National Semiconductor releases new chip

BANGALORE, September 4: National Semiconductor Corporation has

successfully integrated the entire semiconductor content for an

information appliance onto a single chip - the ` I A on chip’

(Information-Appliance-on-a-Chip). National's Geode SC1400 is a member of

silicon and system solutions under National's new Geode brand. The Geode

SC1400 is designed to deliver an optimal Internet experience for the

interactive set-top box market - providing web-browsing functionality with

digital video.

National Semiconductor Country Manager Sanjeev Keskar said, "In

the first phase, the new chip will be released in India in November but

this will be only for testing purpose, the official launch of the chip

will be in March 2000. The new chip will be tested by HCL, BPL and VXL

instrument’s set-top boxes in India".

The new Geode family offers customers a tailored feature set for each

of National's target segments in the information appliance market- set-top

boxes, thin clients such as Windows-based terminals, and personal access

devices such as the WebPAD reference design that National introduced in

November 1998. For future versions of the chip, manufacturers can specify

the configurations they require, drawing on National's library of reusable

intellectual-property building blocks.

Since National announced its plan to produce a PC-on-a-Chip, market

demand for Internet access has moved beyond the PC to include a variety of

optimized and dedicated devices. National added the MPEG video decoding

function to the original feature set and is now specifically targeting the

information appliance market. Set-top boxes currently being designed by

customers around Geode solutions are expected to be on the market by the

summer of 2000.

Meanwhile. National Semiconductor has completed the sale of Cyrix

standalone PC processor business to Taiwan based VIA Technologies, Inc. As

part of the agreement, a partial payment of the $167 million sale price

was received at closing with the remainder contingent on future revenues

of the Cyrix product lines.

The sale includes the M II x86-compatible processor and successor

products. National Semiconductor will retain the integrated MediaGX

processor, which forms the core of National's new Geode family of

solutions for the Information Appliance market.