NEUBIBERG, GERMANY: The environmentally problematic, fume-belching motorbikes so common in high-growth industrializing countries India and China are soon to be a thing of the past. Over the next two years, tougher emissions standards will come into force, compelling manufacturers to introduce electronic engine management systems on a wider scale. Only systems like these are capable of setting the right fuel/air mix in a fraction of a second.

Infineon Technologies, Europe's leading maker of chips for automobile and motorcycle electronics, expects engine management systems for motorcycles and small automobiles to generate the highest demand for its new family of XC2700 microcontrollers.

Manufacturers in these two countries expect to make more than 36 million new motorcycles in 2010 alone.

"For the most part, motorcycles made in India and China use mechanical control systems that are unable to meet new emissions requirements," says Jochen Hanebeck, who heads Infineon's microcontrollers business. "As people become more mobile, it's important to avoid increasing air pollution and fuel wastage. Infineon can make a difference here: With our chips, engine management systems can achieve energy efficiency gains of as much as 15 percent."

Besides the CPU core and numerous analog-digital converters used to turn mechanical inputs into electronic signals, the XC2700 chip, developed in Duisburg, includes key components for controlling valves and sensors. It also has several hundred kilobytes of memory, sufficient to handle even highly challenging tasks. Software for the XC2700 is written in Munich and at Infineon's R&D center in Bangalore, India, and the high-performance chip itself is manufactured in Dresden.