L M Ericsson Telefon AB has chosen Texas Instruments Inc to be its preferred supplier of advanced integrated circuits. Under a design and production agreement announced in Stockholm last week, the Swedish telecommunications and computer company gets access to the Dallas chipmaker’s standard cell library and its computer-aided engineering systems to create custom parts that will then be made for it by Texas. The agreement won’t preclude Ericsson buying from other manufacturers – indeed it has its own chip shop, Rifa – it is likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of business for Texas in the immediate future. Last year the Swede signed a similar pact with DEC and now specifies the VAX in all bids where it has no suitable CPU of its own.
