Posted on January 31st, 2001 by admin
Hughes Network Systems (HNS) has selected MIPS Technologies to provide the fundamental design ingredients for the company’s next-generation of set-top boxes. HNS sees the agreement as a key factor that will allow it to deliver robust set-tops for satellite TV and two-way satellite Internet service at consumer price points.
The designs will feature the MIPS32 architecture [...]
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Posted on January 31st, 2001 by admin
With bicoastal conferences ongoing—DesignCon in Santa Clara and ComNet in Washington DC—vendors have chosen this week to debut a number of enabling technologies for networking and communications applications. The enablers, ranging from new ICs to software building blocks, support applications from the Internet infrastructure all the way to the network edge.
Port density has been the [...]
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Posted on January 15th, 2001 by admin
As we’ll detail in a feature article in our upcoming February issue, Internet radio is growing in popularity, and new hardware devices are emerging to move online radio away from the PC. 3Com’s long-awaited Kerbango is the best-known example, but now it’s got company.
DigMedia has released a stand-alone device that combines a conventional AM/FM stereo [...]
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Posted on January 15th, 2001 by admin
Despite its name, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is, these days, as much focused on emerging convergence technologies as it is on the latest consumer products. Which just goes to show that the two are becoming increasingly inseparable.
This year’s confab featured key announcements in a wide range of areas. As usual, the presentations ranged from [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
The venerable analog audio system, with speakers driven by a separate amp, may soon go the way of the vinyl LP. More than one IC vendor has announced plans to move toward an audio scheme that delivers digital bits directly to the speaker terminals.
Proponents claim the technology will improve fidelity by eliminating cable losses and [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
All the talk about connecting to an array of devices and appliances on your home network is getting closer to becoming a reality with recent announcements from two chip developers.
family of transceivers/microcontrollers is specifically designed for embedding networking functionality into low-cost, everyday applications found in residential, commercial, utility and transportation markets. The U-Chip, which combines [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
Two common technologies—high-speed backplanes and serial communication links—resonate through the development of many new communication and storage systems, including routers, WAN/LAN switches, and RAID (redundant arrays of independent disks) systems. System designers are already tapping these technologies, but doing so requires the combination of disparate functions, such as serial interface controllers, programmable logic, and others.
This [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
With the increasing availability of broadband Internet access, streaming video continues to capture the imagination of producers and consumers of entertainment and corporate-communications content. Consequently, delivery of broadcast-quality video across IP networks has become the next frontier, with a number of companies fine-tuning expertise in networking, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video codecs, or both, to bring [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
We have conjectured more than once that the PC may be a prime viewing place for HDTV for many people. Underscoring the trend, 2netFX recently introduced its HDTV-over-IP system. The addition of a live high-definition encoder from Motorola enables the system to store HDTV content for later delivery or to multicast it in real time [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
Recognizing the revenue potential and stickiness that video-enabled Web sites can offer, content providers are looking to solve current infrastructure problems that impede effective Internet video delivery. As a result, industry players with a mission to alleviate the Internet’s bottlenecks are quickly turning their attention to video.
Vividon, for example, has entered the content-delivery market with [...]
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