Zilog Inc, Campbell, California has come out with a new chip designed to enable manufacturers of mass storage and peripheral boards to enter the PCMCIA card market quickly. The Z86017 general purpose peripheral adaptor provides the PCMCIA bus interface and control logic needed to implement peripheral functions such as hard disk controllers, Flash memory cards, facsimile modems, keyboards, and local area networks on a PCMCIA card; the Z86017 will function over a 3V to 5.5V power supply, includes a 256-byte attribute memory for defining which function the card is designed to implement, and costs $7 in large volumes; samples are out now.
