Saudi Arabia raises crude output
Vienna: Leading OPEC producer Saudi Arabia has said that it had made a renewed effort to deflate record high world oil prices by upping crude output again, but questioned the need to raise official OPEC quotas to reflect higher actual supplies.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said Riyadh now was producing 9.5 million barrels per day, more than one million barrels daily in excess of its official quota. All members in OPEC, bar Saudi Arabia, are pumping at full capacity.
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Saboteurs blow up pipeline in North Iraq
Kirkuk: Saboteurs have blown up a domestic oil pipeline in northern Iraq, near Beiji, 250 kilometers north of Baghdad. The pipeline carries crude from oilfields outside the city of Kirkuk to a refinery in Beiji. The strike was not expected to affect exports.

The US military confirmed the explosion occurred and said the pipeline had been shut down. There were no reports of injuries.
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Hitachi's 100-gigabyte notebook
San Jose, USA: The Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will begin shipping its new Travelstar 5K100 for standard notebook applications and E5K100 for more demanding data-access applications from the fourth quarter of this year. The 100-gigabyte (GB) hard drives offer the broadest capacity points, the highest shock tolerance and the lowest power consumption in their category. In addition, these new drives will offer native Serial ATA (SATA) support.

Hitachi's newest 5400 RPM Travelstar products are also environmentally friendly. The drives are more than a year ahead of schedule in complying with the European Commission's RoHS directive for eliminating certain hazardous materials in the manufacturing of electronic equipment.

In addition to achieving industry-leading specifications for power, shock and capacity offerings, Hitachi has also maintained excellent performance, acoustics and reliability characteristics on its new drives.

The notebook landscape is rapidly changing, and Hitachi's approach to the 2.5-inch hard drive is changing with it. With notebooks quickly becoming a desktop-replacement solution, Hitachi is modifying attributes of the Travelstar drives to be more like a desktop (high capacity, high performance) in some respects, and more like a notebook in others (longer battery life, better acoustics, higher shock resistance).

In yet another category, miniaturization and the need for around-the-clock data access in lower transaction environments is driving the requirement for enhanced-availability products in smaller footprints, which Hitachi is addressing with the addition of the Travelstar E5K100 model at 5400 RPM.

The 2.5-inch hard drive segment is preparing to embrace the new SATA interface to increase data throughput beyond 100 Mbits/second. Already adopted by the 3.5-inch community, SATA is just beginning to take shape and show potential for the 2.5-inch segment.

Hitachi is offering native SATA support on both the Travelstar 5K100 and E5K100 to lead the transition to this new interface, which is intended to offer higher data transfer speeds and more simplified network configurations. The new SATA drives will use a compact cabling structure and smaller connectors that are designed to enhance air flow and reduce system complexity. The blade server category, for example, is expected to see the greatest benefit from SATA support on 2.5-inch drives.

With the current Travelstar E5K100, Hitachi is now on its third generation of 2.5-inch hard drives for high-availability applications. The E5K100's smaller size and lower heat emission makes it an industrial-strength 2.5-inch hard drive to take on the more demanding data-access cycles typical of blade-server, Internet data center, Web hosting, server pre-processing and telephony applications. Users who require high data-availability will benefit from the E5K100's more aggressive power-on-hour attribute of 730 per month.

Whereas notebooks were once a must-have exclusively for corporate road-warriors, the mobility and wireless convenience of notebooks are increasingly appealing to today's tech savvy consumers. In this scenario, the hard drive becomes even more important as consumers -- wanting to store more and better video, pictures, music, games and keeping them at arm's reach -- are looking for much higher storage capacity than the 40 GB typical of average corporate notebooks. Lower drive acoustics are also more important to this audience with increased usage of notebooks for gaming and audio/video enjoyment.

Both the parallel-ATA and SATA versions of the 5K100 will begin shipping to customers in the fourth quarter in 40, 60, 80 and 100-GB capacities. The E5K100, enhanced-availability model will also ship within this year.

Technical Details: Travelstar 5K100 & E5K100 (PATA & SATA)

40/60/80/100 GB, 9.5 mm in height, 5,400 rpm, 70/70/70/86 billion bits per square inch maximum area density,1/2/2/2 glass disk platter(s), 2/3/4/4 GMR recording head(s), 1000 G/1ms non-operating shock, 300 G/2ms operating shock, 5.5 ms average latency, 12 ms average seek time, 0.85W active idle (PATA); 1.2 W (SATA) (not applicable for E5K100), 0.60W low-power idle (PATA); .85 W (SATA) (not applicable for E5K100), ATA-6 Ultra DMA (mode-5) 100 MB/sec maximum interface transfer rate, 95/102/102/102 weight in grams, 2.2/2.5/2.5/2.5 Bels typical idle acoustics, 2.4/2.7/2.7/2.7 Bels typical operating acoustics.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a result of the strategic combination of Hitachi's and IBM's storage technology businesses. By the end of 2003, Hitachi GST became the industry's second largest hard disk drive manufacturer with $4.2 billion in revenue. Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global electronics company, with approximately 326,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2003 (ended March 31, 2004) consolidated sales totaled 8,632.4 billion yen ($81.4 billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors, including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services.
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Samsung's Virtual Platform co-design methodology
Seoul, South Korea: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a leader in advanced semiconductor technology, has revealed a hardware/software co-design methodology that will reduce overall design time for the company's System-on-Chip (SoC) products by up to 40 percent. The Virtual Platform (ViP) approach will ultimately result in faster production of Samsung logic components while giving the company's customers a time-to-market advantage.

Samsung developed the ViP design methodology in partnership with EDA vendors to address the ever-increasing complexity of SoC design challenges. Today's exploding market for multi-function consumer products requires more on-chip firmware as well as transistors, complicating and extending the design process. Using the ViP methodology, simulation speeds are hundreds or even thousands of times faster than that of a traditional RTL approach while maintaining more than 90 percent accuracy over RTL.

With conventional RTL design methodology, it wasn't possible to design and optimize software before the field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype was ready. In addition, it was hard to identify whether the error was due to hardware or software. Using the ViP approach, software designers can now prepare fully optimized and error-minimized software before the development of RTL code, reducing the SoC design time by up to 40 percent.

Some of Samsung's SoC products have already benefited from the ViP methodology. It has been applied to develop the flash memory card controller that is already in mass production, enabling engineers to improve certain chip performance such as the data read operation by more than 30 percent.

Samsung's ViP design methodology has also proven its applicability to SoC products with multiple processors. For example, Samsung's HD digital TV SoC, modem chip for 3G mobile phone, and mobile application processor devices have shown excellent results. Samsung will expand the use of ViP within its logic product line to encompass other various SoC devices.
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is a global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies with 2003 parent company sales of US$36.4 billion and net income of US$5.0 billion.
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Point Biomedical's unique microsphere technology
San Carlos, USA: Point Biomedical Corp. has announced the issuance of a patent that further expands its microsphere technology patent portfolio. The patent covers a specific method of enhancing the diagnostic use of ultrasound by providing a microsphere-imaging agent, which has controlled fragility.

More than 12 million Americans suffer from coronary artery disease and an even larger number of individuals have risk factors or symptoms that make them potential candidates for coronary artery disease assessment by non-invasive means. The number of non-invasive imaging studies for diagnosing coronary artery disease in the US is approximately 10 million per year. If approved for the assessment of myocardial perfusion, CARDIOsphere will allow cardiologists to diagnose coronary artery disease in the office or hospital using standard ultrasound equipment and without the use of radioactive isotopes as required by conventional nuclear imaging tests.

Microsphere-imaging agent allows for control over where and when the microspheres become active. Microspheres using POINT's controlled fragility technology are designed to remain stable and inactive until exposed to ultrasound energy greater than a predetermined threshold. When this threshold is exceeded, all microspheres in the region to be imaged instantly release their nitrogen gas core producing an intense ultrasound signal.

Controlled fragility enhances microsphere performance in a number of applications including ultrasound based molecular imaging and drug delivery. However, it is particularly important for tissue perfusion imaging where uniform breakage and clearance provides a superior image.

Point Biomedical Corp., based in San Carlos, CA develops novel products for diagnostic, molecular imaging and drug delivery applications based on its patented biSphere technology.
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