Piranha, the variable length instruction RISC project from National Semiconductor Corp that surfaced within days of Motorola Inc’s conceptually very similar Coldfire (CI No 2,532), is now called CompactRISC, and the first part using it to ship is CompactSpeech, the first RISC-based digital speech processor with a Flash memory interface for speech processing applications. Also called the NSAM25, it is the first member of a new CompactSpeech family. Target market is digital answering machines and it is being used in Sharp Corp’s new CL-500 and CL-550 cordless phone with answering system, again said to be the first digital answering machines to use Flash. The NSAM265 supports audio-grade or standard 4M-bit and 8M-bit byte-wide Flash devices for up to 15 minutes of recording on a a 4M-bit Flash device. The NSAM265SF is available now at $12.50 for 1,000 or more.
