Technology trends
IBM Corp. (Armonk, NY) has developed the 1.68 ¥ 1.43 ¥ 0.19-in., 0.7-oz Microdrive disk drive that is only slightly larger than a US silver dollar. Aimed at use in personal digital assistants and digital cameras, this 4500-rpm drive is capable of storing 170 or 340 Mbytes on one platter using one or two data heads, respectively. It is expected to be available in mid-1999.
Motorola Inc. (Austin, TX) has introduced the DSP56307 digital-signal-processor chip that includes an on-chip 192-kbyte static-RAM, 6 DMA channels, a triple timer, serial communications, and a filter coprocessor. It reduces wait states by allowing applications to run in on-chip memory and uses the coprocessor to run applications in parallel, thereby achieving 170 MIPS performance using an internal 100-MHz clock.
Telegen Corp. (Redwood City, CA) has completed an operational prototype 10.5-in. emissive, phosphor-based color flat-panel display.
Mitsubishi Electronics Inc. (Cypress, CA) has unveiled its Diamond Pro 900u 19-in. distortion-free color desktop CRT monitor. Its patented Natural Flat technology incorporates a proprietary, thin, lightweight, flat-faced glass tube; a 0.25-mm aperture grill pitch; a 30- to 95-kHz horizontal scanning frequency; a 50-MHz video clock frequency; and a noninterlaced addressable resolution of 1600 ¥ 1200 pixels at a 75-Hz refresh rate.
Network Instruments LLC (Minneapolis, MN) and Siemens Medical Systems Inc. (Iselin, NJ) have announced the Observer Extension analyzer that supports the decoding of the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocol via a 32-bit, PC-based, Windows 95/98/NT environment.
Pegasus Imaging Corp. (Tampa, FL) has received FDA approval to market its PICTools Medical Compression Toolkit for handling teleradiology and PACS (picture archiving and communication system) systems. This toolkit includes lossless JPEG, lossy JPEG, and Pegasus` wavelet compression technologies for handling, storing, viewing, and transmitting medical images, such as CT, MRI, and x-ray types.
Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc. (San Jose, CA) has released its 15-in. LCD screen, which is constructed using Multi-domain Vertical Alignment (MVA) technology. This technology provides 160° viewing angles, both vertically and horizontally, a high contrast ratio of 300:1, and a response time of 25 ms.
Therma-Wave Inc. (Fremont, CA) has received US Patent #5,596,406, which covers a combination of spectroscopy and spectral ellipsometry in one metrology system for evaluating thin-film samples such as those used in IC manufacturing.
Sumitomo Metals (Santa Clara, CA) is finalizing its new 28-sq mm, 66-Mpixel/s Vision image-processing CMOS chip design in a QFP 208-pin plastic package for early 1999 engineering sampling. Loaded with an ALU, line buffers, and a frame memory controller, the chip provides 3 ¥ 3 spatial filtering, rank value filtering, logical filtering, look-up table conversion, labeling, projection processing, and histogram processing modes; and postlabeling operations that can extract linear and quadratic moment, perimeter, endpoint, and Feret`s diameter measurements.
