Motorola Inc has teamed up with Hamilton Hallmark Inc to produce a reference design for a Personal Digital Assistant based upon an as yet unannounced embedded PowerPC. The two companies plan to introduce the finished design to Motorola and Hamilton Hall customers this summer, and the general public should get a chance to see it at the Fall Embedded Systems Conference. The designs will be available as a model on which third parties can base their own machines, but there is no word from Motorola yet on whether it will manufacture the machine as a commercial proposition for end-users. Hamilton Hallmark, a business unit of Avnet Inc, is one of the world’s bigger electronic component distribution companies. Its Technical Support Centre in Tempe, Arizona was formed three years ago to support field engineers and to act as a focus for technical knowledge. Writing in the centre’s house journal, the company’s Wayne Diener described the basic specifications for a hand-held machine with pen input, wireless communications and PCMCIA expansion. In addition to this base, there will be hooks into additional services – video input is one that has been planned. In addition to the hardware, the team is devising demonstration applications. One initial idea is for a wireless whiteboard that would enable a number of users to sketch on their hand-held’s screen at the same time, the results being passed to co-workers and to a central personal computer that will enable the work to be periodically saved, enabling previous versions to be restored. The reference machines may include both Infrared Data Association-compliant and RF wireless networking. The design is apparently intended to be modular, so that developers can pick the elements they want to use. There are no details yet on the new Motorola PowerPC part that will power the device; presumably it will be an addition to the MPC50x range. The suggestion is that the new chip will be announced around June.
