Tony Blair and the 20,000 tackle Millennium bug Richard Ball Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced the creation of a 20,000-strong task force of trainees to tackle the Year 2000 crisis. The Government will offer grants of ?1,300 each to train young people, the older unemployed or retired people to help companies deal with the Millennium Bug. It is part ...

European chip packaging start-up aims to break turnaround records David Manners A new European semiconductor company launched at Semicon Europa aims to break all records in industry cycle times for packaging and test. “Cycle times in this business are usually quoted in weeks – the good guys quote in days – but we’ll be quoting hours,” said Steve Lerner, CEO ...

Distributor @.bacuspolar picks up the Siemens passives franchise Paul Gregg Broadline distributor @.bacuspolar has been appointed the first franchised distributor to sell Siemens Passive Components’ ferrite products in the UK. “We find that an increasing number of customers want to deal with suppliers who offer a broad product range, and that means distribution,” said Rudolf Schwenger, Siemens executive sales director ...

BTG links with Swiss on LCDs Richard Ball BTG has set up a joint venture to commercialise liquid crystal technology with Rolic, a Swiss company specialising in LCDs. Called Rolic Technologies, the venture will be 25 per cent owned by BTG. It will also take over the management of Rolic’s patent portfolio. Research into electro-optical effects of LCDs has resulted ...

Lucent pioneers transistor printing Tom Foremski Lucent Technologies says that its Bell Labs research centre has developed a technique of “printing” transistors directly onto plastic, opening up new chip applications in areas such as smart cards and flat panel displays. The breakthrough was announced by Bell Labs researchers at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Dallas. Building ...

Rambus breaches $1bn sales Tom Foremski Rambus says that sales of its logic and DRAM chips have exceeded $1bn since the company began licensing its technology to chip makers. Much of the shipments, however, are due to Rambus DRAMs shipping in the Nintendo 64 video games console which has been on the market since 1996. Rambus has yet to reap ...

Cirrus integrates DVD functions Tom Foremski Cirrus Logic has launched a family of ICs which promise cheaper DVD-ROM and DVD-players. Cirrus says it is the first supplier of a single DVD drive solution with its CR3700 DVD Drive Manager chip, integrating an RF amplifier, PRML data channel (read-channel), servo controller, content scramble system, DVD Error Correction Code, and a decoder ...

MIPS operation to be separated from SGI Tom Foremski Sources close to Silicon Graphics (SGI) say that the workstation firm is near to announcing the spin off of its successful MIPS microprocessor division as SGI warns of sharply lower financial results. Under the leadership of its recently appointed CEO Richard Belluzo, SGI will spin-off MIPS in order to focus on ...

Intel embedded plans cast StrongARM into darkness Tom Foremski Intel’s commitment to the StrongARM microprocessor it acquired from Digital Equipment, is in doubt, with senior Intel executives announcing plans to push low end Pentium II microprocessors into the embedded systems market. Stung by the loss of a major contract to supply chips for digital set top boxes manufactured by General ...

Microsoft DirectX supports AMD MMX Tom Foremski Microsoft says that its new version of DirectX application programming interface will support Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) extended MMX instructions and will be out in July, giving AMD an important boost in establishing its new K6 3D microprocessor. DirectX 6.0 will enter beta testing in May and will ship in July. DirectX is ...