Cover Story: LCDs Challenge PDP Dominance of Large-Screen TV Market

Liquid crystal panels are steadily eroding the TV receiver market. Screen size is increasing, with 46-inch units set to hit the shelves soon. Also, motion display performance is approaching the fidelity of CRTs with pseudo-impulse drive technology. PDP manufacturers, meanwhile, are concentrating on improving emission efficiency, with the goal of achieving 3 lm/W by 2005. They are also determined to drop power consumption to at least the level of LCD TVs, if not lower. It is believed that the PDP television will maintain its advantage even in 2005.

Technology Analysis: RFID Tag Chips Poised to Succeed Barcodes
(Coming up on Feb 18)

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are attracting interest as a possible successor to barcodes, and some firms are already moving to implement the technology. Competition to develop the technology is growing more intense in both hardware and software arenas as a result. In the area of product distribution, the most commonly used waveband is 13.56MHz, but RFID development is focusing on the 2.45GHz band, which seems to offer lower manufacturing cost. Meanwhile, the Auto-ID Center in the US is using the 915MHz band.

Meeting the Challenge: A New Approach to System Design
(Coming up on Feb 25)

The complex digital products and services being developed today demand increasing functionality from the ASICs that go into them, leading in turn to a rapid increase in the complexity of ASICs and the software they support. Verifying that these complex systems work and meeting the end product's requirements also are becoming significantly more difficult. To address these issues, ARM has introduced the ARM11 PrimeXsys Platform, developed to meet the challenges that SoC developers face when integrating microprocessor cores.

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