Under its agreement with IBM Corp, Intel Corp can only sit back and watch while IBM stuffs its versions of the Intel iAPX-86 microprocessor family into boards and sells them on the OEM market, and yesterday, IBM’s Electronic Card Assembly & Test Plant in Charlotte, North Carolina announced contracts totalling $344m to manufacture personal computer planar boards for two California firms: Eteq Microsystems Inc in Milpitas and that new company, Alaris Inc, just formed by those Everexes in Fremont (CI No 2,121). The boards will use IBM’s 486SLC2 microprocessor. The contracts – $217m for Eteq and $127m for Alaris – are the largest yet for the IBM Charlotte facility, which began contract manufacturing last August. Production and shipment has already begun, and the contracts extend through the first quarter of 1994.
