July 30, 1989

BIG DEAL: Though Intel Corp. isn’t yet shipping its fast new i486 chip (a main controller for personal computers), the Santa Clara firm isn’t wasting any time getting its ducks in a row for what it hopes will be an onslaught of demand.

Next week, Intel and Saratoga Semiconductor (illogically located in Sunnyvale) will announce a nine-figure-plus product development agreement for a series of Saratoga’s superfast BiCMOS chips, including a cache memory set.

Making the deal unusual is the probability that Intel will stamp its own imprimatur on the parts that Saratoga supplies. The chip giant generally brand-names only its own products.
BiCMOS allows two chip manufacturing processes, bipolar and CMOS, to work together on one chip. CMOS packs a lot of circuits on one chip and runs at low power. Bipolar is lightning fast, but runs hot at high power. Saratoga and a few other chip makers in this country, as well as in Japan, have figured out how to do BiCMOS and get the best of both worlds: cool, fast, densely packed chips, vital for today’s blazing fast microprocessors like the i486.

Michael Slater, editor of the Microprocessor Report newsletter, says the deal proves “every technology is becoming more important, and BiCMOS is the area most people are looking toward. It’s a nice mesh, in that Saratoga doesn’t do processors and Intel doesn’t do much in memories. It gives Intel some missing pieces.”

PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: Next week at the Siggraph graphics show in Boston, Jim Clark, chairman of Silicon Graphics Inc., and Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, begin a campaign for (among other things) a fiber-optic data network installed into every home, so all of us can start using new technologies such as “virtual reality” and dial-up video, etc.

Clark is devoted to pushing high-end technology (like SGI’s 3D workstations) down to the consumer. Last week, he addressed the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space about Sen. Albert Gore’s (D-Tenn.) “National High Performance Computer Technology Plan”, otherwise known as S.1067. The legislation purports, in part, to fund research for an ultra-high-speed, low-cost data highway.

Clark believes proposed HDTV research legislation is short-sighted, and wants to link it to the Gore bill. HDTV should be developed as an interactive tool, he says, that will allow consumers not just to watch “Leave it to Beaver” in high-resolution, but to download information from broadcasting networks as well as databases.

Gore’s bill calls for a 3 gigabit/second fiber optic network to be installed. That sounds really fast, but Clark contends it is “a drop in the bucket,” and he is pushing for the government to support research in “multi-hundreds” of gigabits-per-second technology.

“An HDTV channel over fiber has the bandwidth to receive the entire Library of Congress listing very quickly,” Clark says. “HDTV can be an information retrieval and interactive system for all manner of things, be it video telephone or whatever. The technology will be sufficient, and I can almost guarantee that the Japanese will recognize this.”

BUG OR FEATURE? The fire alarm system worked too well last week for high-tech publisher David Bunnell, who had one candle too many on his birthday cake. The cloud of smoke that went up when he blew out the 42 candles in the San Mateo offices of Io Publishing set off the smoke alarm, and the fire department rolled in time for the party.

Bunnell has other reason to celebrate. His biotechnology service/database dubbed BioWorld is scheduled to go on line in October, and he’s hired a couple of major guns to help report the news: Joan O.C. Hamilton, from Business Week’s SF office, and Ray Potter, biotech reporter from the San Jose Mercury News. That’s in addition to Cynthia Robbins-Roth, whose BioVenture View newsletter is already part of BioWorld.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS: The First Annual Propaganda Review conference in San Francisco (August 11-13 at Fort Mason Center) should be good. Propaganda Review is a fascinating magazine published by San Francisco-based Media Alliance. Conference coordinator Claude Steiner recently put a high-tech panel on the agenda to talk about the relationship between technology and propaganda.

Steiner’s views come partly from French philosophy Jacques Ellul, a “grand old man” of propaganda analysis. Ellul believes propaganda is a consequence of technology, and that technology itself is propaganda. “Getting people to submit to technology is the function of propaganda in a technological society,” Steiner says. It’s an interesting thought to ponder.