Altera earnings warning prompts stock slide Simon Parry Altera has warned that sales for the third quarter will be lower than expected because of a depressed North American market. The warnings sparked a wave of sales in semiconductor company shares on Wall Street as analysts worried about earnings for other chip makers. Altera said that third quarter revenues will be ...

Sun’s McNealy demos Java smart card chip Tom Foremski Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy demonstrated a “smart ring” one of the first applications for embedded Java processors during the ground-breaking ceremony for Sun’s new $200m East coast campus. The ring uses the processor to transmit data to other devices and McNealy said it could be used to open car doors, ...

Motorola demos 300MHz PowerPC Tom Foremski Motorola has demonstrated a 300MHz version of the PowerPC 750 microprocessor, the latest entry into the PowerPC market and specially optimised for Macintosh application code. A 275MHz PowerPC 750 microprocessor was introduced earlier this month. The chip was demonstrated at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley where Motorola showed a prototype Macintosh compatible ...

US trade commission looks closer at Chips take-over Tom Foremski Intel’s planned $420m acquisition of Chips & Technologies has come under closer scrutiny for possible antitrust implications with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting more information about Intel’s bid. Intel says that the FTC request is normal practice for an acquisition of that kind but the FTC could be responding ...

Cyrix recalls faulty microprocessors Tom Foremski Cyrix says it has recalled about 10,000 of its high-end 6X86 microprocessors because of testing problems that led to the release of faulty chips. Cyrix says that only a few end users were affected by the problem chips with most being caught by two Cyrix distributors. The chip failure rate was much higher than ...

Oil rigged up Jon Mainwaring Virtual reality software developer Division has signed a European distribution agreement with interactive computer graphics systems supplier Intergraph, who will sell its dVISE software into the process, oil and power industries. Over 40 per cent of the world’s industrial plant designers who work with 3D computer aided design use Intergraph’s Plant Design System (PDS) and ...

Developers of GSM handsets are looking for more sophisticated RF architectures than the tried and trusted superhet receiver...but...

Hear this Hearing must be one of the most important of the senses, and DSPs are coming to the aid of the deaf. Richard Ball explains how    Swiss precision… Phonak’s behind-the-ear hearing aids use its VLIW, parallel processing DSP architecture. It manages around 130Mips at just 10MHz clock frequency. By the way, they’re not normally transparent. Small is beautiful… ...

Scandinavians control energy home and awayJon Mainwaring The experience of coming home to a freezing cold house after a weekend winter break is now a thing of the past for many Finns and Norwegians thanks to a project carried out by two Scandinavian companies. Telepower allows users to control their homes’ energy usage from any place at any time through ...

DARPA steers RF with micromachinesSteve Bush Researchers at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Virginia are looking at micromachines on RF chips to replace conventional active components. “The advantages are extremely low loss and good impedance matching,” said Elliot Brown of DARPA’s Electronic Technology Office:”The principle areas of interest are signal switching, filtering, phase shifting and impedance matching.” ...