Seiko Instruments Inc has licensed an embedded chip technology from iReady Corp that could reduce the costs and power requirements of networked portable devices. The Santa Clara, California-based company has developed a core, dubbed the Internet Tuner, which supports protocols for transporting and routing data including TCP/IP, PPP and UDP. The design supports the POP3 and SMTP email protocols and HTML.
iReady says that hardware support for the TCP/IP, means that chip designers can do away with memory-hungry software support for internet and network connection. It says that what would take an embedded software design a 32-bit processor and several megabytes of memory to achieve can be by matched the Internet Tuner core linked to an eight-bit processor and a few hundred kilobytes of memory, meaning that power consumption would also be drastically reduced.
Seiko will initially use the design, which it has called the iChip S7600A, in portable consumer devices and for telecoms applications. The chip begins sampling today and Seiko is predicting that it will sell 2 billion units a year when the chip is available in volume.
