Philips Electronics and Intersil plan to jointly develop a reference design based on a Philips chipset and Intersil laser driver for DVD+RW/+R (DVD+ReWriteable/+Recordable) drives. The reference design for both PC and standalone DVD recorders will support 4X record speeds, and has the potential to support speeds up to 12X. With DVD recorders based on this reference design, consumers will have the ability to create 4.7GByte video or data DVDs in fewer than 15 minutes, twice the speed of existing DVD recorders, claim the companies. The reference design will be offered to a broad range of DVD+RW manufacturers, including Philips.

Philips invented the Compact Disc (CD) in 1982. Philips plans to offer the
DVD+RW/+R reference design based on the Intersil laser driver in early 2003.
DVD+RW is the compatible, rewritable DVD format developed by the DVD+RW
Alliance -- a group of PC, optical storage and electronics manufacturers.
Alliance members include Dell, HP, MCC/Verbatim, Philips, Ricoh, Sony,
Thomson Multimedia and Yamaha. According to the DVD+RW Alliance, more than
70 additional companies have formally pledged support for DVD+RW/+R
technology.

Japanese companies Tokyo Electron (TEL), Ebara and Dainippon Screen have
entered into a memorandum of agreement to found a joint venture company to
develop a low-energy electron beam direct writing system. The aim is meet
the demand for short product lifecycle system LSI chips, which have
experienced soaring mask manufacturing costs and lead times.
The system will be based on the e-beam direct write (EBDW) technology
developed by Toshiba as a maskless lithography system. This could enable
quick turnaround times, advantageous to smaller manufacturing operations
with a large variety of devices.
The technology uses both a low energy electron beam as a countermeasure
against proximity effects and a character projection method. Repeated
circuit blocks are represented as a single character (fixed pattern). This
improves throughput substantially and shortens lead times. Throughput is a
major barrier to adoption of direct write techniques, which are often used
for prototyping.
Full-scale shipment of a system capable of a 65nm resolution is planned by
2005.

Zarlink Semiconductor and Agilent Technologies announced a multi-source
agreement intended to create a common standard for pluggable 4-channel
parallel optic transceiver modules with an aggregate bandwidth of up to 10
Gbits/sec. The new standard is called POP4 (Pluggable Optics 4-channel).
Agilent and Zarlink will design standardised packaging, optical and
electronic interfaces for their respective 4-channel transceiver modules.
The companies will also work to encourage the POP4 specification as the
global industry standard for 4-channel parallel optic transceivers. The
components will also be compatible with Infiniband and VSR OC-192
specifications.