperature of the VCSEL array -- not based on individual VCSEL
channel performance. Furthermore, changes occurring from aging effects are
not accommodated (using temperature compensation) since each channel is
not actively monitored.

Also notable is the environmental seal provided to the O-E devices,
removing the need for expensive hermetic packaging. This is especially
important in condensing environments and surface mount assembly
processing.

Applications for the PE7200 include high-speed interconnects within and
between switches, routers, and transport equipment, low cost OC-192VSR
(Very Short Reach) connections, ESCON, gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel,
Infiniband, and proprietary optical interconnects, including
board-to-board, shelf-to-shelf and chasis-to-chasis interconnects. Each
channel of the PE7200 operates from 155 Mbps to 2.7 Gbps covering the data
rate range of several common SONET/SDH standards including OC-3, OC-12 and
OC-48. The PE7200 is the first of a family of parallel optical
interconnect products that will use FOCUTSpak technology.

Product samples are available starting second quarter 2002. Product
pricing is $300 in one thousand piece quantities.

http://www.peregrine-semi.com


0207.5 Wireless

***parvus Unveils Wireless CDMA Modem Carrier Board in PC/104 Form Factor
(February 28)

parvus Corp. Thursday announced the release of its CDMA Carrier Board, a
cellular modem carrier module for wide-spectrum communications
applications.

Manufactured to PC/104 board specifications, the carrier board enables
original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to deploy CDMA (Code Division
Multiple Access)-based, fixed, mobile or wireless devices. It supports
standard cell phone features, including microphone, speakers and
line-in/out.

The board includes two serial ports and a CDMA modem jack for integration
of a wireless modem (such as offered by Sierra Wireless and others).

Features/Specifications

-- Dual serial control and data interfaces (COM1, COM2)
-- Xilinx programming logic
-- LED status indicator
-- PC/104 form factor
-- National Semiconductor PC16552DV DUART
-- Zero degrees C to +70 degrees C operating range
-- Low power consumption
-- Rugged performance and environmental specs
-- Onboard power supply requires only 5 Vdc
-- CDMA jack
-- COM1 configurable as pass-through to CDMA

Applications

The CDMA Carrier Board is suited for embedded microcomputers in devices
commonly found in the avionics/aerospace, defense, factory automation,
light industrial, medical, telecom and transportation fields, such as
distributed communications systems, point-of-sale devices, mobile
terminals, industrial meters, vehicle or fleet management applications,
and remote data logging nodes, etc.

Systems development projects not using the PC/104 bus can configure the
CDMA board to communicate directly with the CDMA modem, by changing jumper
settings and bypassing the PC/104 bus with a standard serial port.

http://www.parvus.com

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